Models, code, and papers for "Yujia Li":

##### GM-Net: Learning Features with More Efficiency

Jun 21, 2017
Yujia Chen, Ce Li

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are capable of learning unprecedentedly effective features from images. Some researchers have struggled to enhance the parameters' efficiency using grouped convolution. However, the relation between the optimal number of convolutional groups and the recognition performance remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a series of Basic Units (BUs) and a two-level merging strategy to construct deep CNNs, referred to as a joint Grouped Merging Net (GM-Net), which can produce joint grouped and reused deep features while maintaining the feature discriminability for classification tasks. Our GM-Net architectures with the proposed BU_A (dense connection) and BU_B (straight mapping) lead to significant reduction in the number of network parameters and obtain performance improvement in image classification tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the superior performance of the GM-Net than the state-of-the-arts on the benchmark datasets, e.g., MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN.

* 6 Pages, 5 figures
##### Mean-Field Networks

Oct 21, 2014
Yujia Li, Richard Zemel

The mean field algorithm is a widely used approximate inference algorithm for graphical models whose exact inference is intractable. In each iteration of mean field, the approximate marginals for each variable are updated by getting information from the neighbors. This process can be equivalently converted into a feedforward network, with each layer representing one iteration of mean field and with tied weights on all layers. This conversion enables a few natural extensions, e.g. untying the weights in the network. In this paper, we study these mean field networks (MFNs), and use them as inference tools as well as discriminative models. Preliminary experiment results show that MFNs can learn to do inference very efficiently and perform significantly better than mean field as discriminative models.

* Published in ICML 2014 workshop on Learning Tractable Probabilistic Models
##### Generative Moment Matching Networks

Feb 10, 2015
Yujia Li, Kevin Swersky, Richard Zemel

We consider the problem of learning deep generative models from data. We formulate a method that generates an independent sample via a single feedforward pass through a multilayer perceptron, as in the recently proposed generative adversarial networks (Goodfellow et al., 2014). Training a generative adversarial network, however, requires careful optimization of a difficult minimax program. Instead, we utilize a technique from statistical hypothesis testing known as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), which leads to a simple objective that can be interpreted as matching all orders of statistics between a dataset and samples from the model, and can be trained by backpropagation. We further boost the performance of this approach by combining our generative network with an auto-encoder network, using MMD to learn to generate codes that can then be decoded to produce samples. We show that the combination of these techniques yields excellent generative models compared to baseline approaches as measured on MNIST and the Toronto Face Database.

##### Learning unbiased features

Dec 17, 2014
Yujia Li, Kevin Swersky, Richard Zemel

A key element in transfer learning is representation learning; if representations can be developed that expose the relevant factors underlying the data, then new tasks and domains can be learned readily based on mappings of these salient factors. We propose that an important aim for these representations are to be unbiased. Different forms of representation learning can be derived from alternative definitions of unwanted bias, e.g., bias to particular tasks, domains, or irrelevant underlying data dimensions. One very useful approach to estimating the amount of bias in a representation comes from maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) [5], a measure of distance between probability distributions. We are not the first to suggest that MMD can be a useful criterion in developing representations that apply across multiple domains or tasks [1]. However, in this paper we describe a number of novel applications of this criterion that we have devised, all based on the idea of developing unbiased representations. These formulations include: a standard domain adaptation framework; a method of learning invariant representations; an approach based on noise-insensitive autoencoders; and a novel form of generative model.

* Published in NIPS 2014 Workshop on Transfer and Multitask Learning, see http://nips.cc/Conferences/2014/Program/event.php?ID=4282
##### Prioritized Unit Propagation with Periodic Resetting is (Almost) All You Need for Random SAT Solving

Dec 04, 2019
Xujie Si, Yujia Li, Vinod Nair, Felix Gimeno

We propose prioritized unit propagation with periodic resetting, which is a simple but surprisingly effective algorithm for solving random SAT instances that are meant to be hard. In particular, an evaluation on the Random Track of the 2017 and 2018 SAT competitions shows that a basic prototype of this simple idea already ranks at second place in both years. We share this observation in the hope that it helps the SAT community better understand the hardness of random instances used in competitions and inspire other interesting ideas on SAT solving.

