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We derive a novel, provably robust, and closed-form Bayesian update rule for online filtering in state-space models in the presence of outliers and misspecified measurement models. Our method combines generalised Bayesian inference with filtering methods such as the extended and ensemble Kalman filter. We use the former to show robustness and the latter to ensure computational efficiency in the case of nonlinear models. Our method matches or outperforms other robust filtering methods (such as those based on variational Bayes) at a much lower computational cost. We show this empirically on a range of filtering problems with outlier measurements, such as object tracking, state estimation in high-dimensional chaotic systems, and online learning of neural networks., Comment: 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

Soldiers in the field often need to cross negative obstacles, such as rivers or canyons, to reach goals or safety. Military gap crossing involves on-site temporary bridges construction. However, this procedure is conducted with dangerous, time and labor intensive operations, and specialized machinery. We envision a scalable robotic solution inspired by advancements in force-controlled and Cable Driven Parallel Robots (CDPRs); this solution can address the challenges inherent in this transportation problem, achieving fast, efficient, and safe deployment and field operations. We introduce the embodied vision in Co3MaNDR, a solution to the military gap crossing problem, a distributed robot consisting of several modules simultaneously pulling on a central payload, controlling the cables' tensions to achieve complex objectives, such as precise trajectory tracking or force amplification. Hardware experiments demonstrate teleoperation of a payload, trajectory following, and the sensing and amplification of operators' applied physical forces during slow operations. An operator was shown to manipulate a 27.2 kg (60 lb) payload with an average force utilization of 14.5\% of its weight. Results indicate that the system can be scaled up to heavier payloads without compromising performance or introducing superfluous complexity. This research lays a foundation to expand CDPR technology to uncoordinated and unstable mobile platforms in unknown environments., Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Submit to IROS 2024

BlackJAX is a library implementing sampling and variational inference algorithms commonly used in Bayesian computation. It is designed for ease of use, speed, and modularity by taking a functional approach to the algorithms' implementation. BlackJAX is written in Python, using JAX to compile and run NumpPy-like samplers and variational methods on CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs. The library integrates well with probabilistic programming languages by working directly with the (un-normalized) target log density function. BlackJAX is intended as a collection of low-level, composable implementations of basic statistical 'atoms' that can be combined to perform well-defined Bayesian inference, but also provides high-level routines for ease of use. It is designed for users who need cutting-edge methods, researchers who want to create complex sampling methods, and people who want to learn how these work., Comment: Companion paper for the library https://github.com/blackjax-devs/blackjax Update: minor changes and updated the list of authors to include technical contributors

In this work, we introduce Semantic Pyramid AutoEncoder (SPAE) for enabling frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-linguistic modalities such as images or videos. SPAE converts between raw pixels and interpretable lexical tokens (or words) extracted from the LLM's vocabulary. The resulting tokens capture both the semantic meaning and the fine-grained details needed for visual reconstruction, effectively translating the visual content into a language comprehensible to the LLM, and empowering it to perform a wide array of multimodal tasks. Our approach is validated through in-context learning experiments with frozen PaLM 2 and GPT 3.5 on a diverse set of image understanding and generation tasks. Our method marks the first successful attempt to enable a frozen LLM to generate image content while surpassing state-of-the-art performance in image understanding tasks, under the same setting, by over 25%., Comment: NeurIPS 2023 spotlight

We propose an efficient online approximate Bayesian inference algorithm for estimating the parameters of a nonlinear function from a potentially non-stationary data stream. The method is based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF), but uses a novel low-rank plus diagonal decomposition of the posterior precision matrix, which gives a cost per step which is linear in the number of model parameters. In contrast to methods based on stochastic variational inference, our method is fully deterministic, and does not require step-size tuning. We show experimentally that this results in much faster (more sample efficient) learning, which results in more rapid adaptation to changing distributions, and faster accumulation of reward when used as part of a contextual bandit algorithm.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

