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Minyoung Kim

Publications and source records attributed to Minyoung Kim.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

A Stochastic Approach to Bi-Level Optimization for Hyperparameter Optimization and Meta Learning

We tackle the general differentiable meta learning problem that is ubiquitous in modern deep learning, including hyperparameter optimization, loss function learning, few-shot learning, invariance learning and more. These problems are often formalized as Bi-Level optimizations (BLO). We introduce a novel perspective by turning a given BLO problem into a stochastic optimization, where the inner loss function becomes a smooth probability distribution, and the outer loss becomes an expected loss over the inner distribution. To solve this stochastic optimization, we adopt Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) MCMC to sample inner distribution, and propose a recurrent algorithm to compute the MC-estimated hypergradient. Our derivation is similar to forward-mode differentiation, but we introduce a new first-order approximation that makes it feasible for large models without needing to store huge Jacobian matrices. The main benefits are two-fold: i) Our stochastic formulation takes into account uncertainty, which makes the method robust to suboptimal inner optimization or non-unique multiple inner minima due to overparametrization; ii) Compared to existing methods that often exhibit unstable behavior and hyperparameter sensitivity in practice, our method leads to considerably more reliable solutions. We demonstrate that the new approach achieves promising results on diverse meta learning problems and easily scales to learning 87M hyperparameters in the case of Vision Transformers.

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Improving the Fidelity of CNOT Circuits on NISQ Hardware

We introduce an improved CNOT synthesis algorithm that considers nearest-neighbour interactions and CNOT gate error rates in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. Compared to IBM's Qiskit compiler, it improves the fidelity of a synthesized CNOT circuit by about 2 times on average (up to 9 times). It lowers the synthesized CNOT count by a factor of 13 on average (up to a factor of 162). Our contribution is twofold. First, we define a $\textsf{Cost}$ function by approximating the average gate fidelity $F_{avg}$. According to the simulation results, $\textsf{Cost}$ fits the error probability of a noisy CNOT circuit, $\textsf{Prob} = 1 - F_{avg}$, much tighter than the commonly used cost functions. On IBM's fake Nairobi backend, it matches $\textsf{Prob}$ to within $10^{-3}$. On other backends, it fits $\textsf{Prob}$ to within $10^{-1}$. $\textsf{Cost}$ accurately quantifies the dynamic error characteristics and shows remarkable scalability. Second, we propose a noise-aware CNOT routing algorithm, NAPermRowCol, by adapting the leading Steiner-tree-based connectivity-aware CNOT synthesis algorithms. A weighted edge is used to encode a CNOT gate error rate and $\textsf{Cost}$-instructed heuristics are applied to each reduction step. NAPermRowCol does not use ancillary qubits and is not restricted to certain initial qubit maps. Compared with algorithms that are noise-agnostic, it improves the fidelity of a synthesized CNOT circuit across varied NISQ hardware. Depending on the benchmark circuit and the IBM backend selected, it lowers the synthesized CNOT count up to $56.95\%$ compared to ROWCOL and up to $21.62\%$ compared to PermRowCol. It reduces the synthesis $\textsf{Cost}$ up to $25.71\%$ compared to ROWCOL and up to $9.12\%$ compared to PermRowCol. Our method can be extended to route a more general quantum circuit, giving a powerful new tool for compiling on NISQ devices.

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FedL2P: Federated Learning to Personalize

Federated learning (FL) research has made progress in developing algorithms for distributed learning of global models, as well as algorithms for local personalization of those common models to the specifics of each client's local data distribution. However, different FL problems may require different personalization strategies, and it may not even be possible to define an effective one-size-fits-all personalization strategy for all clients: depending on how similar each client's optimal predictor is to that of the global model, different personalization strategies may be preferred. In this paper, we consider the federated meta-learning problem of learning personalization strategies. Specifically, we consider meta-nets that induce the batch-norm and learning rate parameters for each client given local data statistics. By learning these meta-nets through FL, we allow the whole FL network to collaborate in learning a customized personalization strategy for each client. Empirical results show that this framework improves on a range of standard hand-crafted personalization baselines in both label and feature shift situations.

