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Anima Anandkumar

Publications and source records attributed to Anima Anandkumar.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

1st Place Solution of The Robust Vision Challenge 2022 Semantic Segmentation Track

This report describes the winning solution to the Robust Vision Challenge (RVC) semantic segmentation track at ECCV 2022. Our method adopts the FAN-B-Hybrid model as the encoder and uses SegFormer as the segmentation framework. The model is trained on a composite dataset consisting of images from 9 datasets (ADE20K, Cityscapes, Mapillary Vistas, ScanNet, VIPER, WildDash 2, IDD, BDD, and COCO) with a simple dataset balancing strategy. All the original labels are projected to a 256-class unified label space, and the model is trained using a cross-entropy loss. Without significant hyperparameter tuning or any specific loss weighting, our solution ranks the first place on all the testing semantic segmentation benchmarks from multiple domains (ADE20K, Cityscapes, Mapillary Vistas, ScanNet, VIPER, and WildDash 2). The proposed method can serve as a strong baseline for the multi-domain segmentation task and benefit future works. Code will be available at https://github.com/lambert-x/RVC_Segmentation.

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ZerO Initialization: Initializing Neural Networks with only Zeros and Ones

Deep neural networks are usually initialized with random weights, with adequately selected initial variance to ensure stable signal propagation during training. However, selecting the appropriate variance becomes challenging especially as the number of layers grows. In this work, we replace random weight initialization with a fully deterministic initialization scheme, viz., ZerO, which initializes the weights of networks with only zeros and ones (up to a normalization factor), based on identity and Hadamard transforms. Through both theoretical and empirical studies, we demonstrate that ZerO is able to train networks without damaging their expressivity. Applying ZerO on ResNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including ImageNet, which suggests random weights may be unnecessary for network initialization. In addition, ZerO has many benefits, such as training ultra deep networks (without batch-normalization), exhibiting low-rank learning trajectories that result in low-rank and sparse solutions, and improving training reproducibility.

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DensePure: Understanding Diffusion Models towards Adversarial Robustness

Diffusion models have been recently employed to improve certified robustness through the process of denoising. However, the theoretical understanding of why diffusion models are able to improve the certified robustness is still lacking, preventing from further improvement. In this study, we close this gap by analyzing the fundamental properties of diffusion models and establishing the conditions under which they can enhance certified robustness. This deeper understanding allows us to propose a new method DensePure, designed to improve the certified robustness of a pretrained model (i.e. classifier). Given an (adversarial) input, DensePure consists of multiple runs of denoising via the reverse process of the diffusion model (with different random seeds) to get multiple reversed samples, which are then passed through the classifier, followed by majority voting of inferred labels to make the final prediction. This design of using multiple runs of denoising is informed by our theoretical analysis of the conditional distribution of the reversed sample. Specifically, when the data density of a clean sample is high, its conditional density under the reverse process in a diffusion model is also high; thus sampling from the latter conditional distribution can purify the adversarial example and return the corresponding clean sample with a high probability. By using the highest density point in the conditional distribution as the reversed sample, we identify the robust region of a given instance under the diffusion model's reverse process. We show that this robust region is a union of multiple convex sets, and is potentially much larger than the robust regions identified in previous works. In practice, DensePure can approximate the label of the high density region in the conditional distribution so that it can enhance certified robustness.

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Pre-Trained Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making

Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and generalization in general sequential decision-making problems. In this approach, goals and observations are represented as a sequence of embeddings, and a policy network initialized with a pre-trained LM predicts the next action. We demonstrate that this framework enables effective combinatorial generalization across different environments and supervisory modalities. We begin by assuming access to a set of expert demonstrations, and show that initializing policies with LMs and fine-tuning them via behavior cloning improves task completion rates by 43.6% in the VirtualHome environment. Next, we integrate an active data gathering procedure in which agents iteratively interact with the environment, relabel past "failed" experiences with new goals, and update their policies in a self-supervised loop. Active data gathering further improves combinatorial generalization, outperforming the best baseline by 25.1%. Finally, we explain these results by investigating three possible factors underlying the effectiveness of the LM-based policy. We find that sequential input representations (vs. fixed-dimensional feature vectors) and LM-based weight initialization are both important for generalization. Surprisingly, however, the format of the policy inputs encoding (e.g. as a natural language string vs. an arbitrary sequential encoding) has little influence. Together, these results suggest that language modeling induces representations that are useful for modeling not just language, but also goals and plans; these representations can aid learning and generalization even outside of language processing.