Changes in the data distribution at test time can have deleterious effects on the performance of predictive models $p(y|x)$. We consider situations where there are additional meta-data labels (such as group labels), denoted by $z$, that can account for such changes in the distribution. In particular, we assume that the prior distribution $p(y, z)$, which models the dependence between the class label $y$ and the "nuisance" factors $z$, may change across domains, either due to a change in the correlation between these terms, or a change in one of their marginals. However, we assume that the generative model for features $p(x|y, z)$ is invariant across domains. We note that this corresponds to an expanded version of the widely used "label shift" assumption, where the labels now also include the nuisance factors $z$. Based on this observation, we propose a test-time label shift correction that adapts to changes in the joint distribution $p(y, z)$ using EM applied to unlabeled samples from the target domain distribution, $p_t(x)$. Importantly, we are able to avoid fitting a generative model $p(x|y,z)$, and merely need to reweight the outputs of a discriminative model $p_s(y,z|x)$ trained on the source distribution. We evaluate our method, which we call "Test-Time Label-Shift Adaptation" (TTLSA), on several standard image and text datasets, as well as the CheXpert chest X-ray dataset, and show that it improves performance over methods that target invariance to changes in the distribution, as well as baseline empirical risk minimization methods. Code for reproducing experiments is available at https://github.com/nalzok/test-time-label-shift ., Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures

Gaussian processes are Bayesian non-parametric models used in many areas. In this work, we propose a Non-stationary Heteroscedastic Gaussian process model which can be learned with gradient-based techniques. We demonstrate the interpretability of the proposed model by separating the overall uncertainty into aleatoric (irreducible) and epistemic (model) uncertainty. We illustrate the usability of derived epistemic uncertainty on active learning problems. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model with various ablations on multiple datasets., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS Workshop on Gaussian Processes, Spatiotemporal Modeling, and Decision-making Systems, 2023

Prompted models have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning abilities. Repeated interactions at test-time with a single model, or the composition of multiple models together, further expands capabilities. These compositions are probabilistic models, and may be expressed in the language of graphical models with random variables whose values are complex data types such as strings. Cases with control flow and dynamic structure require techniques from probabilistic programming, which allow implementing disparate model structures and inference strategies in a unified language. We formalize several existing techniques from this perspective, including scratchpads / chain of thought, verifiers, STaR, selection-inference, and tool use. We refer to the resulting programs as language model cascades., Comment: Presented as spotlight at the Beyond Bases workshop at ICML 2022 (https://beyond-bayes.github.io)

A recent trend in artificial intelligence is the use of pretrained models for language and vision tasks, which have achieved extraordinary performance but also puzzling failures. Probing these models' abilities in diverse ways is therefore critical to the field. In this paper, we explore the reliability of models, where we define a reliable model as one that not only achieves strong predictive performance but also performs well consistently over many decision-making tasks involving uncertainty (e.g., selective prediction, open set recognition), robust generalization (e.g., accuracy and proper scoring rules such as log-likelihood on in- and out-of-distribution datasets), and adaptation (e.g., active learning, few-shot uncertainty). We devise 10 types of tasks over 40 datasets in order to evaluate different aspects of reliability on both vision and language domains. To improve reliability, we developed ViT-Plex and T5-Plex, pretrained large model extensions for vision and language modalities, respectively. Plex greatly improves the state-of-the-art across reliability tasks, and simplifies the traditional protocol as it improves the out-of-the-box performance and does not require designing scores or tuning the model for each task. We demonstrate scaling effects over model sizes up to 1B parameters and pretraining dataset sizes up to 4B examples. We also demonstrate Plex's capabilities on challenging tasks including zero-shot open set recognition, active learning, and uncertainty in conversational language understanding., Comment: Code available at https://goo.gle/plex-code

Robotic systems that can dynamically combine manipulation and locomotion could facilitate dangerous or physically demanding labor. For instance, firefighter humanoid robots could leverage their body by leaning against collapsed building rubble to push it aside. Here we introduce a teleoperation system that targets the realization of these tasks using human whole-body motor skills. We describe a new wheeled humanoid platform, SATYRR, and a novel hands-free teleoperation architecture using a whole-body Human Machine Interface (HMI). This system enables telelocomotion of the humanoid robot using the operator body motion, freeing their arms for manipulation tasks. In this study we evaluate the efficacy of the proposed system on hardware, and explore the control of SATYRR using two teleoperation mappings that map the operators body pitch and twist to the robot velocity or acceleration. Through experiments and user feedback we showcase our preliminary findings of the pilot-system response. Results suggest that the HMI is capable of effectively telelocomoting SATYRR, that pilot preferences should dictate the appropriate motion mapping and gains, and finally that the pilot can better learn to control the system over time. This study represents a fundamental step towards the realization of combined manipulation and locomotion via teleoperation.

