Ajay N. Jain

Ajay Jain, Pieter Abbeel, Deepak Pathak

High-dimensional generative models have many applications including image compression, multimedia generation, anomaly detection and data completion. State-of-the-art estimators for natural images are autoregressive, decomposing the joint distribution over pixels into a product of conditionals parameterized by a deep neural network, e.g. a convolutional neural network such as the PixelCNN. However, PixelCNNs only model a single decomposition of the joint, and only a single generation order is efficient. For tasks such as image completion, these models are unable to use much of the observed context. To generate data in arbitrary orders, we introduce LMConv: a simple modification to the standard 2D convolution that allows arbitrary masks to be applied to the weights at each location in the image. Using LMConv, we learn an ensemble of distribution estimators that share parameters but differ in generation order, achieving improved performance on whole-image density estimation (2.89 bpd on unconditional CIFAR10), as well as globally coherent image completions. Our code is available at https://ajayjain.github.io/lmconv.

Paras Jain, Ajay Jain, Aniruddha Nrusimha et al.

We formalize the problem of trading-off DNN training time and memory requirements as the tensor rematerialization optimization problem, a generalization of prior checkpointing strategies. We introduce Checkmate, a system that solves for optimal rematerialization schedules in reasonable times (under an hour) using off-the-shelf MILP solvers or near-optimal schedules with an approximation algorithm, then uses these schedules to accelerate millions of training iterations. Our method scales to complex, realistic architectures and is hardware-aware through the use of accelerator-specific, profile-based cost models. In addition to reducing training cost, Checkmate enables real-world networks to be trained with up to 5.1x larger input sizes. Checkmate is an open-source project, available at https://github.com/parasj/checkmate.

Ajay N. Jain, Ann E. Cleves, W. Patrick Walters

The diffusion learning method, DiffDock, for docking small-molecule ligands into protein binding sites was recently introduced. Results included comparisons to more conventional docking approaches, with DiffDock showing superior performance. Here, we employ a fully automatic workflow using the Surflex-Dock methods to generate a fair baseline for conventional docking approaches. Results were generated for the common and expected situation where a binding site location is known and also for the condition of an unknown binding site. For the known binding site condition, Surflex-Dock success rates at 2.0 Angstroms RMSD far exceeded those for DiffDock (Top-1/Top-5 success rates, respectively, were 68/81% compared with 45/51%). Glide performed with similar success rates (67/73%) to Surflex-Dock for the known binding site condition, and results for AutoDock Vina and Gnina followed this pattern. For the unknown binding site condition, using an automated method to identify multiple binding pockets, Surflex-Dock success rates again exceeded those of DiffDock, but by a somewhat lesser margin. DiffDock made use of roughly 17,000 co-crystal structures for learning (98% of PDBBind version 2020, pre-2019 structures) for a training set in order to predict on 363 test cases (2% of PDBBind 2020) from 2019 forward. DiffDock's performance was inextricably linked with the presence of near-neighbor cases of close to identical protein-ligand complexes in the training set for over half of the test set cases. DiffDock exhibited a 40 percentage point difference on near-neighbor cases (two-thirds of all test cases) compared with cases with no near-neighbor training case. DiffDock has apparently encoded a type of table-lookup during its learning process, rendering meaningful applications beyond its reach. Further, it does not perform even close to competitively with a competently run modern docking workflow.

Ajay Jain, Ben Mildenhall, Jonathan T. Barron et al.

We combine neural rendering with multi-modal image and text representations to synthesize diverse 3D objects solely from natural language descriptions. Our method, Dream Fields, can generate the geometry and color of a wide range of objects without 3D supervision. Due to the scarcity of diverse, captioned 3D data, prior methods only generate objects from a handful of categories, such as ShapeNet. Instead, we guide generation with image-text models pre-trained on large datasets of captioned images from the web. Our method optimizes a Neural Radiance Field from many camera views so that rendered images score highly with a target caption according to a pre-trained CLIP model. To improve fidelity and visual quality, we introduce simple geometric priors, including sparsity-inducing transmittance regularization, scene bounds, and new MLP architectures. In experiments, Dream Fields produce realistic, multi-view consistent object geometry and color from a variety of natural language captions.

