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@misc{paulus2024advprompter,
title={AdvPrompter: Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs},
author={Anselm Paulus* and Arman Zharmagambetov* and Chuan Guo and Brandon Amos$^{\dagger}$ and Yuandong Tian$^{\dagger}$},
year={2024},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16873},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/advprompter},
_venue={arXiv},
selected={true},
abstract={
While recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes, they are vulnerable to certain jailbreaking attacks that lead to generation of inappropriate or harmful content. Manual red-teaming requires finding adversarial prompts that cause such jailbreaking, e.g. by appending a suffix to a given instruction, which is inefficient and time-consuming.
On the other hand, automatic adversarial prompt generation often leads to semantically meaningless attacks that can easily be detected by perplexity-based filters, may require gradient information from the target LLM, or do not scale well due to time-consuming discrete optimization processes over the token space. In this paper, we present a novel method that uses another LLM, called the AdvPrompter, to generate human-readable adversarial prompts in seconds, approximately 800 times faster than existing optimization-based approaches.
We train the AdvPrompter using a novel algorithm that does not require access to the gradients of the target LLM. This process alternates between two steps: (1) generating high-quality target adversarial suffixes by optimizing the AdvPrompter predictions, and (2) low-rank fine-tuning of the AdvPrompter with the generated adversarial suffixes. The trained AdvPrompter generates suffixes that veil the input instruction without changing its meaning, such that the target LLM is lured to give a harmful response. Experimental results on popular open source target LLMs show state-of-the-art results on the AdvBench dataset, that also transfer to closed-source black-box LLM APIs. Further, we demonstrate that by fine-tuning on a synthetic dataset generated by Advprompter, LLMs can be made more robust against jailbreaking attacks while maintaining performance, i.e. high MMLU scores.
}
}
@misc{pooladian2023neural,
title = {Neural Optimal Transport with Lagrangian Costs},
author = {Aram-Alexandre Pooladian and Carles Domingo-Enrich and Ricky T. Q. Chen and Brandon Amos},
year = {2024},
_venue={UAI},
selected={true},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00288},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/lagrangian-ot},
abstract={
We investigate the optimal transport problem between probability measures when the underlying cost function is understood to satisfy a least action principle, also known as a Lagrangian cost. These generalizations are useful when connecting observations from a physical system, where the transport dynamics are influenced by the geometry of the system, such as obstacles, (e.g., incorporating barrier functions in the Lagrangian) and allows practitioners to incorporate a priori knowledge of the underlying system such as non-Euclidean geometries (e.g., paths must be circular). Our contributions are of computational interest, where we demonstrate the ability to efficiently compute geodesics and amortize spline-based paths, which has not been done before, even in low dimensional problems. Unlike prior work, we also output the resulting Lagrangian optimal transport map without requiring an ODE solver. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our formulation on low-dimensional examples taken from prior work.
}
}
@misc{sambharya2024learning,
title={Learning to Warm-Start Fixed-Point Optimization Algorithms},
author={Rajiv Sambharya and Georgina Hall and Brandon Amos and Bartolomeo Stellato},
year={2024},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07835},
codeurl={https://github.com/stellatogrp/l2ws},
_venue={JMLR},
abstract={
We introduce a machine-learning framework to warm-start fixed-point optimization algorithms. Our architecture consists of a neural network mapping problem parameters to warm starts, followed by a predefined number of fixed-point iterations. We propose two loss functions designed to either minimize the fixed-point residual or the distance to a ground truth solution. In this way, the neural network predicts warm starts with the end-to-end goal of minimizing the downstream loss. An important feature of our architecture is its flexibility, in that it can predict a warm start for fixed-point algorithms run for any number of steps, without being limited to the number of steps it has been trained on. We provide PAC-Bayes generalization bounds on unseen data for common classes of fixed-point operators: contractive, linearly convergent, and averaged. Applying this framework to well-known applications in control, statistics, and signal processing, we observe a significant reduction in the number of iterations and solution time required to solve these problems, through learned warm starts.
}
}
@misc{amos2023tutorial,
title={Tutorial on amortized optimization},
author={Brandon Amos},
year={2023},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00665},
_venue={Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/amortized-optimization-tutorial},
selected={true},
abstract={
Optimization is a ubiquitous modeling tool and is often deployed
in settings which repeatedly solve similar instances
of the same problem. Amortized optimization methods
use learning to predict the solutions to problems in
these settings, exploiting the shared structure
between similar problem instances. These methods
have been crucial in variational inference and
reinforcement learning and are capable of solving
optimization problems many orders of magnitudes
times faster than traditional optimization methods
that do not use amortization. This tutorial presents
an introduction to the amortized optimization
foundations behind these advancements and overviews
their applications in variational inference, sparse
coding, gradient-based meta-learning, control,
reinforcement learning, convex optimization, optimal
transport, and deep equilibrium networks.