In this paper we present a new algorithm for online (sequential) inference in Bayesian neural networks, and show its suitability for tackling contextual bandit problems. The key idea is to combine the extended Kalman filter (which locally linearizes the likelihood function at each time step) with a (learned or random) low-dimensional affine subspace for the parameters; the use of a subspace enables us to scale our algorithm to models with $\sim 1M$ parameters. While most other neural bandit methods need to store the entire past dataset in order to avoid the problem of "catastrophic forgetting", our approach uses constant memory. This is possible because we represent uncertainty about all the parameters in the model, not just the final linear layer. We show good results on the "Deep Bayesian Bandit Showdown" benchmark, as well as MNIST and a recommender system.

High-quality estimates of uncertainty and robustness are crucial for numerous real-world applications, especially for deep learning which underlies many deployed ML systems. The ability to compare techniques for improving these estimates is therefore very important for research and practice alike. Yet, competitive comparisons of methods are often lacking due to a range of reasons, including: compute availability for extensive tuning, incorporation of sufficiently many baselines, and concrete documentation for reproducibility. In this paper we introduce Uncertainty Baselines: high-quality implementations of standard and state-of-the-art deep learning methods on a variety of tasks. As of this writing, the collection spans 19 methods across 9 tasks, each with at least 5 metrics. Each baseline is a self-contained experiment pipeline with easily reusable and extendable components. Our goal is to provide immediate starting points for experimentation with new methods or applications. Additionally we provide model checkpoints, experiment outputs as Python notebooks, and leaderboards for comparing results. Code available at https://github.com/google/uncertainty-baselines.

Digital contact tracing apps for COVID, such as the one developed by Google and Apple, need to estimate the risk that a user was infected during a particular exposure, in order to decide whether to notify the user to take precautions, such as entering into quarantine, or requesting a test. Such risk score models contain numerous parameters that must be set by the public health authority. In this paper, we show how to automatically learn these parameters from data. Our method needs access to exposure and outcome data. Although this data is already being collected (in an aggregated, privacy-preserving way) by several health authorities, in this paper we limit ourselves to simulated data, so that we can systematically study the different factors that affect the feasibility of the approach. In particular, we show that the parameters become harder to estimate when there is more missing data (e.g., due to infections which were not recorded by the app), and when there is model misspecification. Nevertheless, the learning approach outperforms a strong manually designed baseline. Furthermore, the learning approach can adapt even when the risk factors of the disease change, e.g., due to the evolution of new variants, or the adoption of vaccines., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures

This paper introduces HOPPY, an open-source, low-cost, robust, and modular kit for robotics education. The robot dynamically hops around a rotating gantry with a fixed base. The kit is intended to lower the entry barrier for studying dynamic robots and legged locomotion with real systems. It bridges the theoretical content of fundamental robotic courses with real dynamic robots by facilitating and guiding the software and hardware integration. This paper describes the topics which can be studied using the kit, lists its components, discusses preferred practices for implementation, presents results from experiments with the simulator and the real system, and suggests further improvements. A simple heuristic-based controller is described to achieve velocities up to 1.7m/s, navigate small objects, and mitigate external disturbances when the robot is aided by a counterweight. HOPPY was utilized as the subject of a semester-long project for the Robot Dynamics and Control course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The positive feedback from the students and instructors about the hands-on activities during the course motivates us to share this kit and continue improving in the future., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2010.14580

In 2018, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered two assessments--the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL) assessment and the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS)--to two separate nationally representative samples of 8th-grade students in the United States. TEL was administered in January-March to 15,400 students, while ICILS was administered in March-May to 9,000 students. Because of some similarities in content and item formats, NCES commissioned a study to explore the similarities and differences between the two assessment frameworks as well as the characteristics of the assessment items. The results of the comparison study showed that the framework targets and design features underlying the scenario-based tasks (SBTs) used in both assessments have many similarities. Both assessments have a focus on information and communication technologies, and both are digital-based assessments that use interactive features in item design. However, there are differences between the two assessments in framework scope and item characteristics. About half of the TEL framework targets are beyond the scope of ICILS; TEL evaluates students' knowledge and skills in analyzing general systems, while ICILS limits its evaluation to computer systems. ICILS uses some response modes (e.g., flowcharts) that are not used in TEL. Forty-two percent of the ICILS items do not allow students to go back to the previous item to change their answers, compared with 85 percent of the TEL SBT items. About two-thirds of ICILS items assess procedural knowledge, while only about one-third of TEL SBT items do that.