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BayesDLL: Bayesian Deep Learning Library

We release a new Bayesian neural network library for PyTorch for large-scale deep networks. Our library implements mainstream approximate Bayesian inference algorithms: variational inference, MC-dropout, stochastic-gradient MCMC, and Laplace approximation. The main differences from other existing Bayesian neural network libraries are as follows: 1) Our library can deal with very large-scale deep networks including Vision Transformers (ViTs). 2) We need virtually zero code modifications for users (e.g., the backbone network definition codes do not neet to be modified at all). 3) Our library also allows the pre-trained model weights to serve as a prior mean, which is very useful for performing Bayesian inference with the large-scale foundation models like ViTs that are hard to optimise from scratch with the downstream data alone. Our code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/SamsungLabs/BayesDLL}\footnote{A mirror repository is also available at: \url{https://github.com/minyoungkim21/BayesDLL}.}.

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Vulnerability Clustering and other Machine Learning Applications of Semantic Vulnerability Embeddings

Cyber-security vulnerabilities are usually published in form of short natural language descriptions (e.g., in form of MITRE's CVE list) that over time are further manually enriched with labels such as those defined by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). In the Vulnerability AI (Analytics and Intelligence) project, we investigated different types of semantic vulnerability embeddings based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques to obtain a concise representation of the vulnerability space. We also evaluated their use as a foundation for machine learning applications that can support cyber-security researchers and analysts in risk assessment and other related activities. The particular applications we explored and briefly summarize in this report are clustering, classification, and visualization, as well as a new logic-based approach to evaluate theories about the vulnerability space.

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A Hierarchical Bayesian Model for Deep Few-Shot Meta Learning

We propose a novel hierarchical Bayesian model for learning with a large (possibly infinite) number of tasks/episodes, which suits well the few-shot meta learning problem. We consider episode-wise random variables to model episode-specific target generative processes, where these local random variables are governed by a higher-level global random variate. The global variable helps memorize the important information from historic episodes while controlling how much the model needs to be adapted to new episodes in a principled Bayesian manner. Within our model framework, the prediction on a novel episode/task can be seen as a Bayesian inference problem. However, a main obstacle in learning with a large/infinite number of local random variables in online nature, is that one is not allowed to store the posterior distribution of the current local random variable for frequent future updates, typical in conventional variational inference. We need to be able to treat each local variable as a one-time iterate in the optimization. We propose a Normal-Inverse-Wishart model, for which we show that this one-time iterate optimization becomes feasible due to the approximate closed-form solutions for the local posterior distributions. The resulting algorithm is more attractive than the MAML in that it is not required to maintain computational graphs for the whole gradient optimization steps per episode. Our approach is also different from existing Bayesian meta learning methods in that unlike dealing with a single random variable for the whole episodes, our approach has a hierarchical structure that allows one-time episodic optimization, desirable for principled Bayesian learning with many/infinite tasks. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/minyoungkim21/niwmeta}.

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Domain Generalisation via Domain Adaptation: An Adversarial Fourier Amplitude Approach

We tackle the domain generalisation (DG) problem by posing it as a domain adaptation (DA) task where we adversarially synthesise the worst-case target domain and adapt a model to that worst-case domain, thereby improving the model's robustness. To synthesise data that is challenging yet semantics-preserving, we generate Fourier amplitude images and combine them with source domain phase images, exploiting the widely believed conjecture from signal processing that amplitude spectra mainly determines image style, while phase data mainly captures image semantics. To synthesise a worst-case domain for adaptation, we train the classifier and the amplitude generator adversarially. Specifically, we exploit the maximum classifier discrepancy (MCD) principle from DA that relates the target domain performance to the discrepancy of classifiers in the model hypothesis space. By Bayesian hypothesis modeling, we express the model hypothesis space effectively as a posterior distribution over classifiers given the source domains, making adversarial MCD minimisation feasible. On the DomainBed benchmark including the large-scale DomainNet dataset, the proposed approach yields significantly improved domain generalisation performance over the state-of-the-art.