}
}
@misc{amos2023amortizing,
title={On amortizing convex conjugates for optimal transport},
author={Brandon Amos},
year={2023},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12153},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/w2ot},
_venue={ICLR},
selected={true},
abstract={
This paper focuses on computing the convex conjugate operation that
arises when solving Euclidean Wasserstein-2 optimal
transport problems. This conjugation, which is also
referred to as the Legendre-Fenchel conjugate or
c-transform, is considered difficult to compute and
in practice, Wasserstein-2 methods are limited by
not being able to exactly conjugate the dual
potentials in continuous space. I show that
combining amortized approximations to the conjugate
with a solver for fine-tuning is computationally
easy. This combination significantly improves the
quality of transport maps learned for the
Wasserstein-2 benchmark by Korotin et al. (2021) and
is able to model many 2-dimensional couplings and
flows considered in the literature.
}
}
@misc{sambharya2023l2a,
title={End-to-End Learning to Warm-Start for Real-Time Quadratic Optimization},
author={Rajiv Sambharya and Georgina Hall and Brandon Amos and Bartolomeo Stellato},
year={2023},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08260},
codeurl={https://github.com/stellatogrp/l2ws},
_venue={L4DC},
abstract={
First-order methods are widely used to solve convex quadratic programs
(QPs) in real-time applications because of their low
per-iteration cost. However, they can suffer from
slow convergence to accurate solutions. In this
paper, we present a framework which learns an
effective warm-start for a popular first-order
method in real-time applications, Douglas-Rachford
(DR) splitting, across a family of parametric
QPs. This framework consists of two modules: a
feedforward neural network block, which takes as
input the parameters of the QP and outputs a
warm-start, and a block which performs a fixed
number of iterations of DR splitting from this
warm-start and outputs a candidate solution. A key
feature of our framework is its ability to do
end-to-end learning as we differentiate through the
DR iterations. To illustrate the effectiveness of
our method, we provide generalization bounds (based
on Rademacher complexity) that improve with the
number of training problems and number of iterations
simultaneously. We further apply our method to three
real-time applications and observe that, by learning
good warm-starts, we are able to significantly
reduce the number of iterations required to obtain
high-quality solutions.
}
}
@misc{amos2023meta,
title={Meta Optimal Transport},
author={Brandon Amos and Samuel Cohen and Giulia Luise and Ievgen Redko},
year={2023},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05262},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/meta-ot},
_venue={ICML},
selected={true},
abstract={
We study the use of amortized optimization to predict optimal
transport (OT) maps from the input measures, which
we call Meta OT. This helps repeatedly solve similar
OT problems between different measures by leveraging
the knowledge and information present from past
problems to rapidly predict and solve new
problems. Otherwise, standard methods ignore the
knowledge of the past solutions and suboptimally
re-solve each problem from scratch. Meta OT models
surpass the standard convergence rates of
log-Sinkhorn solvers in the discrete setting and
convex potentials in the continuous setting. We
improve the computational time of standard OT
solvers by multiple orders of magnitude in discrete
and continuous transport settings between images,
spherical data, and color palettes.
}
}
@misc{pooladian2023multisample,
title={Multisample Flow Matching: Straightening Flows with Minibatch Couplings},
author={Aram-Alexandre Pooladian and Heli Ben-Hamu and Carles Domingo-Enrich and Brandon Amos and Yaron Lipman and Ricky T. Q. Chen},
year={2023},
_venue={ICML},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14772},
abstract={
Simulation-free methods for training continuous-time generative models
construct probability paths that go between noise
distributions and individual data samples. Recent
works, such as Flow Matching, derived paths that are
optimal for each data sample. However, these
algorithms rely on independent data and noise
samples, and do not exploit underlying structure in
the data distribution for constructing probability
paths. We propose Multisample Flow Matching, a more
general framework that uses non-trivial couplings
between data and noise samples while satisfying the
correct marginal constraints. At very small overhead
costs, this generalization allows us to (i) reduce
gradient variance during training, (ii) obtain
straighter flows for the learned vector field, which
allows us to generate high-quality samples using
fewer function evaluations, and (iii) obtain
transport maps with lower cost in high dimensions,
which has applications beyond generative
modeling. Importantly, we do so in a completely
simulation-free manner with a simple minimization
objective. We show that our proposed methods improve
sample consistency on downsampled ImageNet data
sets, and lead to better low-cost sample generation.
}
}
@misc{zheng2023semi,
title = {Semi-Supervised Offline Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Trajectories},
author = {Zheng, Qinqing and Henaff, Mikael and Amos, Brandon and Grover, Aditya},
year = {2023},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06518},
_venue={ICML},
abstract={
Natural agents can effectively learn from multiple data sources that
differ in size, quality, and types of
measurements. We study this heterogeneity in the
context of offline reinforcement learning (RL) by
introducing a new, practically motivated
semi-supervised setting. Here, an agent has access
to two sets of trajectories: labelled trajectories
containing state, action, reward triplets at every
timestep, along with unlabelled trajectories that
contain only state and reward information. For this
setting, we develop a simple meta-algorithmic
pipeline that learns an inverse-dynamics model on
the labelled data to obtain proxy-labels for the
unlabelled data, followed by the use of any offline
RL algorithm on the true and proxy-labelled
trajectories. Empirically, we find this simple
pipeline to be highly successful -- on several D4RL
benchmarks, certain offline RL
algorithms can match the performance of variants
trained on a fully labeled dataset even when we
label only 10\% trajectories from the low return
regime. Finally, we perform a large-scale controlled
empirical study investigating the interplay of
data-centric properties of the labelled and
unlabelled datasets, with algorithmic design choices
(e.g., inverse dynamics, offline RL algorithm) to
identify general trends and best practices for
training RL agents on semi-supervised offline
datasets.