Teleoperation (i.e., controlling a robot with human motion) proves promising in enabling a humanoid robot to move as dynamically as a human. But how to map human motion to a humanoid robot matters because a human and a humanoid robot rarely have identical topologies and dimensions. This work presents an experimental study that utilizes reaction tests to compare the proposed joint space mapping and the proposed task space mapping for dynamic teleoperation of an anthropomorphic robotic arm that possesses human-level dynamic motion capabilities. The experimental results suggest that the robot achieved similar and, in some cases, human-level dynamic performances with both mappings for the six participating human subjects. All subjects became proficient at teleoperating the robot with both mappings after practice, despite that the subjects and the robot differed in size and link length ratio and that the teleoperation required the subjects to move unintuitively. Yet, most subjects developed their teleoperation proficiencies more quickly with the task space mapping than with the joint space mapping after similar amounts of practice. This study also indicates the potential values of a three-dimensional task space mapping, a teleoperation training simulator, and force feedback to the human pilot for intuitive and dynamic teleoperation of a humanoid robot's arms.

This letter introduces HOPPY, an open-source, low-cost, robust, and modular kit for robotics education. The robot dynamically hops around a rotating gantry with a fixed base. The kit lowers the entry barrier for studying dynamic robots and legged locomotion in real systems. The kit bridges the theoretical content of fundamental robotic courses and real dynamic robots by facilitating and guiding the software and hardware integration. This letter describes the topics which can be studied using the kit, lists its components, discusses best practices for implementation, presents results from experiments with the simulator and the real system, and suggests further improvements. A simple controller is described to achieve velocities up to 2m/s, navigate small objects, and mitigate external disturbances (kicks). HOPPY was utilized as the topic of a semester-long project for the Robot Dynamics and Control course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Students provided an overwhelmingly positive feedback from the hands-on activities during the course and the instructors will continue to improve the kit for upcoming semesters.

The use of black-box optimization for the design of new biological sequences is an emerging research area with potentially revolutionary impact. The cost and latency of wet-lab experiments requires methods that find good sequences in few experimental rounds of large batches of sequences--a setting that off-the-shelf black-box optimization methods are ill-equipped to handle. We find that the performance of existing methods varies drastically across optimization tasks, posing a significant obstacle to real-world applications. To improve robustness, we propose Population-Based Black-Box Optimization (P3BO), which generates batches of sequences by sampling from an ensemble of methods. The number of sequences sampled from any method is proportional to the quality of sequences it previously proposed, allowing P3BO to combine the strengths of individual methods while hedging against their innate brittleness. Adapting the hyper-parameters of each of the methods online using evolutionary optimization further improves performance. Through extensive experiments on in-silico optimization tasks, we show that P3BO outperforms any single method in its population, proposing higher quality sequences as well as more diverse batches. As such, P3BO and Adaptive-P3BO are a crucial step towards deploying ML to real-world sequence design.

There has been a surge of recent interest in learning representations for graph-structured data. Graph representation learning methods have generally fallen into three main categories, based on the availability of labeled data. The first, network embedding (such as shallow graph embedding or graph auto-encoders), focuses on learning unsupervised representations of relational structure. The second, graph regularized neural networks, leverages graphs to augment neural network losses with a regularization objective for semi-supervised learning. The third, graph neural networks, aims to learn differentiable functions over discrete topologies with arbitrary structure. However, despite the popularity of these areas there has been surprisingly little work on unifying the three paradigms. Here, we aim to bridge the gap between graph neural networks, network embedding and graph regularization models. We propose a comprehensive taxonomy of representation learning methods for graph-structured data, aiming to unify several disparate bodies of work. Specifically, we propose a Graph Encoder Decoder Model (GRAPHEDM), which generalizes popular algorithms for semi-supervised learning on graphs (e.g. GraphSage, Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks), and unsupervised learning of graph representations (e.g. DeepWalk, node2vec, etc) into a single consistent approach. To illustrate the generality of this approach, we fit over thirty existing methods into this framework. We believe that this unifying view both provides a solid foundation for understanding the intuition behind these methods, and enables future research in the area.

