Tomotake Sasaki

Yoshihiro Okawa, Tomotake Sasaki, Hitoshi Yanami et al.

Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to safety-critical problems especially in real environments. In this study, we deal with a safe exploration problem in reinforcement learning under the existence of disturbance. We define the safety during learning as satisfaction of the constraint conditions explicitly defined in terms of the state and propose a safe exploration method that uses partial prior knowledge of a controlled object and disturbance. The proposed method assures the satisfaction of the explicit state constraints with a pre-specified probability even if the controlled object is exposed to a stochastic disturbance following a normal distribution. As theoretical results, we introduce sufficient conditions to construct conservative inputs not containing an exploring aspect used in the proposed method and prove that the safety in the above explained sense is guaranteed with the proposed method. Furthermore, we illustrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical simulations of an inverted pendulum and a four-bar parallel link robot manipulator.

Amir Rahimi, Vanessa D'Amario, Moyuru Yamada et al.

Systematic generalization is a crucial aspect of intelligence, which refers to the ability to generalize to novel tasks by combining known subtasks and concepts. One critical factor that has been shown to influence systematic generalization is the diversity of training data. However, diversity can be defined in various ways, as data have many factors of variation. A more granular understanding of how different aspects of data diversity affect systematic generalization is lacking. We present new evidence in the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA) that reveals that the diversity of simple tasks (i.e. tasks formed by a few subtasks and concepts) plays a key role in achieving systematic generalization. This implies that it may not be essential to gather a large and varied number of complex tasks, which could be costly to obtain. We demonstrate that this result is independent of the similarity between the training and testing data and applies to well-known families of neural network architectures for VQA (i.e. monolithic architectures and neural module networks). Additionally, we observe that neural module networks leverage all forms of data diversity we evaluated, while monolithic architectures require more extensive amounts of data to do so. These findings provide a first step towards understanding the interactions between data diversity design, neural network architectures, and systematic generalization capabilities.

Ian Mason, Anirban Sarkar, Tomotake Sasaki et al.

By default neural networks are not robust to changes in data distribution. This has been demonstrated with simple image corruptions, such as blurring or adding noise, degrading image classification performance. Many methods have been proposed to mitigate these issues but for the most part models are evaluated on single corruptions. In reality, visual space is compositional in nature, that is, that as well as robustness to elemental corruptions, robustness to compositions of corruptions is also needed. In this work we develop a compositional image classification task where, given a few elemental corruptions, models are asked to generalize to compositions of these corruptions. That is, to achieve compositional robustness. We experimentally compare empirical risk minimization with an invariance building pairwise contrastive loss and, counter to common intuitions in domain generalization, achieve only marginal improvements in compositional robustness by encouraging invariance. To move beyond invariance, following previously proposed inductive biases that model architectures should reflect data structure, we introduce a modular architecture whose structure replicates the compositional nature of the task. We then show that this modular approach consistently achieves better compositional robustness than non-modular approaches. We additionally find empirical evidence that the degree of invariance between representations of 'in-distribution' elemental corruptions fails to correlate with robustness to 'out-of-distribution' compositions of corruptions.

Anirban Sarkar, Matthew Groth, Ian Mason et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often fail in out-of-distribution scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a tool to visualize and understand such failures. We draw inspiration from concepts from neural electrophysiology, which are based on inspecting the internal functioning of a neural networks by analyzing the feature tuning and invariances of individual units. Deep Electrophysiology, in short Deephys, provides insights of the DNN's failures in out-of-distribution scenarios by comparative visualization of the neural activity in in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets. Deephys provides seamless analyses of individual neurons, individual images, and a set of set of images from a category, and it is capable of revealing failures due to the presence of spurious features and novel features. We substantiate the validity of the qualitative visualizations of Deephys thorough quantitative analyses using convolutional and transformers architectures, in several datasets and distribution shifts (namely, colored MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet).

Spandan Madan, Tomotake Sasaki, Hanspeter Pfister et al.