}
}
@misc{bansal2023taskmet,
title = {TaskMet: Task-Driven Metric Learning for Model Learning},
author = {Dishank Bansal and Ricky T. Q. Chen and Mustafa Mukadam and Brandon Amos},
year = {2023},
_venue={NeurIPS},
selected={true},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05250},
abstract={
Deep learning models are often used with some downstream
task. Models solely trained to achieve accurate
predictions may struggle to perform well on
the desired downstream tasks. We propose using the
task's loss to learn a metric which parameterizes a
loss to train the model.This approach does not alter
the optimal prediction model itself, but rather
changes the model learning to emphasize the
information important for the downstream task.This
enables us to achieve the best of both worlds:a
prediction model trained in the original prediction
space while also being valuable for the desired
downstream task.We validate our approach through
experiments conducted in two main settings: 1)
decision-focused model learning scenarios involving
portfolio optimization and budget allocation, and2)
reinforcement learning in noisy environments with
distracting states.
}
}
@misc{zharmagambetov2023landscape,
title = {Landscape Surrogate: Learning Decision Losses for Mathematical Optimization Under Partial Information},
author = {Arman Zharmagambetov and Brandon Amos and Aaron Ferber and Taoan Huang and Bistra Dilkina and Yuandong Tian},
year = {2023},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08964},
_venue={NeurIPS},
abstract={
Recent works in learning-integrated optimization have shown promise in
settings where the optimization problem is only
partially observed or where general-purpose
optimizers perform poorly without expert tuning. By
learning an optimizer g to tackle these challenging
problems with f as the objective, the optimization
process can be substantially accelerated by
leveraging past experience. Training the optimizer
can be done with supervision from known optimal
solutions (not always available) or implicitly by
optimizing the compound function f ∘ g , but the
implicit approach is slow and challenging due to
frequent calls to the optimizer and sparse
gradients, particularly for combinatorial
solvers. To address these challenges, we propose
using a smooth and learnable Landscape Surrogate
M instead of composing f with g . This surrogate can be computed
faster than g, provides dense and smooth gradients
during training, can generalize to unseen
optimization problems, and is efficiently learned
via alternating optimization. We test our approach
on both synthetic problems and real-world problems,
achieving comparable or superior objective values
compared to state-of-the-art baselines while
reducing the number of calls to g . Notably, our
approach outperforms existing methods for
computationally expensive high-dimensional problems.
}
}
@misc{retchin2023koopman,
title = {Koopman Constrained Policy Optimization: A Koopman operator theoretic method for differentiable optimal control in robotics},
author = {Matthew Retchin and Brandon Amos and Steven Brunton and Shuran Song},
year = {2023},
_venue={ICML Differentiable Almost Everything Workshop},
url={https://differentiable.xyz/papers/paper_45.pdf},
abstract={
We introduce Koopman Constrained Policy Optimization (KCPO),
combining implicitly differentiable model predictive
control with a deep Koopman autoencoder for robot
learning in unknown and nonlinear dynamical
systems. KCPO is a new policy optimization algorithm
that trains neural policies end-to-end with hard box
constraints on controls. Guaranteed satisfaction of
hard constraints helps ensure the performance and
safety of robots. We perform imitation learning with
KCPO to recover expert policies on the Simple
Pendulum, Cartpole Swing-Up, Reacher, and
Differential Drive environments, outperforming
baseline methods in generalizing to
out-of-distribution constraints in most environments
after training.