Resampling is a key component of sample-based recursive state estimation in particle filters. Recent work explores differentiable particle filters for end-to-end learning. However, resampling remains a challenge in these works, as it is inherently non-differentiable. We address this challenge by replacing traditional resampling with a learned neural network resampler. We present a novel network architecture, the particle transformer, and train it for particle resampling using a likelihood-based loss function over sets of particles. Incorporated into a differentiable particle filter, our model can be end-to-end optimized jointly with the other particle filter components via gradient descent. Our results show that our learned resampler outperforms traditional resampling techniques on synthetic data and in a simulated robot localization task.

Invertible flow-based generative models are an effective method for learning to generate samples, while allowing for tractable likelihood computation and inference. However, the invertibility requirement restricts models to have the same latent dimensionality as the inputs. This imposes significant architectural, memory, and computational costs, making them more challenging to scale than other classes of generative models such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). We propose a generative model based on probability flows that does away with the bijectivity requirement on the model and only assumes injectivity. This also provides another perspective on regularized autoencoders (RAEs), with our final objectives resembling RAEs with specific regularizers that are derived by lower bounding the probability flow objective. We empirically demonstrate the promise of the proposed model, improving over VAEs and AEs in terms of sample quality., Comment: AISTATS 2020

This paper studies the problem of predicting the distribution over multiple possible future paths of people as they move through various visual scenes. We make two main contributions. The first contribution is a new dataset, created in a realistic 3D simulator, which is based on real world trajectory data, and then extrapolated by human annotators to achieve different latent goals. This provides the first benchmark for quantitative evaluation of the models to predict multi-future trajectories. The second contribution is a new model to generate multiple plausible future trajectories, which contains novel designs of using multi-scale location encodings and convolutional RNNs over graphs. We refer to our model as Multiverse. We show that our model achieves the best results on our dataset, as well as on the real-world VIRAT/ActEV dataset (which just contains one possible future)., Comment: CVPR 2020. Code, models and dataset are available at: https://next.cs.cmu.edu/multiverse/index.html

We propose an efficient inference method for switching nonlinear dynamical systems. The key idea is to learn an inference network which can be used as a proposal distribution for the continuous latent variables, while performing exact marginalization of the discrete latent variables. This allows us to use the reparameterization trick, and apply end-to-end training with stochastic gradient descent. We show that the proposed method can successfully segment time series data, including videos and 3D human pose, into meaningful ``regimes'' by using the piece-wise nonlinear dynamics.

Extracting and predicting object structure and dynamics from videos without supervision is a major challenge in machine learning. To address this challenge, we adopt a keypoint-based image representation and learn a stochastic dynamics model of the keypoints. Future frames are reconstructed from the keypoints and a reference frame. By modeling dynamics in the keypoint coordinate space, we achieve stable learning and avoid compounding of errors in pixel space. Our method improves upon unstructured representations both for pixel-level video prediction and for downstream tasks requiring object-level understanding of motion dynamics. We evaluate our model on diverse datasets: a multi-agent sports dataset, the Human3.6M dataset, and datasets based on continuous control tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite. The spatially structured representation outperforms unstructured representations on a range of motion-related tasks such as object tracking, action recognition and reward prediction., Comment: 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019), Vancouver, Canada

Solving complex, temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). We hypothesize that one critical element of solving such problems is the notion of compositionality. With the ability to learn concepts and sub-skills that can be composed to solve longer tasks, i.e. hierarchical RL, we can acquire temporally-extended behaviors. However, acquiring effective yet general abstractions for hierarchical RL is remarkably challenging. In this paper, we propose to use language as the abstraction, as it provides unique compositional structure, enabling fast learning and combinatorial generalization, while retaining tremendous flexibility, making it suitable for a variety of problems. Our approach learns an instruction-following low-level policy and a high-level policy that can reuse abstractions across tasks, in essence, permitting agents to reason using structured language. To study compositional task learning, we introduce an open-source object interaction environment built using the MuJoCo physics engine and the CLEVR engine. We find that, using our approach, agents can learn to solve to diverse, temporally-extended tasks such as object sorting and multi-object rearrangement, including from raw pixel observations. Our analysis reveals that the compositional nature of language is critical for learning diverse sub-skills and systematically generalizing to new sub-skills in comparison to non-compositional abstractions that use the same supervision., Comment: Published in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019; Supplementary materials: https://sites.google.com/view/hal-demo