Neural networks are susceptible to small perturbations in the form of 2D rotations and shifts, image crops, and even changes in object colors. Past works attribute these errors to dataset bias, claiming that models fail on these perturbed samples as they do not belong to the training data distribution. Here, we challenge this claim and present evidence of the widespread existence of perturbed images within the training data distribution, which networks fail to classify. We train models on data sampled from parametric distributions, then search inside this data distribution to find such in-distribution adversarial examples. This is done using our gradient-free evolution strategies (ES) based approach which we call CMA-Search. Despite training with a large-scale (0.5 million images), unbiased dataset of camera and light variations, CMA-Search can find a failure inside the data distribution in over 71% cases by perturbing the camera position. With lighting changes, CMA-Search finds misclassifications in 42% cases. These findings also extend to natural images from ImageNet and Co3D datasets. This phenomenon of in-distribution images presents a highly worrisome problem for artificial intelligence -- they bypass the need for a malicious agent to add engineered noise to induce an adversarial attack. All code, datasets, and demos are available at https://github.com/Spandan-Madan/in_distribution_adversarial_examples.

Kentaro Takemoto, Moyuru Yamada, Tomotake Sasaki et al.

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a task to localize humans and objects in an image and predict the interactions in human-object pairs. In real-world scenarios, HOI detection models need systematic generalization, i.e., generalization to novel combinations of objects and interactions, because the train data are expected to cover a limited portion of all possible combinations. To evaluate the systematic generalization performance of HOI detection models, we created two new sets of HOI detection data splits named HICO-DET-SG and V-COCO-SG based on the HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets, respectively. When evaluated on the new data splits, HOI detection models with various characteristics performed much more poorly than when evaluated on the original splits. This shows that systematic generalization is a challenging goal in HOI detection. By analyzing the evaluation results, we also gain insights for improving the systematic generalization performance and identify four possible future research directions. We hope that our new data splits and presented analysis will encourage further research on systematic generalization in HOI detection.

Moyuru Yamada, Vanessa D'Amario, Kentaro Takemoto et al.

Transformers achieve great performance on Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, their systematic generalization capabilities, i.e., handling novel combinations of known concepts, is unclear. We reveal that Neural Module Networks (NMNs), i.e., question-specific compositions of modules that tackle a sub-task, achieve better or similar systematic generalization performance than the conventional Transformers, even though NMNs' modules are CNN-based. In order to address this shortcoming of Transformers with respect to NMNs, in this paper we investigate whether and how modularity can bring benefits to Transformers. Namely, we introduce Transformer Module Network (TMN), a novel NMN based on compositions of Transformer modules. TMNs achieve state-of-the-art systematic generalization performance in three VQA datasets, improving more than 30% over standard Transformers for novel compositions of sub-tasks. We show that not only the module composition but also the module specialization for each sub-task are the key of such performance gain.

Kimberly Villalobos, Vilim Štih, Amineh Ahmadinejad et al.

The insideness problem is an aspect of image segmentation that consists of determining which pixels are inside and outside a region. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) excel in segmentation benchmarks, but it is unclear if they have the ability to solve the insideness problem as it requires evaluating long-range spatial dependencies. In this paper, the insideness problem is analysed in isolation, without texture or semantic cues, such that other aspects of segmentation do not interfere in the analysis. We demonstrate that DNNs for segmentation with few units have sufficient complexity to solve insideness for any curve. Yet, such DNNs have severe problems with learning general solutions. Only recurrent networks trained with small images learn solutions that generalize well to almost any curve. Recurrent networks can decompose the evaluation of long-range dependencies into a sequence of local operations, and learning with small images alleviates the common difficulties of training recurrent networks with a large number of unrolling steps.

Shobhita Sundaram, Darius Sinha, Matthew Groth et al.

Symmetry is omnipresent in nature and perceived by the visual system of many species, as it facilitates detecting ecologically important classes of objects in our environment. Symmetry perception requires abstraction of long-range spatial dependencies between image regions, and its underlying neural mechanisms remain elusive. In this paper, we evaluate Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures on the task of learning symmetry perception from examples. We demonstrate that feed-forward DNNs that excel at modelling human performance on object recognition tasks, are unable to acquire a general notion of symmetry. This is the case even when the DNNs are architected to capture long-range spatial dependencies, such as through `dilated' convolutions and the recently introduced `transformers' design. By contrast, we find that recurrent architectures are capable of learning to perceive symmetry by decomposing the long-range spatial dependencies into a sequence of local operations, that are reusable for novel images. These results suggest that recurrent connections likely play an important role in symmetry perception in artificial systems, and possibly, biological ones too.