}
}
@misc{domingoenrich2023stochastic,
title={Stochastic Optimal Control Matching},
author={Carles Domingo-Enrich and Jiequn Han and Brandon Amos and Joan Bruna and Ricky T. Q. Chen},
year={2023},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02027},
_venue={arXiv},
abstract={Stochastic optimal control, which has the goal of driving the behavior of noisy systems, is broadly applicable in science, engineering and artificial intelligence. Our work introduces Stochastic Optimal Control Matching (SOCM), a novel Iterative Diffusion Optimization (IDO) technique for stochastic optimal control that stems from the same philosophy as the conditional score matching loss for diffusion models. That is, the control is learned via a least squares problem by trying to fit a matching vector field. The training loss, which is closely connected to the cross-entropy loss, is optimized with respect to both the control function and a family of reparameterization matrices which appear in the matching vector field. The optimization with respect to the reparameterization matrices aims at minimizing the variance of the matching vector field. Experimentally, our algorithm achieves lower error than all the existing IDO techniques for stochastic optimal control for four different control settings. The key idea underlying SOCM is the path-wise reparameterization trick, a novel technique that is of independent interest, e.g., for generative modeling.}
}
@misc{fickinger2021crossdomain,
title={Cross-Domain Imitation Learning via Optimal Transport},
author={Arnaud Fickinger and Samuel Cohen and Stuart Russell and Brandon Amos},
year={2022},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03684},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/gwil},
_venue={ICLR},
selected={true},
abstract={
Cross-domain imitation learning studies how to leverage expert
demonstrations of one agent to train an imitation
agent with a different embodiment or
morphology. Comparing trajectories and stationary
distributions between the expert and imitation
agents is challenging because they live on different
systems that may not even have the same
dimensionality. We propose Gromov-Wasserstein
Imitation Learning (GWIL), a method for cross-domain
imitation that uses the Gromov-Wasserstein distance
to align and compare states between the different
spaces of the agents. Our theory formally
characterizes the scenarios where GWIL preserves
optimality, revealing its possibilities and
limitations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
GWIL in non-trivial continuous control domains
ranging from simple rigid transformation of the
expert domain to arbitrary transformation of the
state-action space.
}
}
@misc{benhamu2022matching,
title = {Matching Normalizing Flows and Probability Paths on Manifolds},
author = {Ben-Hamu*, Heli and Cohen*, Samuel and Bose, Joey and Amos, Brandon and Grover, Aditya and Nickel, Maximilian and Chen, Ricky T. Q. and Lipman, Yaron},
year = {2022},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04711},
_venue={ICML},
selected={false},
abstract={
Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs) are a class of generative models
that transform a prior distribution to a model
distribution by solving an ordinary differential
equation (ODE). We propose to train CNFs on
manifolds by minimizing probability path divergence
(PPD), a novel family of divergences between the
probability density path generated by the CNF and a
target probability density path. PPD is formulated
using a logarithmic mass conservation formula which
is a linear first order partial differential
equation relating the log target probabilities and
the CNF's defining vector field. PPD has several key
benefits over existing methods: it sidesteps the
need to solve an ODE per iteration, readily applies
to manifold data, scales to high dimensions, and is
compatible with a large family of target paths
interpolating pure noise and data in finite
time. Theoretically, PPD is shown to bound classical
probability divergences. Empirically, we show that
CNFs learned by minimizing PPD achieve
state-of-the-art results in likelihoods and sample
quality on existing low-dimensional manifold
benchmarks, and is the first example of a generative
model to scale to moderately high dimensional
manifolds.
}
}
@article{chen2022semi,
title={Semi-Discrete Normalizing Flows through Differentiable Tessellation},
author={Ricky T. Q. Chen and Brandon Amos and Maximilian Nickel},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.06832},
year={2022},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06832},
_venue={NeurIPS},
abstract={
Mapping between discrete and continuous distributions is a difficult
task and many have had to resort to approximate or
heuristical approaches. We propose a
tessellation-based approach that directly learns
quantization boundaries on a continuous space,
complete with exact likelihood evaluations. This is
done through constructing normalizing flows on
convex polytopes parameterized through a
differentiable Voronoi tessellation. Using a simple
homeomorphism with an efficient log determinant
Jacobian, we can then cheaply parameterize
distributions on convex polytopes.
We explore this approach in two application settings, mapping from
discrete to continuous and vice versa. Firstly, a
Voronoi dequantization allows automatically learning
quantization boundaries in a multidimensional
space. The location of boundaries and distances
between regions can encode useful structural
relations between the quantized discrete
values. Secondly, a Voronoi mixture model has
constant computation cost for likelihood evaluation
regardless of the number of mixture
components. Empirically, we show improvements over
existing methods across a range of structured data
modalities, and find that we can achieve a
significant gain from just adding Voronoi mixtures
to a baseline model.
}
}
@misc{pineda2022theseus,
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09442},
author = {Pineda, Luis and Fan, Taosha and Monge, Maurizio and Venkataraman, Shobha and Sodhi, Paloma and Chen, Ricky and Ortiz, Joseph and DeTone, Daniel and Wang, Austin and Anderson, Stuart and Dong, Jing and Amos, Brandon and Mukadam, Mustafa},
title = {Theseus: A Library for Differentiable Nonlinear Optimization},
_venue = {NeurIPS},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/theseus},
year = 2022,
selected={true},
abstract={
We present Theseus, an efficient application-agnostic open source
library for differentiable nonlinear least squares
(DNLS) optimization built on PyTorch, providing a
common framework for end-to-end structured learning
in robotics and vision. Existing DNLS
implementations are application specific and do not
always incorporate many ingredients important for
efficiency. Theseus is application-agnostic, as we
illustrate with several example applications that
are built using the same underlying differentiable
components, such as second-order optimizers,
standard costs functions, and Lie groups. For
efficiency, Theseus incorporates support for sparse
solvers, automatic vectorization, batching, GPU
acceleration, and gradient computation with implicit
differentiation and direct loss minimization. We do
extensive performance evaluation in a set of
applications, demonstrating significant efficiency
gains and better scalability when these features are
incorporated.