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SwAMP: Swapped Assignment of Multi-Modal Pairs for Cross-Modal Retrieval

We tackle the cross-modal retrieval problem, where learning is only supervised by relevant multi-modal pairs in the data. Although the contrastive learning is the most popular approach for this task, it makes potentially wrong assumption that the instances in different pairs are automatically irrelevant. To address the issue, we propose a novel loss function that is based on self-labeling of the unknown semantic classes. Specifically, we aim to predict class labels of the data instances in each modality, and assign those labels to the corresponding instances in the other modality (i.e., swapping the pseudo labels). With these swapped labels, we learn the data embedding for each modality using the supervised cross-entropy loss. This way, cross-modal instances from different pairs that are semantically related can be aligned to each other by the class predictor. We tested our approach on several real-world cross-modal retrieval problems, including text-based video retrieval, sketch-based image retrieval, and image-text retrieval. For all these tasks our method achieves significant performance improvement over the contrastive learning.

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Fisher SAM: Information Geometry and Sharpness Aware Minimisation

Recent sharpness-aware minimisation (SAM) is known to find flat minima which is beneficial for better generalisation with improved robustness. SAM essentially modifies the loss function by reporting the maximum loss value within the small neighborhood around the current iterate. However, it uses the Euclidean ball to define the neighborhood, which can be inaccurate since loss functions for neural networks are typically defined over probability distributions (e.g., class predictive probabilities), rendering the parameter space non Euclidean. In this paper we consider the information geometry of the model parameter space when defining the neighborhood, namely replacing SAM's Euclidean balls with ellipsoids induced by the Fisher information. Our approach, dubbed Fisher SAM, defines more accurate neighborhood structures that conform to the intrinsic metric of the underlying statistical manifold. For instance, SAM may probe the worst-case loss value at either a too nearby or inappropriately distant point due to the ignorance of the parameter space geometry, which is avoided by our Fisher SAM. Another recent Adaptive SAM approach stretches/shrinks the Euclidean ball in accordance with the scale of the parameter magnitudes. This might be dangerous, potentially destroying the neighborhood structure. We demonstrate improved performance of the proposed Fisher SAM on several benchmark datasets/tasks.

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Pushing the Limits of Simple Pipelines for Few-Shot Learning: External Data and Fine-Tuning Make a Difference

Few-shot learning (FSL) is an important and topical problem in computer vision that has motivated extensive research into numerous methods spanning from sophisticated meta-learning methods to simple transfer learning baselines. We seek to push the limits of a simple-but-effective pipeline for more realistic and practical settings of few-shot image classification. To this end, we explore few-shot learning from the perspective of neural network architecture, as well as a three stage pipeline of network updates under different data supplies, where unsupervised external data is considered for pre-training, base categories are used to simulate few-shot tasks for meta-training, and the scarcely labelled data of an novel task is taken for fine-tuning. We investigate questions such as: (1) How pre-training on external data benefits FSL? (2) How state-of-the-art transformer architectures can be exploited? and (3) How fine-tuning mitigates domain shift? Ultimately, we show that a simple transformer-based pipeline yields surprisingly good performance on standard benchmarks such as Mini-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS, CDFSL and Meta-Dataset. Our code and demo are available at https://hushell.github.io/pmf.