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An Adversarial Active Sampling-based Data Augmentation Framework for Manufacturable Chip Design

Lithography modeling is a crucial problem in chip design to ensure a chip design mask is manufacturable. It requires rigorous simulations of optical and chemical models that are computationally expensive. Recent developments in machine learning have provided alternative solutions in replacing the time-consuming lithography simulations with deep neural networks. However, the considerable accuracy drop still impedes its industrial adoption. Most importantly, the quality and quantity of the training dataset directly affect the model performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a litho-aware data augmentation (LADA) framework to resolve the dilemma of limited data and improve the machine learning model performance. First, we pretrain the neural networks for lithography modeling and a gradient-friendly StyleGAN2 generator. We then perform adversarial active sampling to generate informative and synthetic in-distribution mask designs. These synthetic mask images will augment the original limited training dataset used to finetune the lithography model for improved performance. Experimental results demonstrate that LADA can successfully exploits the neural network capacity by narrowing down the performance gap between the training and testing data instances.

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Exploring the Limits of Domain-Adaptive Training for Detoxifying Large-Scale Language Models

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are shown to easily generate toxic language. In this work, we systematically explore domain-adaptive training to reduce the toxicity of language models. We conduct this study on three dimensions: training corpus, model size, and parameter efficiency. For the training corpus, we propose to leverage the generative power of LMs and generate nontoxic datasets for domain-adaptive training, which mitigates the exposure bias and is shown to be more data-efficient than using a curated pre-training corpus. We demonstrate that the self-generation method consistently outperforms the existing baselines across various model sizes on both automatic and human evaluations, even when it uses a 1/3 smaller training corpus. We then comprehensively study detoxifying LMs with parameter sizes ranging from 126M up to 530B (3x larger than GPT-3), a scale that has never been studied before. We find that i) large LMs have similar toxicity levels as smaller ones given the same pre-training corpus, and ii) large LMs require more endeavor to detoxify. We also explore parameter-efficient training methods for detoxification. We demonstrate that adding and training adapter-only layers in LMs not only saves a lot of parameters but also achieves a better trade-off between toxicity and perplexity than whole model adaptation for the large-scale models.

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Generative Adversarial Neural Operators

We propose the generative adversarial neural operator (GANO), a generative model paradigm for learning probabilities on infinite-dimensional function spaces. The natural sciences and engineering are known to have many types of data that are sampled from infinite-dimensional function spaces, where classical finite-dimensional deep generative adversarial networks (GANs) may not be directly applicable. GANO generalizes the GAN framework and allows for the sampling of functions by learning push-forward operator maps in infinite-dimensional spaces. GANO consists of two main components, a generator neural operator and a discriminator neural functional. The inputs to the generator are samples of functions from a user-specified probability measure, e.g., Gaussian random field (GRF), and the generator outputs are synthetic data functions. The input to the discriminator is either a real or synthetic data function. In this work, we instantiate GANO using the Wasserstein criterion and show how the Wasserstein loss can be computed in infinite-dimensional spaces. We empirically study GANO in controlled cases where both input and output functions are samples from GRFs and compare its performance to the finite-dimensional counterpart GAN. We empirically study the efficacy of GANO on real-world function data of volcanic activities and show its superior performance over GAN.

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Learning Dissipative Dynamics in Chaotic Systems

Chaotic systems are notoriously challenging to predict because of their sensitivity to perturbations and errors due to time stepping. Despite this unpredictable behavior, for many dissipative systems the statistics of the long term trajectories are governed by an invariant measure supported on a set, known as the global attractor; for many problems this set is finite dimensional, even if the state space is infinite dimensional. For Markovian systems, the statistical properties of long-term trajectories are uniquely determined by the solution operator that maps the evolution of the system over arbitrary positive time increments. In this work, we propose a machine learning framework to learn the underlying solution operator for dissipative chaotic systems, showing that the resulting learned operator accurately captures short-time trajectories and long-time statistical behavior. Using this framework, we are able to predict various statistics of the invariant measure for the turbulent Kolmogorov Flow dynamics with Reynolds numbers up to 5000.

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AdvDO: Realistic Adversarial Attacks for Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction is essential for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to plan correct and safe driving behaviors. While many prior works aim to achieve higher prediction accuracy, few study the adversarial robustness of their methods. To bridge this gap, we propose to study the adversarial robustness of data-driven trajectory prediction systems. We devise an optimization-based adversarial attack framework that leverages a carefully-designed differentiable dynamic model to generate realistic adversarial trajectories. Empirically, we benchmark the adversarial robustness of state-of-the-art prediction models and show that our attack increases the prediction error for both general metrics and planning-aware metrics by more than 50% and 37%. We also show that our attack can lead an AV to drive off road or collide into other vehicles in simulation. Finally, we demonstrate how to mitigate the adversarial attacks using an adversarial training scheme.