We propose 4 insights that help to significantly improve the performance of deep learning models that predict surface normals and semantic labels from a single RGB image. These insights are: (1) denoise the "ground truth" surface normals in the training set to ensure consistency with the semantic labels; (2) concurrently train on a mix of real and synthetic data, instead of pretraining on synthetic and finetuning on real; (3) jointly predict normals and semantics using a shared model, but only backpropagate errors on pixels that have valid training labels; (4) slim down the model and use grayscale instead of color inputs. Despite the simplicity of these steps, we demonstrate consistently improved results on several datasets, using a model that runs at 12 fps on a standard mobile phone.

This paper proposes a self-supervised learning approach for video features that results in significantly improved performance on downstream tasks (such as video classification, captioning and segmentation) compared to existing methods. Our method extends the BERT model for text sequences to the case of sequences of real-valued feature vectors, by replacing the softmax loss with noise contrastive estimation (NCE). We also show how to learn representations from sequences of visual features and sequences of words derived from ASR (automatic speech recognition), and show that such cross-modal training (when possible) helps even more.

We show that a large class of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, including, but not limited to, Covariance Matrix Adaption, can be written as a Monte Carlo Expectation-Maximization algorithm, and as exact EM in the limit of infinite samples. Because EM sits on a rigorous statistical foundation and has been thoroughly analyzed, this connection provides a new coherent framework with which to reason about EDAs.

This paper focuses on multi-person action forecasting in videos. More precisely, given a history of H previous frames, the goal is to detect actors and to predict their future actions for the next T frames. Our approach jointly models temporal and spatial interactions among different actors by constructing a recurrent graph, using actor proposals obtained with Faster R-CNN as nodes. Our method learns to select a subset of discriminative relations without requiring explicit supervision, thus enabling us to tackle challenging visual data. We refer to our model as Discriminative Relational Recurrent Network (DRRN). Evaluation of action prediction on AVA demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to simpler baselines. Furthermore, we significantly improve performance on the task of early action classification on J-HMDB, from the previous SOTA of 48% to 60%., Comment: CVPR 2019 (oral)

In this work, we have investigated a number of unsupervised learning methods for material segmentation in projection x-ray imaging with a spectral detector. A phantom containing two hard materials (glass, steel) and three soft materials (PVC, polypropylene, and PFTE) all embedded in PMMA was imaged with a 5 energy bin spectal detector. The projection images were utilized to test nine unsupervised learning algorithms for automated material segmentation. Each algorithm was investigated using single energy (SE), dual energy (DE) and multi energy (ME) images. Clustering results were scored based on homogeneity and completeness of the clusters, which were combined into the Rosenberg and Hirshberg's V-measure. Principle component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) were tested as dimensional reduction methods. ME, DE and SE material segmentation was performed using five, two, and single energy images, respectively. ME had the highest V-measure on the soft materials using PCA and a novel interpolating bayesian gaussian mixture model (BGMM) clustering with a V-measure of 0.71. This was by 3.5% better than DE and 20.3% better than SE. Conversely, SE imaging was most capable of hard tissue segmentation using the standard BGMM, with a V-measures of 0.84. This was 6.3% better than DE and 5.0% better than ME. This work demonstrated that ME x-ray imaging might be superior in segmenting soft tissues compared to conventional SE x-ray imaging.

Self-supervised learning has become increasingly important to leverage the abundance of unlabeled data available on platforms like YouTube. Whereas most existing approaches learn low-level representations, we propose a joint visual-linguistic model to learn high-level features without any explicit supervision. In particular, inspired by its recent success in language modeling, we build upon the BERT model to learn bidirectional joint distributions over sequences of visual and linguistic tokens, derived from vector quantization of video data and off-the-shelf speech recognition outputs, respectively. We use VideoBERT in numerous tasks, including action classification and video captioning. We show that it can be applied directly to open-vocabulary classification, and confirm that large amounts of training data and cross-modal information are critical to performance. Furthermore, we outperform the state-of-the-art on video captioning, and quantitative results verify that the model learns high-level semantic features., Comment: ICCV 2019 camera ready