}
}
@misc{vinitsky2022nocturne,
title = {Nocturne: a driving benchmark for multi-agent learning},
author = {Vinitsky, Eugene and Lichtlé, Nathan and Yang, Xiaomeng and Amos, Brandon and Foerster, Jakob},
year = {2022},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.09889},
_venue={NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/nocturne},
abstract={
We introduce Nocturne, a new 2D driving simulator for
investigating multi-agent coordination under partial
observability. The focus of Nocturne is to enable
research into inference and theory of mind in
real-world multi-agent settings without the
computational overhead of computer vision and
feature extraction from images. Agents in this
simulator only observe an obstructed view of the
scene, mimicking human visual sensing
constraints. Unlike existing benchmarks that are
bottlenecked by rendering human-like observations
directly using a camera input, Nocturne uses
efficient intersection methods to compute a
vectorized set of visible features in a C++
back-end, allowing the simulator to run at 2000+
steps-per-second. Using open-source trajectory and
map data, we construct a simulator to load and
replay arbitrary trajectories and scenes from
real-world driving data. Using this environment, we
benchmark reinforcement-learning and
imitation-learning agents and demonstrate that the
agents are quite far from human-level coordination
ability and deviate significantly from the expert
trajectories.
}
}
@misc{amos2021modelbased,
title={On the model-based stochastic value gradient for continuous reinforcement learning},
author={Brandon Amos and Samuel Stanton and Denis Yarats and Andrew Gordon Wilson},
year={2021},
_venue={L4DC},
_note={Oral},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.12775},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/svg},
slidesurl={http://bamos.github.io/data/slides/2021.svg.pdf},
_talkurl={https://youtu.be/ABS40GW7Ekk?t=5393},
selected={true},
abstract={
Model-based reinforcement learning approaches add explicit domain
knowledge to agents in hopes of improving the
sample-efficiency in comparison to model-free
agents. However, in practice model-based methods are
unable to achieve the same asymptotic performance on
challenging continuous control tasks due to the
complexity of learning and controlling an explicit
world model. In this paper we investigate the
stochastic value gradient (SVG), which is a
well-known family of methods for controlling
continuous systems which includes model-based
approaches that distill a model-based value
expansion into a model-free policy. We consider a
variant of the model-based SVG that scales to larger
systems and uses 1) an entropy regularization to
help with exploration, 2) a learned deterministic
world model to improve the short-horizon value
estimate, and 3) a learned model-free value estimate
after the model's rollout. This SVG variation
captures the model-free soft actor-critic method as
an instance when the model rollout horizon is zero,
and otherwise uses short-horizon model rollouts to
improve the value estimate for the policy update. We
surpass the asymptotic performance of other
model-based methods on the proprioceptive MuJoCo
locomotion tasks from the OpenAI gym, including a
humanoid. We notably achieve these results with a
simple deterministic world model without requiring
an ensemble.
}
}
@inproceedings{cohen2021riemannian,
title={{Riemannian Convex Potential Maps}},
author={Cohen*, Samuel and Amos*, Brandon and Lipman, Yaron},
booktitle={ICML},
_venue={ICML},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10272},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/rcpm},
slidesurl={http://bamos.github.io/data/slides/2021.rcpm.pdf},
selected={true},
abstract={
Modeling distributions on Riemannian manifolds is a crucial
component in understanding non-Euclidean data that
arises, e.g., in physics and geology. The budding
approaches in this space are limited by
representational and computational tradeoffs. We
propose and study a class of flows that uses convex
potentials from Riemannian optimal transport. These
are universal and can model distributions on any
compact Riemannian manifold without requiring domain
knowledge of the manifold to be integrated into the
architecture. We demonstrate that these flows can
model standard distributions on spheres, and tori,
on synthetic and geological data.
}
}
@@inproceedings{paulus2021comboptnet,
title={CombOptNet: Fit the Right NP-Hard Problem by Learning Integer Programming Constraints},
author={Paulus, Anselm and Rol{\'\i}nek, Michal and Musil, V{\'\i}t and Amos, Brandon and Martius, Georg},
booktitle={ICML},
_venue={ICML},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02343},
codeurl={https://github.com/martius-lab/CombOptNet},
abstract={
Bridging logical and algorithmic reasoning with modern machine
learning techniques is a fundamental challenge with
potentially transformative impact. On the
algorithmic side, many NP-hard problems can be
expressed as integer programs, in which the
constraints play the role of their "combinatorial
specification". In this work, we aim to integrate
integer programming solvers into neural network
architectures as layers capable of learning both the
cost terms and the constraints. The resulting
end-to-end trainable architectures jointly extract
features from raw data and solve a suitable
(learned) combinatorial problem with
state-of-the-art integer programming solvers. We
demonstrate the potential of such layers with an
extensive performance analysis on synthetic data and
with a demonstration on a competitive computer
vision keypoint matching benchmark.
