SCBMs model causal effects using low-dimensional bottlenecks.
problem Causal effect estimation in high-dimensional systems.
method Structural causal models with low-dimensional summary statistics.
result SCBMs provide a flexible framework for task-specific dimension reduction.
Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB) optimizes graph representations for robustness against adversarial attacks.
problem Challenges in learning graph representations due to structure and feature information.
method GIB is an information-theoretic principle that balances expressiveness and robustness by maximizing mutual information between representation and target, while constraining mutual information with input data.
result GIB-based models are more robust to adversarial attacks, achieving up to 31% improvement.
MPNNs struggle with class-bottlenecks and heterophily, leading to performance limitations.
problem Performance limitations of MPNNs under heterophily and structural bottlenecks.
method A statistical framework decomposing model performance into SNR components and proving bounds on sensitivity.
result Optimal graph structures for maximizing higher-order homophily are disjoint unions of single-class and two-class-bipartite clusters.
CNNs use a bottleneck structure to focus on a few frequencies, affecting function representation.
problem Understanding how CNNs focus on specific frequencies in their feature learning.
method Defined Convolution Bottleneck (CBN) structure, measured CBN rank, and analyzed parameter norms.
result Parameter norm scales with depth and CBN rank, and networks with optimal parameters exhibit this structure.
CB-APM uses analyst consensus as a bottleneck to interpret stock returns.
problem Tackles the challenge of understanding and predicting stock returns using professional beliefs.
method Embeds analyst consensus as a structural bottleneck, treating it as a sufficient statistic for market information.
result CB-APM portfolios exhibit strong monotonic return gradients and robust across different economic conditions.
Deep reinforcement learning has recently shown many impressive successes. However, one major obstacle towards applying such methods to real-world problems is their lack of data-efficiency. To this end, we propose the Bottleneck Simulator: a model-based reinforcement learning method which combines a learned, factorized …
Proposes a VAE with a discrete bottleneck for better text generation.
problem VAEs struggle with latent variable auto-regressive decoding in text generation.
method Introduces a discretized bottleneck to enforce latent feature matching in a compact space.
result Demonstrates improved text generation capabilities across various tasks.
Study on feature learning in Leaky ResNets, explaining bottleneck structure.
problem Understanding feature learning in deep neural networks.
method Lagrangian and Hamiltonian reformulation of representation geodesics.
result Emergence of a bottleneck structure in large effective depth networks.
CIB compresses variables causally, preserving key causal interactions.
problem Constructing causal variable abstractions in complex systems.
method Causal Information Bottleneck (CIB) method, extending IB to include causal structures.
result CIB produces causally interpretable abstractions that accurately capture causal relations.
Large neural networks learn low-dimensional representations that balance complexity and regularity.
problem Understanding the tradeoff between low-dimensional representations and complexity in deep neural networks.
method Computed finite depth corrections to reveal a measure of regularity that bounds the pseudo-determinant of the Jacobian.
result Proved the conjectured bottleneck structure in learned features as network depth increases, showing almost all hidden representations are approximately low-dimensional and weight matrices have singular values close to 1.
New research shows non-bottlenecked autoencoders can outperform bottlenecked ones for anomaly detection.
problem The necessity of a bottleneck in autoencoders for anomaly detection.
method Investigated two ways to remove bottlenecks: overparameterising the latent layer and introducing skip connections. Carried out extensive experiments on various AE types and datasets.
result Non-bottlenecked autoencoders can outperform bottlenecked ones, improving anomaly detection performance.
Q*BERT learns to navigate text-based games by building a knowledge graph.
problem Text-based games have bottlenecks that standard RL agents struggle to overcome.
method Q*BERT learns a knowledge graph and uses intrinsic motivation to detect and overcome bottlenecks.
result Q*BERT outperforms state-of-the-art agents in text games, including Zork.
Softmax is an output activation function for modeling categorical probability distributions in many applications of deep learning. However, a recent study revealed that softmax can be a bottleneck of representational capacity of neural networks in language modeling (the softmax bottleneck). In this paper, we propose an…
There has recently been much work on the "wide limit" of neural networks, where Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are shown to converge to a Gaussian process (GP) as all hidden layers are sent to infinite width. However, these results do not apply to architectures that require one or more of the hidden layers to remain n…
Paper presents a framework for learning generative models with structured latent factors.
problem Learning controllable and generalizable representations of multivariate data with desired structural properties.
method The paper introduces a novel generative model framework that uses mask variables to model dependency structure and extends the multivariate information bottleneck theory.
result The framework learns semantically meaningful latent factors that reflect various desired structures and can automatically estimate dependency structure from data.
Curating labeled training data has become the primary bottleneck in machine learning. Recent frameworks address this bottleneck with generative models to synthesize labels at scale from weak supervision sources. The generative model's dependency structure directly affects the quality of the estimated labels, but select…
We present a comprehensive study on the use of autoencoders for modelling text data, in which (differently from previous studies) we focus our attention on the following issues: i) we explore the suitability of two different models bDA and rsDA for constructing deep autoencoders for text data at the sentence level; ii)…
Study shows bottlenecks improve image segmentation quality.
problem Robust object discovery in real-world images remains challenging.
method Empirical investigation of reconstruction bottlenecks in GENESIS model.
result Reconstruction bottlenecks determine reconstruction and segmentation quality.
