3,580 research outputs found
Bottom-Up and Top-Down Reasoning with Hierarchical Rectified Gaussians
Convolutional neural nets (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in
recent history. Such approaches tend to work in a unidirectional bottom-up
feed-forward fashion. However, practical experience and biological evidence
tells us that feedback plays a crucial role, particularly for detailed spatial
understanding tasks. This work explores bidirectional architectures that also
reason with top-down feedback: neural units are influenced by both lower and
higher-level units.
We do so by treating units as rectified latent variables in a quadratic
energy function, which can be seen as a hierarchical Rectified Gaussian model
(RGs). We show that RGs can be optimized with a quadratic program (QP), that
can in turn be optimized with a recurrent neural network (with rectified linear
units). This allows RGs to be trained with GPU-optimized gradient descent. From
a theoretical perspective, RGs help establish a connection between CNNs and
hierarchical probabilistic models. From a practical perspective, RGs are well
suited for detailed spatial tasks that can benefit from top-down reasoning. We
illustrate them on the challenging task of keypoint localization under
occlusions, where local bottom-up evidence may be misleading. We demonstrate
state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
Recommended from our members
Explainable and Advisable Learning for Self-driving Vehicles
Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance companies, law enforcement, developers, etc., can understand what triggered a particular behavior. Explanations may be triggered by the neural controller, namely introspective explanations, or informed by the neural controller's output, namely rationalizations. Our work has focused on the challenge of generating introspective explanations of deep models for self-driving vehicles. In Chapter 3, we begin by exploring the use of visual explanations. These explanations take the form of real-time highlighted regions of an image that causally influence the network's output (steering control). In the first stage, we use a visual attention model to train a convolution network end-to-end from images to steering angle. The attention model highlights image regions that potentially influence the network's output. Some of these are true influences, but some are spurious. We then apply a causal filtering step to determine which input regions actually influence the output. This produces more succinct visual explanations and more accurately exposes the network's behavior. In Chapter 4, we add an attention-based video-to-text model to produce textual explanations of model actions, e.g. "the car slows down because the road is wet". The attention maps of controller and explanation model are aligned so that explanations are grounded in the parts of the scene that mattered to the controller. We explore two approaches to attention alignment, strong- and weak-alignment. These explainable systems represent an externalization of tacit knowledge. The network's opaque reasoning is simplified to a situation-specific dependence on a visible object in the image. This makes them brittle and potentially unsafe in situations that do not match training data. In Chapter 5, we propose to address this issue by augmenting training data with natural language advice from a human. Advice includes guidance about what to do and where to attend. We present the first step toward advice-giving, where we train an end-to-end vehicle controller that accepts advice. The controller adapts the way it attends to the scene (visual attention) and the control (steering and speed). Further, in Chapter 6, we propose a new approach that learns vehicle control with the help of long-term (global) human advice. Specifically, our system learns to summarize its visual observations in natural language, predict an appropriate action response (e.g. "I see a pedestrian crossing, so I stop"), and predict the controls, accordingly
Iterative Amortized Inference
Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep
latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational
auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference
with a learned model, inference is amortized over data examples and therefore
more computationally efficient. However, standard inference models are
restricted to direct mappings from data to approximate posterior estimates. The
failure of these models to reach fully optimized approximate posterior
estimates results in an amortization gap. We aim toward closing this gap by
proposing iterative inference models, which learn to perform inference
optimization through repeatedly encoding gradients. Our approach generalizes
standard inference models in VAEs and provides insight into several empirical
findings, including top-down inference techniques. We demonstrate the inference
optimization capabilities of iterative inference models and show that they
outperform standard inference models on several benchmark data sets of images
and text.Comment: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 201
- …