}
}
@inproceedings{fickinger2021scalable,
year={2021},
booktitle={NeurIPS},
_venue={NeurIPS},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.15316},
title={{Scalable Online Planning via Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning}},
author={Arnaud Fickinger and Hengyuan Hu and Brandon Amos and Stuart Russell and Noam Brown},
year={2021},
abstract={
Lookahead search has been a critical component of recent AI successes,
such as in the games of chess, go, and
poker. However, the search methods used in these
games, and in many other settings, are
tabular. Tabular search methods do not scale well
with the size of the search space, and this problem
is exacerbated by stochasticity and partial
observability. In this work we replace tabular
search with online model-based fine-tuning of a
policy neural network via reinforcement learning,
and show that this approach outperforms
state-of-the-art search algorithms in benchmark
settings. In particular, we use our search algorithm
to achieve a new state-of-the-art result in
self-play Hanabi, and show the generality of our
algorithm by also showing that it outperforms
tabular search in the Atari game Ms. Pacman.
}
}
@inproceedings{cohen2020aligning,
title={Aligning Time Series on Incomparable Spaces},
author={Samuel Cohen and Giulia Luise and Alexander Terenin and Brandon Amos and Marc Peter Deisenroth},
booktitle={AISTATS},
year={2021},
_venue={AISTATS},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12648},
codeurl={https://github.com/samcohen16/Aligning-Time-Series},
slidesurl={http://bamos.github.io/data/slides/2021.gdtw.pdf},
abstract={
Dynamic time warping (DTW) is a useful method for aligning, comparing
and combining time series, but it requires them to
live in comparable spaces. In this work, we consider
a setting in which time series live on different
spaces without a sensible ground metric, causing DTW
to become ill-defined. To alleviate this, we propose
Gromov dynamic time warping (GDTW), a distance
between time series on potentially incomparable
spaces that avoids the comparability requirement by
instead considering intra-relational geometry. We
derive a Frank-Wolfe algorithm for computing it and
demonstrate its effectiveness at aligning, combining
and comparing time series living on incomparable
spaces. We further propose a smoothed version of
GDTW as a differentiable loss and assess its
properties in a variety of settings, including
barycentric averaging, generative modeling and
imitation learning.
},
}
@inproceedings{chen2021learning,
title={Learning Neural Event Functions for Ordinary Differential Equations},
author={Ricky T. Q. Chen and Brandon Amos and Maximilian Nickel},
booktitle={ICLR},
_venue={ICLR},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03902},
codeurl={https://github.com/rtqichen/torchdiffeq},
abstract={
The existing Neural ODE formulation relies on an explicit
knowledge of the termination time. We extend Neural
ODEs to implicitly defined termination criteria
modeled by neural event functions, which can be
chained together and differentiated through. Neural
Event ODEs are capable of modeling discrete
(instantaneous) changes in a continuous-time system,
without prior knowledge of when these changes should
occur or how many such changes should exist. We test
our approach in modeling hybrid discrete- and
continuous- systems such as switching dynamical
systems and collision in multi-body systems, and we
propose simulation-based training of point processes
with applications in discrete control.
}
}
@inproceedings{chen2021neural,
title={Neural Spatio-Temporal Point Processes},
author={Ricky T. Q. Chen and Brandon Amos and Maximilian Nickel},
booktitle={ICLR},
_venue={ICLR},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04583},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/neural_stpp},
abstract={
We propose a new class of parameterizations for spatio-temporal
point processes which leverage Neural ODEs as a
computational method and enable flexible,
high-fidelity models of discrete events that are
localized in continuous time and space. Central to
our approach is a combination of recurrent
continuous-time neural networks with two novel
neural architectures, i.e., Jump and Attentive
Continuous-time Normalizing Flows. This approach
allows us to learn complex distributions for both
the spatial and temporal domain and to condition
non-trivially on the observed event history. We
validate our models on data sets from a wide variety
of contexts such as seismology, epidemiology, urban
mobility, and neuroscience.
}
}
@inproceedings{yarats2021improving,
title={{Improving Sample Efficiency in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning from Images}},
author={Yarats, Denis and Zhang, Amy and Kostrikov, Ilya and Amos, Brandon and Pineau, Joelle and Fergus, Rob},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01741},
booktitle={AAAI},
_venue={AAAI},
year=2021,
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01741},
codeurl={https://sites.google.com/view/sac-ae},
abstract={
Training an agent to solve control tasks directly from
high-dimensional images with model-free
reinforcement learning (RL) has proven
difficult. The agent needs to learn a latent
representation together with a control policy to
perform the task. Fitting a high-capacity encoder
using a scarce reward signal is not only sample
inefficient, but also prone to suboptimal
convergence. Two ways to improve sample efficiency
are to extract relevant features for the task and
use off-policy algorithms. We dissect various
approaches of learning good latent features, and
conclude that the image reconstruction loss is the
essential ingredient that enables efficient and
stable representation learning in image-based
RL. Following these findings, we devise an
off-policy actor-critic algorithm with an auxiliary
decoder that trains end-to-end and matches
state-of-the-art performance across both model-free
and model-based algorithms on many challenging
control tasks. We release our code to encourage
future research on image-based RL.