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DesCert: Design for Certification

The goal of the DARPA Automated Rapid Certification Of Software (ARCOS) program is to "automate the evaluation of software assurance evidence to enable certifiers to determine rapidly that system risk is acceptable." As part of this program, the DesCert project focuses on the assurance-driven development of new software. The DesCert team consists of SRI International, Honeywell Research, and the University of Washington. We have adopted a formal, tool-based approach to the construction of software artifacts that are supported by rigorous evidence. The DesCert workflow integrates evidence generation into a design process that goes from requirements capture and analysis to the decomposition of the high-level software requirements into architecture properties and software components with assertional contracts, and on to software that can be analyzed both dynamically and statically. The generated evidence is organized by means of an assurance ontology and integrated into the RACK knowledge base.

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Gaussian Process Meta Few-shot Classifier Learning via Linear Discriminant Laplace Approximation

The meta learning few-shot classification is an emerging problem in machine learning that received enormous attention recently, where the goal is to learn a model that can quickly adapt to a new task with only a few labeled data. We consider the Bayesian Gaussian process (GP) approach, in which we meta-learn the GP prior, and the adaptation to a new task is carried out by the GP predictive model from the posterior inference. We adopt the Laplace posterior approximation, but to circumvent the iterative gradient steps for finding the MAP solution, we introduce a novel linear discriminant analysis (LDA) plugin as a surrogate for the MAP solution. In essence, the MAP solution is approximated by the LDA estimate, but to take the GP prior into account, we adopt the prior-norm adjustment to estimate LDA's shared variance parameters, which ensures that the adjusted estimate is consistent with the GP prior. This enables closed-form differentiable GP posteriors and predictive distributions, thus allowing fast meta training. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the previous approaches.

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Synthesizing Human Faces using Latent Space Factorization and Local Weights (Extended Version)

We propose a 3D face generative model with local weights to increase the model's variations and expressiveness. The proposed model allows partial manipulation of the face while still learning the whole face mesh. For this purpose, we address an effective way to extract local facial features from the entire data and explore a way to manipulate them during a holistic generation. First, we factorize the latent space of the whole face to the subspace indicating different parts of the face. In addition, local weights generated by non-negative matrix factorization are applied to the factorized latent space so that the decomposed part space is semantically meaningful. We experiment with our model and observe that effective facial part manipulation is possible and that the model's expressiveness is improved.

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On PyTorch Implementation of Density Estimators for von Mises-Fisher and Its Mixture

The von Mises-Fisher (vMF) is a well-known density model for directional random variables. The recent surge of the deep embedding methodologies for high-dimensional structured data such as images or texts, aimed at extracting salient directional information, can make the vMF model even more popular. In this article, we will review the vMF model and its mixture, provide detailed recipes of how to train the models, focusing on the maximum likelihood estimators, in Python/PyTorch. In particular, implementation of vMF typically suffers from the notorious numerical issue of the Bessel function evaluation in the density normalizer, especially when the dimensionality is high, and we address the issue using the MPMath library that supports arbitrary precision. For the mixture learning, we provide both minibatch-based large-scale SGD learning, as well as the EM algorithm which is a full batch estimator. For each estimator/methodology, we test our implementation on some synthetic data, while we also demonstrate the use case in a more realistic scenario of image clustering. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/minyoungkim21/vmf-lib.

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Reducing the Amortization Gap in Variational Autoencoders: A Bayesian Random Function Approach

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a very successful generative model whose key element is the so called amortized inference network, which can perform test time inference using a single feed forward pass. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of degraded accuracy in posterior approximation, often underperforming the instance-wise variational optimization. Although the latest semi-amortized approaches mitigate the issue by performing a few variational optimization updates starting from the VAE's amortized inference output, they inherently suffer from computational overhead for inference at test time. In this paper, we address the problem in a completely different way by considering a random inference model, where we model the mean and variance functions of the variational posterior as random Gaussian processes (GP). The motivation is that the deviation of the VAE's amortized posterior distribution from the true posterior can be regarded as random noise, which allows us to take into account the uncertainty in posterior approximation in a principled manner. In particular, our model can quantify the difficulty in posterior approximation by a Gaussian variational density. Inference in our GP model is done by a single feed forward pass through the network, significantly faster than semi-amortized methods. We show that our approach attains higher test data likelihood than the state-of-the-arts on several benchmark datasets.