Akira Sakai, Taro Sunagawa, Spandan Madan et al.

The training data distribution is often biased towards objects in certain orientations and illumination conditions. While humans have a remarkable capability of recognizing objects in out-of-distribution (OoD) orientations and illuminations, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) severely suffer in this case, even when large amounts of training examples are available. In this paper, we investigate three different approaches to improve DNNs in recognizing objects in OoD orientations and illuminations. Namely, these are (i) training much longer after convergence of the in-distribution (InD) validation accuracy, i.e., late-stopping, (ii) tuning the momentum parameter of the batch normalization layers, and (iii) enforcing invariance of the neural activity in an intermediate layer to orientation and illumination conditions. Each of these approaches substantially improves the DNN's OoD accuracy (more than 20% in some cases). We report results in four datasets: two datasets are modified from the MNIST and iLab datasets, and the other two are novel (one of 3D rendered cars and another of objects taken from various controlled orientations and illumination conditions). These datasets allow to study the effects of different amounts of bias and are challenging as DNNs perform poorly in OoD conditions. Finally, we demonstrate that even though the three approaches focus on different aspects of DNNs, they all tend to lead to the same underlying neural mechanism to enable OoD accuracy gains --individual neurons in the intermediate layers become more selective to a category and also invariant to OoD orientations and illuminations. We anticipate this study to be a basis for further improvement of deep neural networks' OoD generalization performance, which is highly demanded to achieve safe and fair AI applications.

Kanata Suzuki, Taro Sunagawa, Tomotake Sasaki et al.

Stream-based active learning (AL) is an efficient training data collection method, and it is used to reduce human annotation cost required in machine learning. However, it is difficult to say that the human cost is low enough because most previous studies have assumed that an oracle is a human with domain knowledge. In this study, we propose a method to replace a part of the oracle's work in stream-based AL by self-training with weak labeling using a robot arm. A camera attached to a robot arm takes a series of image data related to a streamed object, which should have the same label. We use this information as a weak label to connect a pseudo-label (estimated class label) and a target instance. Our method selects two data from a series of image data; high confidence data for correcting pseudo-labels and low confidence data for improving the performance of the classifier. We paired a pseudo-label provided to high confidence data with a target instance (low confidence data). By using this technique, we mitigate the inefficiency in self-training, that is, difficulty in creating pseudo-labeled training data with a high impact on the target classifier. In the experiments, we employed the proposed method in the classification task of objects on a belt conveyor. We evaluated the performance against human cost on multiple scenarios considering the temporal variation of data. The proposed method achieves the same or better performance as the conventional methods while reducing human cost.

Avi Cooper, Xavier Boix, Daniel Harari et al.

The capability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to recognize objects in orientations outside the distribution of the training data is not well understood. We present evidence that DNNs are capable of generalizing to objects in novel orientations by disseminating orientation-invariance obtained from familiar objects seen from many viewpoints. This capability strengthens when training the DNN with an increasing number of familiar objects, but only in orientations that involve 2D rotations of familiar orientations. We show that this dissemination is achieved via neurons tuned to common features between familiar and unfamiliar objects. These results implicate brain-like neural mechanisms for generalization.

Vanessa D'Amario, Sanjana Srivastava, Tomotake Sasaki et al.

Datasets often contain input dimensions that are unnecessary to predict the output label, e.g. background in object recognition, which lead to more trainable parameters. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are robust to increasing the number of parameters in the hidden layers, but it is unclear whether this holds true for the input layer. In this letter, we investigate the impact of unnecessary input dimensions on a central issue of DNNs: their data efficiency, ie. the amount of examples needed to achieve certain generalization performance. Our results show that unnecessary input dimensions that are task-unrelated substantially degrade data efficiency. This highlights the need for mechanisms that remove {task-unrelated} dimensions to enable data efficiency gains.

