Chang Liu

Hongbing Zhang, Xinyi Liu, Chang Liu et al. · microsoft-research, tsinghua

Non-convex relaxation methods have been widely used in tensor recovery problems, and compared with convex relaxation methods, can achieve better recovery results. In this paper, a new non-convex function, Minimax Logarithmic Concave Penalty (MLCP) function, is proposed, and some of its intrinsic properties are analyzed, among which it is interesting to find that the Logarithmic function is an upper bound of the MLCP function. The proposed function is generalized to tensor cases, yielding tensor MLCP and weighted tensor $Lγ$-norm. Consider that its explicit solution cannot be obtained when applying it directly to the tensor recovery problem. Therefore, the corresponding equivalence theorems to solve such problem are given, namely, tensor equivalent MLCP theorem and equivalent weighted tensor $Lγ$-norm theorem. In addition, we propose two EMLCP-based models for classic tensor recovery problems, namely low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) and tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA), and design proximal alternate linearization minimization (PALM) algorithms to solve them individually. Furthermore, based on the Kurdyka-Łojasiwicz property, it is proved that the solution sequence of the proposed algorithm has finite length and converges to the critical point globally. Finally, Extensive experiments show that proposed algorithm achieve good results, and it is confirmed that the MLCP function is indeed better than the Logarithmic function in the minimization problem, which is consistent with the analysis of theoretical properties.

Kun Xu, Chang Liu, Xiaodong Ren

The development and application of the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method have attracted great attention in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) com- munity in the past decades. The underlying reason for such an intensive investigation is due to favorable properties of the DG method, such as higher order, compactness, and easy parallelization. However, for the compressible flow simulations, the DG method is also associated with unfavorable prop- erties, such as the frequent instabilities in non-smooth regions. Due to the finite element formulation, except the update of the cell averaged conserva- tive flow variable, it becomes rather difficulty to fully understand the physical mechanism in the DG method for the updates of other degrees of freedom in- side each element. In this short note, based on the linear advection equation we are going to analyze the DG method in an alternative way. The results obtained may be useful for the CFD community for its further development of the DG methods.

Junle Liu, Chang Liu, Yanyu Ke et al.

The wall pressure is of great importance in understanding the forces and structural responses induced by fluid. Recent works have investigated the potential of deep learning techniques in predicting mean pressure coefficients and fluctuating pressure coefficients, but most of existing deep learning frameworks are limited to predicting a single snapshot using full spatial information. To forecast spatiotemporal wall pressure of flow past a rectangular cylinder, this study develops a physics-aware DeepU-Fourier neural Network (DeepUFNet) deep learning model. DeepUFNet comprises the UNet structure and the Fourier neural network, with physical high-frequency loss control embedded in the model training stage to optimize model performance, where the parameter $β$ varies with the development of the training epoch. Wind tunnel testing is performed to collect wall pressures of a two-dimensional rectangular cylinder with a side ratio of 1.5 at an angle of attack of zero using high-frequency pressure scanning, thereby constructing a database for DeepUFNet training and testing. The DeepUFNet model is found to forecast spatiotemporal wall pressure information with high accuracy. The comparison between forecast results and experimental data presents agreement in statistical information, temporal pressure variation, power spectrum density, spatial distribution, and spatiotemporal correlation. It is also found that embedding a physical high-frequency loss control coefficient $β$ in the DeepUFNet model can significantly improve model performance in forecasting spatiotemporal wall pressure information, in particular, in forecasting high-order frequency fluctuation and wall pressure variance. Furthermore, the DeepUFNet extrapolation capability is tested with sparse spatial information input, and the model presents a satisfactory extrapolation ability

Xinyun Chen, Chang Liu, Dawn Song

Program translation is an important tool to migrate legacy code in one language into an ecosystem built in a different language. In this work, we are the first to employ deep neural networks toward tackling this problem. We observe that program translation is a modular procedure, in which a sub-tree of the source tree is translated into the corresponding target sub-tree at each step. To capture this intuition, we design a tree-to-tree neural network to translate a source tree into a target one. Meanwhile, we develop an attention mechanism for the tree-to-tree model, so that when the decoder expands one non-terminal in the target tree, the attention mechanism locates the corresponding sub-tree in the source tree to guide the expansion of the decoder. We evaluate the program translation capability of our tree-to-tree model against several state-of-the-art approaches. Compared against other neural translation models, we observe that our approach is consistently better than the baselines with a margin of up to 15 points. Further, our approach can improve the previous state-of-the-art program translation approaches by a margin of 20 points on the translation of real-world projects.