##### Enhanced Attacks on Defensively Distilled Deep Neural Networks

Nov 16, 2017
Yujia Liu, Weiming Zhang, Shaohua Li, Nenghai Yu

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success in many tasks of machine learning, such as the image classification. Unfortunately, researchers have shown that DNNs are easily attacked by adversarial examples, slightly perturbed images which can mislead DNNs to give incorrect classification results. Such attack has seriously hampered the deployment of DNN systems in areas where security or safety requirements are strict, such as autonomous cars, face recognition, malware detection. Defensive distillation is a mechanism aimed at training a robust DNN which significantly reduces the effectiveness of adversarial examples generation. However, the state-of-the-art attack can be successful on distilled networks with 100% probability. But it is a white-box attack which needs to know the inner information of DNN. Whereas, the black-box scenario is more general. In this paper, we first propose the epsilon-neighborhood attack, which can fool the defensively distilled networks with 100% success rate in the white-box setting, and it is fast to generate adversarial examples with good visual quality. On the basis of this attack, we further propose the region-based attack against defensively distilled DNNs in the black-box setting. And we also perform the bypass attack to indirectly break the distillation defense as a complementary method. The experimental results show that our black-box attacks have a considerable success rate on defensively distilled networks.

##### Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks

Sep 22, 2017
Yujia Li, Daniel Tarlow, Marc Brockschmidt, Richard Zemel

Graph-structured data appears frequently in domains including chemistry, natural language semantics, social networks, and knowledge bases. In this work, we study feature learning techniques for graph-structured inputs. Our starting point is previous work on Graph Neural Networks (Scarselli et al., 2009), which we modify to use gated recurrent units and modern optimization techniques and then extend to output sequences. The result is a flexible and broadly useful class of neural network models that has favorable inductive biases relative to purely sequence-based models (e.g., LSTMs) when the problem is graph-structured. We demonstrate the capabilities on some simple AI (bAbI) and graph algorithm learning tasks. We then show it achieves state-of-the-art performance on a problem from program verification, in which subgraphs need to be matched to abstract data structures.

* Published as a conference paper in ICLR 2016. Fixed a typo
##### Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Jan 25, 2017
Wenjie Luo, Yujia Li, Raquel Urtasun, Richard Zemel

We study characteristics of receptive fields of units in deep convolutional networks. The receptive field size is a crucial issue in many visual tasks, as the output must respond to large enough areas in the image to capture information about large objects. We introduce the notion of an effective receptive field, and show that it both has a Gaussian distribution and only occupies a fraction of the full theoretical receptive field. We analyze the effective receptive field in several architecture designs, and the effect of nonlinear activations, dropout, sub-sampling and skip connections on it. This leads to suggestions for ways to address its tendency to be too small.

##### Detecting Violence in Video using Subclasses

Apr 27, 2016
Xirong Li, Yujia Huo, Jieping Xu, Qin Jin

This paper attacks the challenging problem of violence detection in videos. Different from existing works focusing on combining multi-modal features, we go one step further by adding and exploiting subclasses visually related to violence. We enrich the MediaEval 2015 violence dataset by \emph{manually} labeling violence videos with respect to the subclasses. Such fine-grained annotations not only help understand what have impeded previous efforts on learning to fuse the multi-modal features, but also enhance the generalization ability of the learned fusion to novel test data. The new subclass based solution, with AP of 0.303 and P100 of 0.55 on the MediaEval 2015 test set, outperforms several state-of-the-art alternatives. Notice that our solution does not require fine-grained annotations on the test set, so it can be directly applied on novel and fully unlabeled videos. Interestingly, our study shows that motion related features, though being essential part in previous systems, are dispensable.

##### Dualing GANs

Jun 19, 2017
Yujia Li, Alexander Schwing, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Richard Zemel

Generative adversarial nets (GANs) are a promising technique for modeling a distribution from samples. It is however well known that GAN training suffers from instability due to the nature of its maximin formulation. In this paper, we explore ways to tackle the instability problem by dualizing the discriminator. We start from linear discriminators in which case conjugate duality provides a mechanism to reformulate the saddle point objective into a maximization problem, such that both the generator and the discriminator of this 'dualing GAN' act in concert. We then demonstrate how to extend this intuition to non-linear formulations. For GANs with linear discriminators our approach is able to remove the instability in training, while for GANs with nonlinear discriminators our approach provides an alternative to the commonly used GAN training algorithm.