Vanessa D'Amario, Tomotake Sasaki, Xavier Boix

Neural Module Networks (NMNs) aim at Visual Question Answering (VQA) via composition of modules that tackle a sub-task. NMNs are a promising strategy to achieve systematic generalization, i.e., overcoming biasing factors in the training distribution. However, the aspects of NMNs that facilitate systematic generalization are not fully understood. In this paper, we demonstrate that the degree of modularity of the NMN have large influence on systematic generalization. In a series of experiments on three VQA datasets (VQA-MNIST, SQOOP, and CLEVR-CoGenT), our results reveal that tuning the degree of modularity, especially at the image encoder stage, reaches substantially higher systematic generalization. These findings lead to new NMN architectures that outperform previous ones in terms of systematic generalization.

Mei Minami, Yuka Masumoto, Yoshihiro Okawa et al.

In many practical control applications, the performance level of a closed-loop system degrades over time due to the change of plant characteristics. Thus, there is a strong need for redesigning a controller without going through the system modeling process, which is often difficult for closed-loop systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the promising approaches that enable model-free redesign of optimal controllers for nonlinear dynamical systems based only on the measurement of the closed-loop system. However, the learning process of RL usually requires a considerable number of trial-and-error experiments using the poorly controlled system that may accumulate wear on the plant. To overcome this limitation, we propose a model-free two-step design approach that improves the transient learning performance of RL in an optimal regulator redesign problem for unknown nonlinear systems. Specifically, we first design a linear control law that attains some degree of control performance in a model-free manner, and then, train the nonlinear optimal control law with online RL by using the designed linear control law in parallel. We introduce an offline RL algorithm for the design of the linear control law and theoretically guarantee its convergence to the LQR controller under mild assumptions. Numerical simulations show that the proposed approach improves the transient learning performance and efficiency in hyperparameter tuning of RL.

Yoshihiro Okawa, Tomotake Sasaki, Hidenao Iwane

In reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, exploratory control inputs are used during learning to acquire knowledge for decision making and control, while the true dynamics of a controlled object is unknown. However, this exploring property sometimes causes undesired situations by violating constraints regarding the state of the controlled object. In this paper, we propose an automatic exploration process adjustment method for safe RL in continuous state and action spaces utilizing a linear nominal model of the controlled object. Specifically, our proposed method automatically selects whether the exploratory input is used or not at each time depending on the state and its predicted value as well as adjusts the variance-covariance matrix used in the Gaussian policy for exploration. We also show that our exploration process adjustment method theoretically guarantees the satisfaction of the constraints with the pre-specified probability, that is, the satisfaction of a joint chance constraint at every time. Finally, we illustrate the validity and the effectiveness of our method through numerical simulation.

Spandan Madan, Timothy Henry, Jamell Dozier et al.

Object recognition and viewpoint estimation lie at the heart of visual understanding. Recent works suggest that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) category-viewpoint combinations, ie. combinations not seen during training. In this paper, we investigate when and how such OOD generalization may be possible by evaluating CNNs trained to classify both object category and 3D viewpoint on OOD combinations, and identifying the neural mechanisms that facilitate such OOD generalization. We show that increasing the number of in-distribution combinations (ie. data diversity) substantially improves generalization to OOD combinations, even with the same amount of training data. We compare learning category and viewpoint in separate and shared network architectures, and observe starkly different trends on in-distribution and OOD combinations, ie. while shared networks are helpful in-distribution, separate networks significantly outperform shared ones at OOD combinations. Finally, we demonstrate that such OOD generalization is facilitated by the neural mechanism of specialization, ie. the emergence of two types of neurons -- neurons selective to category and invariant to viewpoint, and vice versa.

Keizo Kato, Jing Zhou, Tomotake Sasaki et al.

To analyze high-dimensional and complex data in the real world, deep generative models, such as variational autoencoder (VAE) embed data in a low-dimensional space (latent space) and learn a probabilistic model in the latent space. However, they struggle to accurately reproduce the probability distribution function (PDF) in the input space from that in the latent space. If the embedding were isometric, this issue can be solved, because the relation of PDFs can become tractable. To achieve isometric property, we propose Rate- Distortion Optimization guided autoencoder inspired by orthonormal transform coding. We show our method has the following properties: (i) the Jacobian matrix between the input space and a Euclidean latent space forms a constantlyscaled orthonormal system and enables isometric data embedding; (ii) the relation of PDFs in both spaces can become tractable one such as proportional relation. Furthermore, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in unsupervised anomaly detection with four public datasets.