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Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models

Pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown promising zero-shot generalization in many downstream tasks with properly designed text prompts. Instead of relying on hand-engineered prompts, recent works learn prompts using the training data from downstream tasks. While effective, training on domain-specific data reduces a model's generalization capability to unseen new domains. In this work, we propose test-time prompt tuning (TPT), a method that can learn adaptive prompts on the fly with a single test sample. For image classification, TPT optimizes the prompt by minimizing the entropy with confidence selection so that the model has consistent predictions across different augmented views of each test sample. In evaluating generalization to natural distribution shifts, TPT improves the zero-shot top-1 accuracy of CLIP by 3.6% on average, surpassing previous prompt tuning approaches that require additional task-specific training data. In evaluating cross-dataset generalization with unseen categories, TPT performs on par with the state-of-the-art approaches that use additional training data. Project page: https://azshue.github.io/TPT.

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LNS-Madam: Low-Precision Training in Logarithmic Number System using Multiplicative Weight Update

Representing deep neural networks (DNNs) in low-precision is a promising approach to enable efficient acceleration and memory reduction. Previous methods that train DNNs in low-precision typically keep a copy of weights in high-precision during the weight updates. Directly training with low-precision weights leads to accuracy degradation due to complex interactions between the low-precision number systems and the learning algorithms. To address this issue, we develop a co-designed low-precision training framework, termed LNS-Madam, in which we jointly design a logarithmic number system (LNS) and a multiplicative weight update algorithm (Madam). We prove that LNS-Madam results in low quantization error during weight updates, leading to stable performance even if the precision is limited. We further propose a hardware design of LNS-Madam that resolves practical challenges in implementing an efficient datapath for LNS computations. Our implementation effectively reduces energy overhead incurred by LNS-to-integer conversion and partial sum accumulation. Experimental results show that LNS-Madam achieves comparable accuracy to full-precision counterparts with only 8 bits on popular computer vision and natural language tasks. Compared to FP32 and FP8, LNS-Madam reduces the energy consumption by over 90% and 55%, respectively.

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Augmenting Deep Classifiers with Polynomial Neural Networks

Deep neural networks have been the driving force behind the success in classification tasks, e.g., object and audio recognition. Impressive results and generalization have been achieved by a variety of recently proposed architectures, the majority of which are seemingly disconnected. In this work, we cast the study of deep classifiers under a unifying framework. In particular, we express state-of-the-art architectures (e.g., residual and non-local networks) in the form of different degree polynomials of the input. Our framework provides insights on the inductive biases of each model and enables natural extensions building upon their polynomial nature. The efficacy of the proposed models is evaluated on standard image and audio classification benchmarks. The expressivity of the proposed models is highlighted both in terms of increased model performance as well as model compression. Lastly, the extensions allowed by this taxonomy showcase benefits in the presence of limited data and long-tailed data distributions. We expect this taxonomy to provide links between existing domain-specific architectures. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/grigorisg9gr/polynomials-for-augmenting-NNs}.

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ACID: Action-Conditional Implicit Visual Dynamics for Deformable Object Manipulation

Manipulating volumetric deformable objects in the real world, like plush toys and pizza dough, bring substantial challenges due to infinite shape variations, non-rigid motions, and partial observability. We introduce ACID, an action-conditional visual dynamics model for volumetric deformable objects based on structured implicit neural representations. ACID integrates two new techniques: implicit representations for action-conditional dynamics and geodesics-based contrastive learning. To represent deformable dynamics from partial RGB-D observations, we learn implicit representations of occupancy and flow-based forward dynamics. To accurately identify state change under large non-rigid deformations, we learn a correspondence embedding field through a novel geodesics-based contrastive loss. To evaluate our approach, we develop a simulation framework for manipulating complex deformable shapes in realistic scenes and a benchmark containing over 17,000 action trajectories with six types of plush toys and 78 variants. Our model achieves the best performance in geometry, correspondence, and dynamics predictions over existing approaches. The ACID dynamics models are successfully employed to goal-conditioned deformable manipulation tasks, resulting in a 30% increase in task success rate over the strongest baseline. Furthermore, we apply the simulation-trained ACID model directly to real-world objects and show success in manipulating them into target configurations. For more results and information, please visit https://b0ku1.github.io/acid/ .