Chang Liu, Jessica B. Hamrick, Jaime F. Fisac et al.

The study of human-robot interaction is fundamental to the design and use of robotics in real-world applications. Robots will need to predict and adapt to the actions of human collaborators in order to achieve good performance and improve safety and end-user adoption. This paper evaluates a human-robot collaboration scheme that combines the task allocation and motion levels of reasoning: the robotic agent uses Bayesian inference to predict the next goal of its human partner from his or her ongoing motion, and re-plans its own actions in real time. This anticipative adaptation is desirable in many practical scenarios, where humans are unable or unwilling to take on the cognitive overhead required to explicitly communicate their intent to the robot. A behavioral experiment indicates that the combination of goal inference and dynamic task planning significantly improves both objective and perceived performance of the human-robot team. Participants were highly sensitive to the differences between robot behaviors, preferring to work with a robot that adapted to their actions over one that did not.

Xiaojun Xu, Xinyun Chen, Chang Liu et al.

Adversarial attacks are known to succeed on classifiers, but it has been an open question whether more complex vision systems are vulnerable. In this paper, we study adversarial examples for vision and language models, which incorporate natural language understanding and complex structures such as attention, localization, and modular architectures. In particular, we investigate attacks on a dense captioning model and on two visual question answering (VQA) models. Our evaluation shows that we can generate adversarial examples with a high success rate (i.e., > 90%) for these models. Our work sheds new light on understanding adversarial attacks on vision systems which have a language component and shows that attention, bounding box localization, and compositional internal structures are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. These observations will inform future work towards building effective defenses.

Jaime F. Fisac, Monica A. Gates, Jessica B. Hamrick et al.

As intelligent systems gain autonomy and capability, it becomes vital to ensure that their objectives match those of their human users; this is known as the value-alignment problem. In robotics, value alignment is key to the design of collaborative robots that can integrate into human workflows, successfully inferring and adapting to their users' objectives as they go. We argue that a meaningful solution to value alignment must combine multi-agent decision theory with rich mathematical models of human cognition, enabling robots to tap into people's natural collaborative capabilities. We present a solution to the cooperative inverse reinforcement learning (CIRL) dynamic game based on well-established cognitive models of decision making and theory of mind. The solution captures a key reciprocity relation: the human will not plan her actions in isolation, but rather reason pedagogically about how the robot might learn from them; the robot, in turn, can anticipate this and interpret the human's actions pragmatically. To our knowledge, this work constitutes the first formal analysis of value alignment grounded in empirically validated cognitive models.

Xinyun Chen, Chang Liu, Dawn Song

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been developed to improve the performance of program synthesis from input-output examples. Albeit its significant progress, the programs that can be synthesized by state-of-the-art approaches are still simple in terms of their complexity. In this work, we move a significant step forward along this direction by proposing a new class of challenging tasks in the domain of program synthesis from input-output examples: learning a context-free parser from pairs of input programs and their parse trees. We show that this class of tasks are much more challenging than previously studied tasks, and the test accuracy of existing approaches is almost 0%. We tackle the challenges by developing three novel techniques inspired by three novel observations, which reveal the key ingredients of using deep learning to synthesize a complex program. First, the use of a non-differentiable machine is the key to effectively restrict the search space. Thus our proposed approach learns a neural program operating a domain-specific non-differentiable machine. Second, recursion is the key to achieve generalizability. Thus, we bake-in the notion of recursion in the design of our non-differentiable machine. Third, reinforcement learning is the key to learn how to operate the non-differentiable machine, but it is also hard to train the model effectively with existing reinforcement learning algorithms from a cold boot. We develop a novel two-phase reinforcement learning-based search algorithm to overcome this issue. In our evaluation, we show that using our novel approach, neural parsing programs can be learned to achieve 100% test accuracy on test inputs that are 500x longer than the training samples.