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Learning Disentangled Latent Factors from Paired Data in Cross-Modal Retrieval: An Implicit Identifiable VAE Approach

We deal with the problem of learning the underlying disentangled latent factors that are shared between the paired bi-modal data in cross-modal retrieval. Our assumption is that the data in both modalities are complex, structured, and high dimensional (e.g., image and text), for which the conventional deep auto-encoding latent variable models such as the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) often suffer from difficulty of accurate decoder training or realistic synthesis. A suboptimally trained decoder can potentially harm the model's capability of identifying the true factors. In this paper we propose a novel idea of the implicit decoder, which completely removes the ambient data decoding module from a latent variable model, via implicit encoder inversion that is achieved by Jacobian regularization of the low-dimensional embedding function. Motivated from the recent Identifiable VAE (IVAE) model, we modify it to incorporate the query modality data as conditioning auxiliary input, which allows us to prove that the true parameters of the model can be identified under some regularity conditions. Tested on various datasets where the true factors are fully/partially available, our model is shown to identify the factors accurately, significantly outperforming conventional encoder-decoder latent variable models. We also test our model on the Recipe1M, the large-scale food image/recipe dataset, where the learned factors by our approach highly coincide with the most pronounced food factors that are widely agreed on, including savoriness, wateriness, and greenness.

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Recursive Inference for Variational Autoencoders

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were proposed to address this drawback; however, their iterative gradient update procedures can be computationally demanding. To address these issues, in this paper we introduce an accurate amortized inference algorithm. We propose a novel recursive mixture estimation algorithm for VAEs that iteratively augments the current mixture with new components so as to maximally reduce the divergence between the variational and the true posteriors. Using the functional gradient approach, we devise an intuitive learning criteria for selecting a new mixture component: the new component has to improve the data likelihood (lower bound) and, at the same time, be as divergent from the current mixture distribution as possible, thus increasing representational diversity. Compared to recently proposed boosted variational inference (BVI), our method relies on amortized inference in contrast to BVI's non-amortized single optimization instance. A crucial benefit of our approach is that the inference at test time requires a single feed-forward pass through the mixture inference network, making it significantly faster than the semi-amortized approaches. We show that our approach yields higher test data likelihood than the state-of-the-art on several benchmark datasets.

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Ordinal-Content VAE: Isolating Ordinal-Valued Content Factors in Deep Latent Variable Models

In deep representational learning, it is often desired to isolate a particular factor (termed {\em content}) from other factors (referred to as {\em style}). What constitutes the content is typically specified by users through explicit labels in the data, while all unlabeled/unknown factors are regarded as style. Recently, it has been shown that such content-labeled data can be effectively exploited by modifying the deep latent factor models (e.g., VAE) such that the style and content are well separated in the latent representations. However, the approach assumes that the content factor is categorical-valued (e.g., subject ID in face image data, or digit class in the MNIST dataset). In certain situations, the content is ordinal-valued, that is, the values the content factor takes are {\em ordered} rather than categorical, making content-labeled VAEs, including the latent space they infer, suboptimal. In this paper, we propose a novel extension of VAE that imposes a partially ordered set (poset) structure in the content latent space, while simultaneously making it aligned with the ordinal content values. To this end, instead of the iid Gaussian latent prior adopted in prior approaches, we introduce a conditional Gaussian spacing prior model. This model admits a tractable joint Gaussian prior, but also effectively places negligible density values on the content latent configurations that violate the poset constraint. To evaluate this model, we consider two specific ordinal structured problems: estimating a subject's age in a face image and elucidating the calorie amount in a food meal image. We demonstrate significant improvements in content-style separation over previous non-ordinal approaches.

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