Ajay Jain, Matthew Tancik, Pieter Abbeel

We present DietNeRF, a 3D neural scene representation estimated from a few images. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) learn a continuous volumetric representation of a scene through multi-view consistency, and can be rendered from novel viewpoints by ray casting. While NeRF has an impressive ability to reconstruct geometry and fine details given many images, up to 100 for challenging 360° scenes, it often finds a degenerate solution to its image reconstruction objective when only a few input views are available. To improve few-shot quality, we propose DietNeRF. We introduce an auxiliary semantic consistency loss that encourages realistic renderings at novel poses. DietNeRF is trained on individual scenes to (1) correctly render given input views from the same pose, and (2) match high-level semantic attributes across different, random poses. Our semantic loss allows us to supervise DietNeRF from arbitrary poses. We extract these semantics using a pre-trained visual encoder such as CLIP, a Vision Transformer trained on hundreds of millions of diverse single-view, 2D photographs mined from the web with natural language supervision. In experiments, DietNeRF improves the perceptual quality of few-shot view synthesis when learned from scratch, can render novel views with as few as one observed image when pre-trained on a multi-view dataset, and produces plausible completions of completely unobserved regions.

Paras Jain, Ajay Jain, Tianjun Zhang et al.

Recent work learns contextual representations of source code by reconstructing tokens from their context. For downstream semantic understanding tasks like summarizing code in English, these representations should ideally capture program functionality. However, we show that the popular reconstruction-based BERT model is sensitive to source code edits, even when the edits preserve semantics. We propose ContraCode: a contrastive pre-training task that learns code functionality, not form. ContraCode pre-trains a neural network to identify functionally similar variants of a program among many non-equivalent distractors. We scalably generate these variants using an automated source-to-source compiler as a form of data augmentation. Contrastive pre-training improves JavaScript summarization and TypeScript type inference accuracy by 2% to 13%. We also propose a new zero-shot JavaScript code clone detection dataset, showing that ContraCode is both more robust and semantically meaningful. On it, we outperform RoBERTa by 39% AUROC in an adversarial setting and up to 5% on natural code.

Scott Emmons, Ajay Jain, Michael Laskin et al.

To operate effectively in the real world, agents should be able to act from high-dimensional raw sensory input such as images and achieve diverse goals across long time-horizons. Current deep reinforcement and imitation learning methods can learn directly from high-dimensional inputs but do not scale well to long-horizon tasks. In contrast, classical graphical methods like A* search are able to solve long-horizon tasks, but assume that the state space is abstracted away from raw sensory input. Recent works have attempted to combine the strengths of deep learning and classical planning; however, dominant methods in this domain are still quite brittle and scale poorly with the size of the environment. We introduce Sparse Graphical Memory (SGM), a new data structure that stores states and feasible transitions in a sparse memory. SGM aggregates states according to a novel two-way consistency objective, adapting classic state aggregation criteria to goal-conditioned RL: two states are redundant when they are interchangeable both as goals and as starting states. Theoretically, we prove that merging nodes according to two-way consistency leads to an increase in shortest path lengths that scales only linearly with the merging threshold. Experimentally, we show that SGM significantly outperforms current state of the art methods on long horizon, sparse-reward visual navigation tasks. Project video and code are available at https://mishalaskin.github.io/sgm/

Ajay Jain, Sergio Casas, Renjie Liao et al.

Self-driving vehicles plan around both static and dynamic objects, applying predictive models of behavior to estimate future locations of the objects in the environment. However, future behavior is inherently uncertain, and models of motion that produce deterministic outputs are limited to short timescales. Particularly difficult is the prediction of human behavior. In this work, we propose the discrete residual flow network (DRF-Net), a convolutional neural network for human motion prediction that captures the uncertainty inherent in long-range motion forecasting. In particular, our learned network effectively captures multimodal posteriors over future human motion by predicting and updating a discretized distribution over spatial locations. We compare our model against several strong competitors and show that our model outperforms all baselines.

Paras Jain, Xiangxi Mo, Ajay Jain et al.

Current trends in Machine Learning~(ML) inference on hardware accelerated devices (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) point to alarmingly low utilization. As ML inference is increasingly time-bounded by tight latency SLOs, increasing data parallelism is not an option. The need for better efficiency motivates GPU multiplexing. Furthermore, existing GPU programming abstractions force programmers to micro-manage GPU resources in an early-binding, context-free fashion. We propose a VLIW-inspired Out-of-Order (OoO) Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler that coalesces and reorders execution kernels at runtime for throughput-optimal device utilization while satisfying latency SLOs. We quantify the inefficiencies of space-only and time-only multiplexing alternatives and demonstrate an achievable 7.7x opportunity gap through spatial coalescing.