}
}
@article{venkataraman2021neural,
title={Neural Fixed-Point Acceleration for Convex Optimization},
author={Shobha Venkataraman* and Brandon Amos*},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10254},
_venue={ICML AutoML Workshop},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/neural-scs},
abstract={
Fixed-point iterations are at the heart of numerical computing and
are often a computational bottleneck in real-time
applications that typically need a fast solution of
moderate accuracy. We present neural fixed-point
acceleration which combines ideas from meta-learning
and classical acceleration methods to automatically
learn to accelerate fixed-point problems that are
drawn from a distribution. We apply our framework to
SCS, the state-of-the-art solver for convex cone
programming, and design models and loss functions to
overcome the challenges of learning over unrolled
optimization and acceleration instabilities. Our
work brings neural acceleration into any
optimization problem expressible with CVXPY.
}
}
@misc{cohen2021sliced,
title={Sliced Multi-Marginal Optimal Transport},
author={Samuel Cohen and Alexander Terenin and Yannik Pitcan and Brandon Amos and Marc Peter Deisenroth and K S Sesh Kumar},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07115},
_venue={NeurIPS OTML Workshop},
abstract={
Multi-marginal optimal transport enables one to compare multiple
probability measures, which increasingly finds
application in multi-task learning problems. One
practical limitation of multi-marginal transport is
computational scalability in the number of measures,
samples and dimensionality. In this work, we propose
a multi-marginal optimal transport paradigm based on
random one-dimensional projections, whose
(generalized) distance we term the sliced
multi-marginal Wasserstein distance. To construct
this distance, we introduce a characterization of
the one-dimensional multi-marginal Kantorovich
problem and use it to highlight a number of
properties of the sliced multi-marginal Wasserstein
distance. In particular, we show that (i) the sliced
multi-marginal Wasserstein distance is a
(generalized) metric that induces the same topology
as the standard Wasserstein distance, (ii) it admits
a dimension-free sample complexity, (iii) it is
tightly connected with the problem of barycentric
averaging under the sliced-Wasserstein metric. We
conclude by illustrating the sliced multi-marginal
Wasserstein on multi-task density estimation and
multi-dynamics reinforcement learning problems.
}
}
@misc{richterpowell2021input,
title={Input Convex Gradient Networks},
author={Jack Richter-Powell and Jonathan Lorraine and Brandon Amos},
year={2021},
_venue={NeurIPS OTML Workshop},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12187},
abstract={
The gradients of convex functions are expressive models of non-trivial
vector fields. For example, Brenier's theorem yields
that the optimal transport map between any two
measures on Euclidean space under the squared
distance is realized as a convex gradient, which is
a key insight used in recent generative flow
models. In this paper, we study how to model convex
gradients by integrating a Jacobian-vector product
parameterized by a neural network, which we call the
Input Convex Gradient Network (ICGN). We
theoretically study ICGNs and compare them to taking
the gradient of an Input-Convex Neural Network
(ICNN), empirically demonstrating that a single
layer ICGN can fit a toy example better than a
single layer ICNN. Lastly, we explore extensions to
deeper networks and connections to constructions
from Riemannian geometry.
}
}
@inproceedings{cohen2021imitation,
title={Imitation Learning from Pixel Observations for Continuous Control},
author={Cohen, Samuel and Amos, Brandon and Deisenroth, Marc Peter and Henaff, Mikael and Vinitsky, Eugene and Yarats, Denis},
_venue={NeurIPS DeepRL Workshop},
year={2021},
url={https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Xe5MFhFvYGX},
abstract={
We study imitation learning from visual observations only for
controlling dynamical systems with continuous states
and actions. This setting is attractive due to the
large amount of video data available from which
agents could learn from. However, it is challenging
due to i) not observing the actions and ii) the
high-dimensional visual space. In this setting, we
explore recipes for imitation learning based on
adversarial learning and optimal transport. These
recipes enable us to scale these methods to attain
expert-level performance on visual continuous
control tasks in the DeepMind control suite. We
investigate the tradeoffs of these approaches and
present a comprehensive evaluation of the key design
choices. To encourage reproducible research in this
area, we provide an easy-to-use implementation for
benchmarking visual imitation learning, including
our methods and expert demonstrations.
}
}
@article{pineda2021mbrl,
title={MBRL-Lib: A Modular Library for Model-based Reinforcement Learning},
author={Pineda, Luis and Amos, Brandon and Zhang, Amy and Lambert, Nathan and Calandra, Roberto},
year={2021},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.10159},
_venue={arXiv},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/mbrl-lib},
abstract={
Model-based reinforcement learning is a compelling framework for
data-efficient learning of agents that interact with
the world. This family of algorithms has many
subcomponents that need to be carefully selected and
tuned. As a result the entry-bar for researchers to
approach the field and to deploy it in real-world
tasks can be daunting. In this paper, we present
MBRL-Lib -- a machine learning library for
model-based reinforcement learning in continuous
state-action spaces based on PyTorch. MBRL-Lib is
designed as a platform for both researchers, to
easily develop, debug and compare new algorithms,
and non-expert user, to lower the entry-bar of
deploying state-of-the-art algorithms.