##### A sparse negative binomial mixture model for clustering RNA-seq count data

Dec 05, 2019
Tanbin Rahman, Yujia Li, Tianzhou Ma, Lu Tang, George Tseng

Clustering with variable selection is a challenging but critical task for modern small-n-large-p data. Existing methods based on Gaussian mixture models or sparse K-means provide solutions to continuous data. With the prevalence of RNA-seq technology and lack of count data modeling for clustering, the current practice is to normalize count expression data into continuous measures and apply existing models with Gaussian assumption. In this paper, we develop a negative binomial mixture model with gene regularization to cluster samples (small $n$) with high-dimensional gene features (large $p$). EM algorithm and Bayesian information criterion are used for inference and determining tuning parameters. The method is compared with sparse Gaussian mixture model and sparse K-means using extensive simulations and two real transcriptomic applications in breast cancer and rat brain studies. The result shows superior performance of the proposed count data model in clustering accuracy, feature selection and biological interpretation by pathway enrichment analysis.

##### Graph Matching Networks for Learning the Similarity of Graph Structured Objects

May 12, 2019
Yujia Li, Chenjie Gu, Thomas Dullien, Oriol Vinyals, Pushmeet Kohli

This paper addresses the challenging problem of retrieval and matching of graph structured objects, and makes two key contributions. First, we demonstrate how Graph Neural Networks (GNN), which have emerged as an effective model for various supervised prediction problems defined on structured data, can be trained to produce embedding of graphs in vector spaces that enables efficient similarity reasoning. Second, we propose a novel Graph Matching Network model that, given a pair of graphs as input, computes a similarity score between them by jointly reasoning on the pair through a new cross-graph attention-based matching mechanism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our models on different domains including the challenging problem of control-flow-graph based function similarity search that plays an important role in the detection of vulnerabilities in software systems. The experimental analysis demonstrates that our models are not only able to exploit structure in the context of similarity learning but they can also outperform domain-specific baseline systems that have been carefully hand-engineered for these problems.

* Accepted as a conference paper at ICML 2019
##### Proximal Policy Optimization and its Dynamic Version for Sequence Generation

Aug 24, 2018
Yi-Lin Tuan, Jinzhi Zhang, Yujia Li, Hung-yi Lee

In sequence generation task, many works use policy gradient for model optimization to tackle the intractable backpropagation issue when maximizing the non-differentiable evaluation metrics or fooling the discriminator in adversarial learning. In this paper, we replace policy gradient with proximal policy optimization (PPO), which is a proved more efficient reinforcement learning algorithm, and propose a dynamic approach for PPO (PPO-dynamic). We demonstrate the efficacy of PPO and PPO-dynamic on conditional sequence generation tasks including synthetic experiment and chit-chat chatbot. The results show that PPO and PPO-dynamic can beat policy gradient by stability and performance.

##### Deep learning approach to Fourier ptychographic microscopy

Jul 30, 2018
Thanh Nguyen, Yujia Xue, Yunzhe Li, Lei Tian, George Nehmetallah

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained tremendous success in solving complex inverse problems. The aim of this work is to develop a novel CNN framework to reconstruct video sequence of dynamic live cells captured using a computational microscopy technique, Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM). The unique feature of the FPM is its capability to reconstruct images with both wide field-of-view (FOV) and high resolution, i.e. a large space-bandwidth-product (SBP), by taking a series of low resolution intensity images. For live cell imaging, a single FPM frame contains thousands of cell samples with different morphological features. Our idea is to fully exploit the statistical information provided by this large spatial ensemble so as to make predictions in a sequential measurement, without using any additional temporal dataset. Specifically, we show that it is possible to reconstruct high-SBP dynamic cell videos by a CNN trained only on the first FPM dataset captured at the beginning of a time-series experiment. Our CNN approach reconstructs a 12800X10800 pixels phase image using only ~25 seconds, a 50X speedup compared to the model-based FPM algorithm. In addition, the CNN further reduces the required number of images in each time frame by ~6X. Overall, this significantly improves the imaging throughput by reducing both the acquisition and computational times. The proposed CNN is based on the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) framework. Additionally, we also exploit transfer learning so that our pre-trained CNN can be further optimized to image other cell types. Our technique demonstrates a promising deep learning approach to continuously monitor large live-cell populations over an extended time and gather useful spatial and temporal information with sub-cellular resolution.

