Tied-Augment: Controlling Representation Similarity Improves Data Augmentation

Data augmentation methods have played an important role in the recent advance of deep learning models, and have become an indispensable component of state-of-the-art models in semi-supervised, self-supervised, and supervised training for vision. Despite incurring no additional latency at test time, data augmentation often requires more epochs of training to be effective. For example, even the simple flips-and-crops augmentation requires training for more than 5 epochs to improve performance, whereas RandAugment requires more than 90 epochs. We propose a general framework called Tied-Augment, which improves the efficacy of data augmentation in a wide range of applications by adding a simple term to the loss that can control the similarity of representations under distortions. Tied-Augment can improve state-of-the-art methods from data augmentation (e.g. RandAugment, mixup), optimization (e.g. SAM), and semi-supervised learning (e.g. FixMatch). For example, Tied-RandAugment can outperform RandAugment by 2.0% on ImageNet. Notably, using Tied-Augment, data augmentation can be made to improve generalization even when training for a few epochs and when fine-tuning. We open source our code at https://github.com/ekurtulus/tied-augment/tree/main.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, ICML 202

Specialization as an Optimal Strategy Under Varying External Conditions

We present an investigation of specialization when considering the execution of collaborative tasks by a robot swarm. Specifically, we consider the stick-pulling problem first proposed by Martinoli et al. [1], [2] and develop a macroscopic analytical model for the swarm executing a set of tasks that require the collaboration of two robots. We show, for constant external conditions, maximum productivity can be achieved by a single species swarm with carefully chosen operational parameters. While the same applies for a two species swarm, we show how specialization is a strategy best employed for changing external conditions

Computational Caches

Caching is a well-known technique for speeding up computation. We cache data from file systems and databases; we cache dynamically generated code blocks; we cache page translations in TLBs. We propose to cache the act of computation, so that we can apply it later and in different contexts. We use a state-space model of computation to support such caching, involving two interrelated parts: speculatively memoized predicted/resultant state pairs that we use to accelerate sequential computation, and trained probabilistic models that we use to generate predicted states from which to speculatively execute. The key techniques that make this approach feasible are designing probabilistic models that automatically focus on regions of program execution state space in which prediction is tractable and identifying state space equivalence classes so that predictions need not be exact.Engineering and Applied Science

Learning and Controlling Silicon Dopant Transitions in Graphene using Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy

We introduce a machine learning approach to determine the transition dynamics of silicon atoms on a single layer of carbon atoms, when stimulated by the electron beam of a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). Our method is data-centric, leveraging data collected on a STEM. The data samples are processed and filtered to produce symbolic representations, which we use to train a neural network to predict transition probabilities. These learned transition dynamics are then leveraged to guide a single silicon atom throughout the lattice to pre-determined target destinations. We present empirical analyses that demonstrate the efficacy and generality of our approach

PolyLoss: A Polynomial Expansion Perspective of Classification Loss Functions

Cross-entropy loss and focal loss are the most common choices when training deep neural networks for classification problems. Generally speaking, however, a good loss function can take on much more flexible forms, and should be tailored for different tasks and datasets. Motivated by how functions can be approximated via Taylor expansion, we propose a simple framework, named PolyLoss, to view and design loss functions as a linear combination of polynomial functions. Our PolyLoss allows the importance of different polynomial bases to be easily adjusted depending on the targeting tasks and datasets, while naturally subsuming the aforementioned cross-entropy loss and focal loss as special cases. Extensive experimental results show that the optimal choice within the PolyLoss is indeed dependent on the task and dataset. Simply by introducing one extra hyperparameter and adding one line of code, our Poly-1 formulation outperforms the cross-entropy loss and focal loss on 2D image classification, instance segmentation, object detection, and 3D object detection tasks, sometimes by a large margin.Comment: Add ablation studies on COCO detection using RetinaNet (Section 8

Accurate Surface and Finite Temperature Bulk Properties of Lithium Metal at Large Scales using Machine Learning Interaction Potentials

The properties of lithium metal are key parameters in the design of lithium ion and lithium metal batteries. They are difficult to probe experimentally due to the high reactivity and low melting point of lithium as well as the microscopic scales at which lithium exists in batteries where it is found to have enhanced strength, with implications for dendrite suppression strategies. Computationally, there is a lack of empirical potentials that are consistently quantitatively accurate across all properties and ab-initio calculations are too costly. In this work, we train Machine Learning Interaction Potentials (MLIPs) on Density Functional Theory (DFT) data to state-of-the-art accuracy in reproducing experimental and ab-initio results across a wide range of simulations at large length and time scales. We accurately predict thermodynamic properties, phonon spectra, temperature dependence of elastic constants and various surface properties inaccessible using DFT. We establish that there exists a Bell-Evans-Polanyi relation correlating the self-adsorption energy and the minimum surface diffusion barrier for high Miller index facets.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 3 pages of Supporting Informatio