26 research outputs found
A Scale Mixture Perspective of Multiplicative Noise in Neural Networks
Corrupting the input and hidden layers of deep neural networks (DNNs) with
multiplicative noise, often drawn from the Bernoulli distribution (or
'dropout'), provides regularization that has significantly contributed to deep
learning's success. However, understanding how multiplicative corruptions
prevent overfitting has been difficult due to the complexity of a DNN's
functional form. In this paper, we show that when a Gaussian prior is placed on
a DNN's weights, applying multiplicative noise induces a Gaussian scale
mixture, which can be reparameterized to circumvent the problematic likelihood
function. Analysis can then proceed by using a type-II maximum likelihood
procedure to derive a closed-form expression revealing how regularization
evolves as a function of the network's weights. Results show that
multiplicative noise forces weights to become either sparse or invariant to
rescaling. We find our analysis has implications for model compression as it
naturally reveals a weight pruning rule that starkly contrasts with the
commonly used signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). While the SNR prunes weights with
large variances, seeing them as noisy, our approach recognizes their robustness
and retains them. We empirically demonstrate our approach has a strong
advantage over the SNR heuristic and is competitive to retraining with soft
targets produced from a teacher model
Active Learning for Multilingual Fingerspelling Corpora
We apply active learning to help with data scarcity problems in sign
languages. In particular, we perform a novel analysis of the effect of
pre-training. Since many sign languages are linguistic descendants of French
sign language, they share hand configurations, which pre-training can hopefully
exploit. We test this hypothesis on American, Chinese, German, and Irish
fingerspelling corpora. We do observe a benefit from pre-training, but this may
be due to visual rather than linguistic similaritie
Hybrid Models with Deep and Invertible Features
We propose a neural hybrid model consisting of a linear model defined on a
set of features computed by a deep, invertible transformation (i.e. a
normalizing flow). An attractive property of our model is that both
p(features), the density of the features, and p(targets | features), the
predictive distribution, can be computed exactly in a single feed-forward pass.
We show that our hybrid model, despite the invertibility constraints, achieves
similar accuracy to purely predictive models. Moreover the generative component
remains a good model of the input features despite the hybrid optimization
objective. This offers additional capabilities such as detection of
out-of-distribution inputs and enabling semi-supervised learning. The
availability of the exact joint density p(targets, features) also allows us to
compute many quantities readily, making our hybrid model a useful building
block for downstream applications of probabilistic deep learning.Comment: ICML 201
Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?
A neural network deployed in the wild may be asked to make predictions for
inputs that were drawn from a different distribution than that of the training
data. A plethora of work has demonstrated that it is easy to find or synthesize
inputs for which a neural network is highly confident yet wrong. Generative
models are widely viewed to be robust to such mistaken confidence as modeling
the density of the input features can be used to detect novel,
out-of-distribution inputs. In this paper we challenge this assumption. We find
that the density learned by flow-based models, VAEs, and PixelCNNs cannot
distinguish images of common objects such as dogs, trucks, and horses (i.e.
CIFAR-10) from those of house numbers (i.e. SVHN), assigning a higher
likelihood to the latter when the model is trained on the former. Moreover, we
find evidence of this phenomenon when pairing several popular image data sets:
FashionMNIST vs MNIST, CelebA vs SVHN, ImageNet vs CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 / SVHN.
To investigate this curious behavior, we focus analysis on flow-based
generative models in particular since they are trained and evaluated via the
exact marginal likelihood. We find such behavior persists even when we restrict
the flows to constant-volume transformations. These transformations admit some
theoretical analysis, and we show that the difference in likelihoods can be
explained by the location and variances of the data and the model curvature.
Our results caution against using the density estimates from deep generative
models to identify inputs similar to the training distribution until their
behavior for out-of-distribution inputs is better understood.Comment: ICLR 201
Exploiting Inferential Structure in Neural Processes
Neural Processes (NPs) are appealing due to their ability to perform fast
adaptation based on a context set. This set is encoded by a latent variable,
which is often assumed to follow a simple distribution. However, in real-word
settings, the context set may be drawn from richer distributions having
multiple modes, heavy tails, etc. In this work, we provide a framework that
allows NPs' latent variable to be given a rich prior defined by a graphical
model. These distributional assumptions directly translate into an appropriate
aggregation strategy for the context set. Moreover, we describe a
message-passing procedure that still allows for end-to-end optimization with
stochastic gradients. We demonstrate the generality of our framework by using
mixture and Student-t assumptions that yield improvements in function modelling
and test-time robustness.Comment: Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 202