12 accepted papers
Informational parsimony provides a useful inductive bias for learning representations that achieve better generalization by being robust to noise and spurious correlations. We propose *information gating* as a way to learn parsimonious representations that identify the minimal information required f…
While deep reinforcement learning excels at solving tasks where large amounts of data can be collected through virtually unlimited interaction with the environment, learning from limited interaction remains a key challenge. We posit that an agent can learn more efficiently if we augment reward maxim…
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of so…
Data efficiency is a key challenge for deep reinforcement learning. We address this problem by using unlabeled data to pretrain an encoder which is then finetuned on a small amount of task-specific data. To encourage learning representations which capture diverse aspects of the underlying MDP, we em…
We posit that a reinforcement learning (RL) agent will perform better when it uses representations that are better at predicting the future, particularly in terms of few-shot learning and domain adaptation. To test that hypothesis, we introduce an objective based on Deep InfoMax (DIM) which trains t…
We propose an approach to self-supervised representation learning based on maximizing mutual information between features extracted from multiple views of a shared context. For example, one could produce multiple views of a local spatio-temporal context by observing it from different locations (e.g.…
Learning inter-domain mappings from unpaired data can improve performance in structured prediction tasks, such as image segmentation, by reducing the need for paired data. CycleGAN was recently proposed for this problem, but critically assumes the underlying inter-domain mapping is approximately det…
In this paper, we propose to equip Generative Adversarial Networks with the ability to produce direct energy estimates for samples. Specifically, we propose a flexible adversarial training framework, and prove this framework not only ensures the generator converges to the true data distribution, but…
We introduce a model that learns active learning algorithms via metalearning. For a distribution of related tasks, our model jointly learns: a data representation, an item selection heuristic, and a prediction function. Our model uses the item selection heuristic to construct a labeled support set f…
We present an architecture which lets us train deep, directed generative models with many layers of latent variables. We include deterministic paths between all latent variables and the generated output, and provide a richer set of connections between computations for inference and generation, which…
We connect a broad class of generative models through their shared reliance on sequential decision making. Motivated by this view, we develop extensions to an existing model, and then explore the idea further in the context of data imputation -- perhaps the simplest setting in which to investigate t…
We develop an approach to training generative models based on unrolling a variational auto-encoder into a Markov chain, and shaping the chain’s trajectories using a technique inspired by recent work in Approximate Bayesian computation. We show that the global minimizer of the resulting objective is…