← Search

Brian Cheung

11 accepted papers

2025

Training the Untrainable: Introducing Inductive Bias via Representational Alignment

NeurIPS 2025poster

We demonstrate that architectures which traditionally are considered to be ill-suited for a task can be trained using inductive biases from another architecture. We call a network untrainable when it overfits, underfits, or converges to poor results even when tuning their hyperparameters. For examp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Straightening Out the Straight-Through Estimator: Overcoming Optimization Challenges in Vector Quantized Networks

ICML 2023poster

This work examines the challenges of training neural networks using vector quantization using straight-through estimation. We find that the main cause of training instability is the discrepancy between the model embedding and the code-vector distribution. We identify the factors that contribute to t…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2023

System Identification of Neural Systems: If We Got It Right, Would We Know?

ICML 2023poster

Artificial neural networks are being proposed as models of parts of the brain. The networks are compared to recordings of biological neurons, and good performance in reproducing neural responses is considered to support the model's validity. A key question is how much this system identification appr…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2022

Equivariant Self-Supervised Learning: Encouraging Equivariance in Representations

ICLR 2022poster

In state-of-the-art self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training produces semantically good representations by encouraging them to be invariant under meaningful transformations prescribed from human knowledge. In fact, the property of invariance is a trivial instance of a broader class called equivar…

2020

Cautious Adaptation For Reinforcement Learning in Safety-Critical Settings

ICML 2020poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world safety-critical target settings like urban driving is hazardous, imperiling the RL agent, other agents, and the environment. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a "safety-critical adaptation" task setting: an agent first trains in non-safety-critical "so…

Cited by 79SourcePDFScholar
2019

Meta-Learning Update Rules for Unsupervised Representation Learning

ICLR 2019oral

A major goal of unsupervised learning is to discover data representations that are useful for subsequent tasks, without access to supervised labels during training. Typically, this involves minimizing a surrogate objective, such as the negative log likelihood of a generative model, with the hope tha…

2019

Superposition of many models into one

NeurIPS 2019poster

We present a method for storing multiple models within a single set of parameters. Models can coexist in superposition and still be retrieved individually. In experiments with neural networks, we show that a surprisingly large number of models can be effectively stored within a single parameter inst…

Cited by 154SourcePDFScholar
2018

Adversarial Examples that Fool both Computer Vision and Time-Limited Humans

NeurIPS 2018poster

Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples: small changes to images can cause computer vision models to make mistakes such as identifying a school bus as an ostrich. However, it is still an open question whether humans are prone to similar mistakes. Here, we address this question…

Cited by 327SourcePDFScholar