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MinVIS: A Minimal Video Instance Segmentation Framework without Video-based Training

We propose MinVIS, a minimal video instance segmentation (VIS) framework that achieves state-of-the-art VIS performance with neither video-based architectures nor training procedures. By only training a query-based image instance segmentation model, MinVIS outperforms the previous best result on the challenging Occluded VIS dataset by over 10% AP. Since MinVIS treats frames in training videos as independent images, we can drastically sub-sample the annotated frames in training videos without any modifications. With only 1% of labeled frames, MinVIS outperforms or is comparable to fully-supervised state-of-the-art approaches on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021. Our key observation is that queries trained to be discriminative between intra-frame object instances are temporally consistent and can be used to track instances without any manually designed heuristics. MinVIS thus has the following inference pipeline: we first apply the trained query-based image instance segmentation to video frames independently. The segmented instances are then tracked by bipartite matching of the corresponding queries. This inference is done in an online fashion and does not need to process the whole video at once. MinVIS thus has the practical advantages of reducing both the labeling costs and the memory requirements, while not sacrificing the VIS performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/MinVIS

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Robust Trajectory Prediction against Adversarial Attacks

Trajectory prediction using deep neural networks (DNNs) is an essential component of autonomous driving (AD) systems. However, these methods are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, leading to serious consequences such as collisions. In this work, we identify two key ingredients to defend trajectory prediction models against adversarial attacks including (1) designing effective adversarial training methods and (2) adding domain-specific data augmentation to mitigate the performance degradation on clean data. We demonstrate that our method is able to improve the performance by 46% on adversarial data and at the cost of only 3% performance degradation on clean data, compared to the model trained with clean data. Additionally, compared to existing robust methods, our method can improve performance by 21% on adversarial examples and 9% on clean data. Our robust model is evaluated with a planner to study its downstream impacts. We demonstrate that our model can significantly reduce the severe accident rates (e.g., collisions and off-road driving).

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Large Scale Mask Optimization Via Convolutional Fourier Neural Operator and Litho-Guided Self Training

Machine learning techniques have been extensively studied for mask optimization problems, aiming at better mask printability, shorter turnaround time, better mask manufacturability, and so on. However, most of these researches are focusing on the initial solution generation of small design regions. To further realize the potential of machine learning techniques on mask optimization tasks, we present a Convolutional Fourier Neural Operator (CFNO) that can efficiently learn layout tile dependencies and hence promise stitch-less large-scale mask optimization with the limited intervention of legacy tools. We discover the possibility of litho-guided self-training (LGST) through a trained machine learning model when solving non-convex optimization problems, which allows iterative model and dataset update and brings significant model performance improvement. Experimental results show that, for the first time, our machine learning-based framework outperforms state-of-the-art academic numerical mask optimizers with an order of magnitude speedup.

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Langevin Monte Carlo for Contextual Bandits

We study the efficiency of Thompson sampling for contextual bandits. Existing Thompson sampling-based algorithms need to construct a Laplace approximation (i.e., a Gaussian distribution) of the posterior distribution, which is inefficient to sample in high dimensional applications for general covariance matrices. Moreover, the Gaussian approximation may not be a good surrogate for the posterior distribution for general reward generating functions. We propose an efficient posterior sampling algorithm, viz., Langevin Monte Carlo Thompson Sampling (LMC-TS), that uses Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to directly sample from the posterior distribution in contextual bandits. Our method is computationally efficient since it only needs to perform noisy gradient descent updates without constructing the Laplace approximation of the posterior distribution. We prove that the proposed algorithm achieves the same sublinear regret bound as the best Thompson sampling algorithms for a special case of contextual bandits, viz., linear contextual bandits. We conduct experiments on both synthetic data and real-world datasets on different contextual bandit models, which demonstrates that directly sampling from the posterior is both computationally efficient and competitive in performance.

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Thompson Sampling Achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ Regret in Linear Quadratic Control

Thompson Sampling (TS) is an efficient method for decision-making under uncertainty, where an action is sampled from a carefully prescribed distribution which is updated based on the observed data. In this work, we study the problem of adaptive control of stabilizable linear-quadratic regulators (LQRs) using TS, where the system dynamics are unknown. Previous works have established that $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ frequentist regret is optimal for the adaptive control of LQRs. However, the existing methods either work only in restrictive settings, require a priori known stabilizing controllers, or utilize computationally intractable approaches. We propose an efficient TS algorithm for the adaptive control of LQRs, TS-based Adaptive Control, TSAC, that attains $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret, even for multidimensional systems, thereby solving the open problem posed in Abeille and Lazaric (2018). TSAC does not require a priori known stabilizing controller and achieves fast stabilization of the underlying system by effectively exploring the environment in the early stages. Our result hinges on developing a novel lower bound on the probability that the TS provides an optimistic sample. By carefully prescribing an early exploration strategy and a policy update rule, we show that TS achieves order-optimal regret in adaptive control of multidimensional stabilizable LQRs. We empirically demonstrate the performance and the efficiency of TSAC in several adaptive control tasks.

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