##### Learning Deep Generative Models of Graphs

Mar 08, 2018
Yujia Li, Oriol Vinyals, Chris Dyer, Razvan Pascanu, Peter Battaglia

Graphs are fundamental data structures which concisely capture the relational structure in many important real-world domains, such as knowledge graphs, physical and social interactions, language, and chemistry. Here we introduce a powerful new approach for learning generative models over graphs, which can capture both their structure and attributes. Our approach uses graph neural networks to express probabilistic dependencies among a graph's nodes and edges, and can, in principle, learn distributions over any arbitrary graph. In a series of experiments our results show that once trained, our models can generate good quality samples of both synthetic graphs as well as real molecular graphs, both unconditionally and conditioned on data. Compared to baselines that do not use graph-structured representations, our models often perform far better. We also explore key challenges of learning generative models of graphs, such as how to handle symmetries and ordering of elements during the graph generation process, and offer possible solutions. Our work is the first and most general approach for learning generative models over arbitrary graphs, and opens new directions for moving away from restrictions of vector- and sequence-like knowledge representations, toward more expressive and flexible relational data structures.

* 21 pages
##### The Variational Fair Autoencoder

Aug 10, 2017
Christos Louizos, Kevin Swersky, Yujia Li, Max Welling, Richard Zemel

We investigate the problem of learning representations that are invariant to certain nuisance or sensitive factors of variation in the data while retaining as much of the remaining information as possible. Our model is based on a variational autoencoding architecture with priors that encourage independence between sensitive and latent factors of variation. Any subsequent processing, such as classification, can then be performed on this purged latent representation. To remove any remaining dependencies we incorporate an additional penalty term based on the "Maximum Mean Discrepancy" (MMD) measure. We discuss how these architectures can be efficiently trained on data and show in experiments that this method is more effective than previous work in removing unwanted sources of variation while maintaining informative latent representations.

* Fixed typo in eq. 3 and 4
##### Fast Training of Sparse Graph Neural Networks on Dense Hardware

Graph neural networks have become increasingly popular in recent years due to their ability to naturally encode relational input data and their ability to scale to large graphs by operating on a sparse representation of graph adjacency matrices. As we look to scale up these models using custom hardware, a natural assumption would be that we need hardware tailored to sparse operations and/or dynamic control flow. In this work, we question this assumption by scaling up sparse graph neural networks using a platform targeted at dense computation on fixed-size data. Drawing inspiration from optimization of numerical algorithms on sparse matrices, we develop techniques that enable training the sparse graph neural network model from Allamanis et al. [2018] in 13 minutes using a 512-core TPUv2 Pod, whereas the original training takes almost a day.

##### Learning Transferable Graph Exploration

This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with an unseen environment from the same distribution, the policy aims to generalize the exploration strategy to visit the maximum number of unique states in a limited number of steps. We particularly focus on environments with graph-structured state-spaces that are encountered in many important real-world applications like software testing and map building. We formulate this task as a reinforcement learning problem where the exploration' agent is rewarded for transitioning to previously unseen environment states and employ a graph-structured memory to encode the agent's past trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is extremely effective for exploration of spatial maps; and when applied on the challenging problems of coverage-guided software-testing of domain-specific programs and real-world mobile applications, it outperforms methods that have been hand-engineered by human experts.

* To appear in NeurIPS 2019
##### REGAL: Transfer Learning For Fast Optimization of Computation Graphs

We present a deep reinforcement learning approach to optimizing the execution cost of computation graphs in a static compiler. The key idea is to combine a neural network policy with a genetic algorithm, the Biased Random-Key Genetic Algorithm (BRKGA). The policy is trained to predict, given an input graph to be optimized, the node-level probability distributions for sampling mutations and crossovers in BRKGA. Our approach, "REINFORCE-based Genetic Algorithm Learning" (REGAL), uses the policy's ability to transfer to new graphs to significantly improve the solution quality of the genetic algorithm for the same objective evaluation budget. As a concrete application, we show results for minimizing peak memory in TensorFlow graphs by jointly optimizing device placement and scheduling. REGAL achieves on average 3.56% lower peak memory than BRKGA on previously unseen graphs, outperforming all the algorithms we compare to, and giving 4.4x bigger improvement than the next best algorithm. We also evaluate REGAL on a production compiler team's performance benchmark of XLA graphs and achieve on average 3.74% lower peak memory than BRKGA, again outperforming all others. Our approach and analysis is made possible by collecting a dataset of 372 unique real-world TensorFlow graphs, more than an order of magnitude more data than previous work.