English

Multiset-Equivariant Set Prediction with Approximate Implicit Differentiation

Machine Learning 2022-02-07 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Most set prediction models in deep learning use set-equivariant operations, but they actually operate on multisets. We show that set-equivariant functions cannot represent certain functions on multisets, so we introduce the more appropriate notion of multiset-equivariance. We identify that the existing Deep Set Prediction Network (DSPN) can be multiset-equivariant without being hindered by set-equivariance and improve it with approximate implicit differentiation, allowing for better optimization while being faster and saving memory. In a range of toy experiments, we show that the perspective of multiset-equivariance is beneficial and that our changes to DSPN achieve better results in most cases. On CLEVR object property prediction, we substantially improve over the state-of-the-art Slot Attention from 8% to 77% in one of the strictest evaluation metrics because of the benefits made possible by implicit differentiation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.12193,
  title  = {Multiset-Equivariant Set Prediction with Approximate Implicit Differentiation},
  author = {Yan Zhang and David W. Zhang and Simon Lacoste-Julien and Gertjan J. Burghouts and Cees G. M. Snoek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.12193},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Published at International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:49:47.317Z