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Brian McWilliams

13 accepted papers

2024

MusicRL: Aligning Music Generation to Human Preferences

ICML 2024poster

We propose MusicRL, the first music generation system finetuned from human feedback. Appreciation of text-to-music models is particularly subjective since the concept of musicality as well as the specific intention behind a caption are user-dependent (e.g. a caption such as “upbeat workout music” ca…

2022

EigenGame Unloaded: When playing games is better than optimizing

ICLR 2022poster

We build on the recently proposed EigenGame that views eigendecomposition as a competitive game. EigenGame's updates are biased if computed using minibatches of data, which hinders convergence and more sophisticated parallelism in the stochastic setting. In this work, we propose an unbiased stochast…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2021

Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms

ICLR 2021poster

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a strategy to reduce the reliance on costly supervised signal by pretraining representations only using unlabeled data. These methods combine heuristic proxy classification tasks with data augmentations and have achieved significant success, but our theoretica…

Cited by 301SourcePDFScholar
2018

PhaseNet for Video Frame Interpolation

CVPR 2018poster

Most approaches for video frame interpolation require accurate dense correspondences to synthesize an in-between frame. Therefore, they do not perform well in challenging scenarios with e.g. lighting changes or motion blur. Recent deep learning approaches that rely on kernels to represent motion can…

Cited by 230SourcePDFScholar
2017

Neural Taylor Approximations: Convergence and Exploration in Rectifier Networks

ICLR 2017workshop

Modern convolutional networks, incorporating rectifiers and max-pooling, are neither smooth nor convex. Standard guarantees therefore do not apply. Nevertheless, methods from convex optimization such as gradient descent and Adam are widely used as building blocks for deep learning algorithms. This p…

Cited by 41SourceScholar
2017

Neural Taylor Approximations: Convergence and Exploration in Rectifier Networks

ICML 2017poster

Modern convolutional networks, incorporating rectifiers and max-pooling, are neither smooth nor convex; standard guarantees therefore do not apply. Nevertheless, methods from convex optimization such as gradient descent and Adam are widely used as building blocks for deep learning algorithms. This p…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2017

The Shattered Gradients Problem: If resnets are the answer, then what is the question?

ICML 2017poster

A long-standing obstacle to progress in deep learning is the problem of vanishing and exploding gradients. Although, the problem has largely been overcome via carefully constructed initializations and batch normalization, architectures incorporating skip-connections such as highway and resnets perfo…

2016

A Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Methodology for Video Object Segmentation

CVPR 2016poster

Over the years, datasets and benchmarks have proven their fundamental importance in computer vision research, enabling targeted progress and objective comparisons in many fields. At the same time, legacy datasets may impend the evolution of a field due to saturated algorithm performance and the lack…

Cited by 2422PDFcodeScholar
2016

DUAL-LOCO: Distributing Statistical Estimation Using Random Projections

AISTATS 2016poster

We present DUAL-LOCO, a communication-efficient algorithm for distributed statistical estimation. DUAL-LOCO assumes that the data is distributed across workers according to the features rather than the samples. It requires only a single round of communication where low-dimensional random projections…

2016

Scalable Adaptive Stochastic Optimization Using Random Projections

NeurIPS 2016poster

Adaptive stochastic gradient methods such as AdaGrad have gained popularity in particular for training deep neural networks. The most commonly used and studied variant maintains a diagonal matrix approximation to second order information by accumulating past gradients which are used to tune the step…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2015

Variance Reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent with Neighbors

NeurIPS 2015poster

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet it is also known to be slow relative to steepest descent. Recently, variance reduction techniques such as SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness. With asymptotically vanishing variance, a constant step siz…

Cited by 183SourcePDFScholar