Related papers: Gradient Estimation for Binary Latent Variables vi…

Machine learning models involving discrete latent variables require gradient estimators to facilitate backpropagation in a computationally efficient manner. The most recent addition to the Straight-Through family of estimators, ReinMax, can…

Deep neural networks tend to make overconfident predictions and often require additional detectors for misclassifications, particularly for safety-critical applications. Existing detection methods usually only focus on adversarial attacks…

Irregular distribution in latent space causes posterior collapse, misalignment between posterior and prior, and ill-sampling problem in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). In this paper, we introduce a novel adaptable three-stage Uniform…

Gradient-based optimization is the foundation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Even when the mechanism being optimized is unknown or not differentiable, optimization using high-variance or biased gradient estimates is still…

We propose a robust gradient estimator based on per-sample gradient clipping and analyze its properties both theoretically and empirically. We show that the resulting method, per-sample clipped SGD (PS-Clip-SGD), achieves optimal…

We derive an unbiased estimator for expectations over discrete random variables based on sampling without replacement, which reduces variance as it avoids duplicate samples. We show that our estimator can be derived as the…

Discrete latent bottlenecks in variational autoencoders (VAEs) offer high bit efficiency and can be modeled with autoregressive discrete distributions, enabling parameter-efficient multimodal search with transformers. However, discrete…

Event-based vision encodes dynamic scenes as asynchronous spatio-temporal spikes called events. To leverage conventional image processing pipelines, events are typically binned into frames. However, binning functions are discontinuous,…

Differentially private deep learning has recently witnessed advances in computational efficiency and privacy-utility trade-off. We explore whether further improvements along the two axes are possible and provide affirmative answers…

In recent times, a variety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have been proposed for optimal tracking problem of continuous time nonlinear systems with input constraints. Most of these algorithms are based on the notion of uniform…

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is the most widely used method for training machine learning models with provable privacy guarantees. A key challenge in DP-SGD is setting the per-sample gradient clipping…

Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not…

Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…

In weakly supervised learning, unbiased risk estimator(URE) is a powerful tool for training classifiers when training and test data are drawn from different distributions. Nevertheless, UREs lead to overfitting in many problem settings when…

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

Recent successes in image generation, model-based reinforcement learning, and text-to-image generation have demonstrated the empirical advantages of discrete latent representations, although the reasons behind their benefits remain unclear.…

Optimization in the latent space of variational autoencoders is a promising approach to generate high-dimensional discrete objects that maximize an expensive black-box property (e.g., drug-likeness in molecular generation, function…

Differential graphical models are designed to represent the difference between the conditional dependence structures of two groups, thus are of particular interest for scientific investigation. Motivated by modern applications, this…

Estimating the gradients for binary variables is a task that arises frequently in various domains, such as training discrete latent variable models. What has been commonly used is a REINFORCE based Monte Carlo estimation method that uses…

Privacy preserving machine learning algorithms are crucial for learning models over user data to protect sensitive information. Motivated by this, differentially private stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms for training machine…