}
}
@inproceedings{amos2020differentiable,
title={{The Differentiable Cross-Entropy Method}},
author={Amos, Brandon and Yarats, Denis},
booktitle={ICML},
_venue={ICML},
year={2020},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12830},
codeurl={https://github.com/facebookresearch/dcem},
slidesurl={http://bamos.github.io/data/slides/2020.dcem.pdf},
selected={true},
abstract={
We study the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) for the non-convex
optimization of a continuous and parameterized
objective function and introduce a differentiable
variant (DCEM) that enables us to differentiate the
output of CEM with respect to the objective
function's parameters. In the machine learning
setting this brings CEM inside of the end-to-end
learning pipeline where this has otherwise been
impossible. We show applications in a synthetic
energy-based structured prediction task and in
non-convex continuous control. In the control
setting we show on the simulated cheetah and walker
tasks that we can embed their optimal action
sequences with DCEM and then use policy optimization
to fine-tune components of the controller as a step
towards combining model-based and model-free RL.
}
}
@inproceedings{lambert2020objective,
title={Objective Mismatch in Model-based Reinforcement Learning},
author={Lambert, Nathan and Amos, Brandon and Yadan, Omry and Calandra, Roberto},
year={2020},
booktitle={L4DC},
_venue={L4DC},
year={2020},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04523},
abstract={
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has been shown to be a powerful framework for data-efficiently learning control of continuous tasks. Recent work in MBRL has mostly focused on using more advanced function approximators and planning schemes, with little development of the general framework. In this paper, we identify a fundamental issue of the standard MBRL framework--what we call the objective mismatch issue. Objective mismatch arises when one objective is optimized in the hope that a second, often uncorrelated, metric will also be optimized. In the context of MBRL, we characterize the objective mismatch between training the forward dynamics model with respect to the likelihood of the one-step ahead prediction, and the overall goal of improving performance on a downstream control task. For example, this issue can emerge with the realization that dynamics models effective for a specific task do not necessarily need to be globally accurate, and vice versa globally accurate models might not be sufficiently accurate locally to obtain good control performance on a specific task. In our experiments, we study this objective mismatch issue and demonstrate that the likelihood of one-step ahead predictions is not always correlated with control performance. This observation highlights a critical limitation in the MBRL framework which will require further research to be fully understood and addressed. We propose an initial method to mitigate the mismatch issue by re-weighting dynamics model training. Building on it, we conclude with a discussion about other potential directions of research for addressing this issue.
}
}
@article{amos2020QNSTOP,
title={{{QNSTOP: Quasi-Newton Algorithm for Stochastic Optimization}}},
author={Brandon Amos and David Easterling and Layne T. Watson and
William Thacker and Brent Castle and Michael Trosset},
journal={},
_venue={ACM TOMS},
year={2020},
keywords={journal},
url={https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/49672/qnTOMS14.pdf},
codeurl={https://github.com/vtopt/qnstop},
abstract={
QNSTOP consists of serial and parallel (OpenMP) Fortran 2003 codes for the
quasi-Newton stochastic optimization method of Castle and Trosset. For
stochastic problems, convergence theory exists for the particular
algorithmic choices and parameter values used in QNSTOP. Both the parallel
driver subroutine, which offers several parallel decomposition strategies,
and the serial driver subroutine can be used for stochastic optimization or
deterministic global optimization, based on an input switch. QNSTOP is
particularly effective for “noisy” deterministic problems, using only
objective function values. Some performance data for computational systems
biology problems is given.
}
}
@article{sercu2020neural,
title={Neural Potts Model},
author={Sercu, Tom and Verkuil, Robert and Meier, Joshua and Amos, Brandon and Lin, Zeming and Chen, Caroline and Liu, Jason and LeCun, Yann and Rives, Alexander},
year={2020},
_venue = {MLCB},
url={https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.08.439084v1.abstract},
abstract = {
We propose the Neural Potts Model objective as an amortized
optimization problem. The objective enables training
a single model with shared parameters to explicitly
model energy landscapes across multiple protein
families. Given a protein sequence as input, the
model is trained to predict a pairwise coupling
matrix for a Potts model energy function describing
the local evolutionary landscape of the
sequence. Couplings can be predicted for novel
sequences. A controlled ablation experiment
assessing unsupervised contact prediction on sets of
related protein families finds a gain from
amortization for low-depth multiple sequence
alignments; the result is then confirmed on a
database with broad coverage of protein sequences.
}
}
@article{lou2020riemannian,
title={Deep Riemannian Manifold Learning},
author={Lou, Aaron and Nickel, Maximilian and Amos, Brandon},
year={2020},
_venue = {NeurIPS Geo4dl Workshop},
url={https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ewro0Ne1tvK15nHyYopY4wZ59QTVB-1c/view},
abstract = {