Humans easily recognize object parts and their hierarchical structure by watching how they move; they can then predict how each part moves in the future. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation that simultaneously learns a hierarchical, disentangled object representation and a dynamics model for object parts from unlabeled videos. Our Parts, Structure, and Dynamics (PSD) model learns to, first, recognize the object parts via a layered image representation; second, predict hierarchy via a structural descriptor that composes low-level concepts into a hierarchical structure; and third, model the system dynamics by predicting the future. Experiments on multiple real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our PSD model works well on all three tasks: segmenting object parts, building their hierarchical structure, and capturing their motion distributions., Comment: ICLR 2019. The first two authors contributed equally to this work

We present a method that learns to integrate temporal information, from a learned dynamics model, with ambiguous visual information, from a learned vision model, in the context of interacting agents. Our method is based on a graph-structured variational recurrent neural network (Graph-VRNN), which is trained end-to-end to infer the current state of the (partially observed) world, as well as to forecast future states. We show that our method outperforms various baselines on two sports datasets, one based on real basketball trajectories, and one generated by a soccer game engine., Comment: ICLR 2019 camera ready

Recent advances in neural architecture search (NAS) demand tremendous computational resources, which makes it difficult to reproduce experiments and imposes a barrier-to-entry to researchers without access to large-scale computation. We aim to ameliorate these problems by introducing NAS-Bench-101, the first public architecture dataset for NAS research. To build NAS-Bench-101, we carefully constructed a compact, yet expressive, search space, exploiting graph isomorphisms to identify 423k unique convolutional architectures. We trained and evaluated all of these architectures multiple times on CIFAR-10 and compiled the results into a large dataset of over 5 million trained models. This allows researchers to evaluate the quality of a diverse range of models in milliseconds by querying the pre-computed dataset. We demonstrate its utility by analyzing the dataset as a whole and by benchmarking a range of architecture optimization algorithms., Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning

Better understanding of feeding behaviour will be vital in reducing obesity and metabolic syndrome, but we lack a standard model that captures the complexity of feeding behaviour. We construct an accurate stochastic model of rodent feeding at the bout level in order to perform quantitative behavioural analysis. Analysing the different effects on feeding behaviour of PYY 3-36, lithium chloride, GLP-1 and leptin shows the precise behavioural changes caused by each anorectic agent, and demonstrates that these changes do not mimic satiety. In the ad libitum fed state during the light period, meal initiation is governed by complete stomach emptying, whereas in all other conditions there is a graduated response. We show how robust homeostatic control of feeding thwarts attempts to reduce food intake, and how this might be overcome. In silico experiments suggest that introducing a minimum intermeal interval or modulating gastric emptying can be as effective as anorectic drug administration.

In this paper, we study the task of image retrieval, where the input query is specified in the form of an image plus some text that describes desired modifications to the input image. For example, we may present an image of the Eiffel tower, and ask the system to find images which are visually similar but are modified in small ways, such as being taken at nighttime instead of during the day. To tackle this task, we learn a similarity metric between a target image and a source image plus source text, an embedding and composing function such that target image feature is close to the source image plus text composition feature. We propose a new way to combine image and text using such function that is designed for the retrieval task. We show this outperforms existing approaches on 3 different datasets, namely Fashion-200k, MIT-States and a new synthetic dataset we create based on CLEVR. We also show that our approach can be used to classify input queries, in addition to image retrieval.

The U.S. art museum sector is grappling with diversity. While previous work has investigated the demographic diversity of museum staffs and visitors, the diversity of artists in their collections has remained unreported. We conduct the first large-scale study of artist diversity in museums. By scraping the public online catalogs of 18 major U.S. museums, deploying a sample of 10,000 artist records comprising over 9,000 unique artists to crowdsourcing, and analyzing 45,000 responses, we infer artist genders, ethnicities, geographic origins, and birth decades. Our results are threefold. First, we provide estimates of gender and ethnic diversity at each museum, and overall, we find that 85% of artists are white and 87% are men. Second, we identify museums that are outliers, having significantly higher or lower representation of certain demographic groups than the rest of the pool. Third, we find that the relationship between museum collection mission and artist diversity is weak, suggesting that a museum wishing to increase diversity might do so without changing its emphases on specific time periods and regions. Our methodology can be used to broadly and efficiently assess diversity in other fields., Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, minor revisions of and enhancements to text