Deep ResNets favor low bottleneck rank with proper hyperparameters.
problem Understanding the inductive bias of deep neural networks.
method Computed minimum-norm weights of a deep linear ResNet.
result Deep nonlinear ResNets have an inductive bias towards minimizing bottleneck rank.
Since persistence diagrams do not admit an inner product structure, a map into a Hilbert space is needed in order to use kernel methods. It is natural to ask if such maps necessarily distort the metric on persistence diagrams. We show that persistence diagrams with the bottleneck distance do not even admit a coarse emb…
Wide neural networks become linear, but adding bottlenecks makes them bilinear or multilinear.
problem Understanding the transition of neural networks from linearity to higher-order functions.
method Analyzing the behavior of randomly initialized wide neural networks with and without bottleneck layers.
result Bottleneck layers transform the network's function from linear to bilinear or multilinear.
Autoencoders and their variations provide unsupervised models for learning low-dimensional representations for downstream tasks. Without proper regularization, autoencoder models are susceptible to the overfitting problem and the so-called posterior collapse phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce a quantization-based …
Topology-based information retrieval improves query accuracy.
problem Query accuracy in databases with complex structures.
method Dilation-invariant comparative measures of persistent homology.
result Topology-based retrieval outperforms standard methods.
New algorithm clusters sparse data effectively.
problem Challenges in clustering sparse data.
method Deterministic Information Bottleneck framework for joint feature weighting and clustering.
result Demonstrated effectiveness on real-world genomics data.
New method quantifies redundant information using information bottleneck.
problem Quantifying redundant information among multiple sources.
method Formulated as an information bottleneck problem, termed redundancy bottleneck.
result Extracts information that best predicts the target without revealing source identity.
The Mahler volume of a centrally symmetric convex body K is defined as M(K)= (Vol K)(Vol K^dual). Mahler conjectured that this volume is minimized when K is a cube. We introduce the bottleneck conjecture, which stipulates that a certain convex body K^diamond subset K X K^dual has least volume when K is an ellipsoid. If…
The Information bottleneck method is an unsupervised non-parametric data organization technique. Given a joint distribution P(A,B), this method constructs a new variable T that extracts partitions, or clusters, over the values of A that are informative about B. The information bottleneck has already been applied to doc…
New method uses sufficient statistics to infer causal relationships from observational data.
problem Inferring causal relationships from observational data with hidden variables.
method Information Bottleneck method applied to find functional sufficient statistics.
result New causal rules not obtainable from standard methods, validated on simulated and real data.
MO2 learns useful behaviours from past experience for new tasks.
problem Discovering useful behaviours from past experience and transferring them to new tasks.
method Model-Based Offline Options (MO2) framework supporting sample-efficient bottleneck option discovery over continuous state-action spaces.
result MO2 outperforms recent option learning methods on complex long-horizon continuous control tasks.
Graph neural networks struggle to propagate long-range information, causing over-squashing.
problem Graph neural networks struggle to propagate long-range information.
method Identified over-squashing as the bottleneck in GNNs, demonstrated on various models.
result Breaking the bottleneck improves GNNs' performance on long-range problems.
In this paper, we provide an information-theoretic interpretation of the Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE). We show that the loss function of the original VQ-VAE can be derived from the variational deterministic information bottleneck (VDIB) principle. On the other hand, the VQ-VAE trained by the Expect…
Proposes GIB for recognizing informative subgraphs in graphs.
problem Recognizing a subgraph that is maximally informative yet compressive.
method Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB) framework, mutual information estimator, bi-level optimization, connectivity loss.
result IB-subgraph improves graph classification, interpretation, and denoising.
Tutorial on information bottleneck problems with connections to coding and learning.
problem Information bottleneck problems and their connections to coding and learning.
method Information theoretic perspective, practical methods, connections to various problems.
result Optimal trade-offs between relevance and complexity in discrete and vector Gaussian frameworks.
CEB enhances model resilience through simple entropy bottleneck.
problem Improving model robustness against adversarial attacks.
method Conditional Entropy Bottleneck (CEB) combined with data augmentation.
result CEB significantly boosts adversarial robustness on various benchmarks.
PCBM improves neural network generalization by partially observing concepts.
problem Decreased generalization performance due to observing all concepts in CBM.
method Developed a theoretical analysis of PCBM's Bayesian generalization error.
result PCBM's generalization error is lower than CBM's due to partial concept observation.
Combining the Information Bottleneck model with deep learning by replacing mutual information terms with deep neural nets has proved successful in areas ranging from generative modelling to interpreting deep neural networks. In this paper, we revisit the Deep Variational Information Bottleneck and the assumptions neede…
Proposes Decodable Information Bottleneck for optimal representation learning.
problem Finding optimal representations for supervised learning.
method Integrates information retention and compression with the desired predictive family.
result Optimal representations lead to better expected test performance and can be estimated with guarantees.
We introduce the HSIC (Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion) bottleneck for training deep neural networks. The HSIC bottleneck is an alternative to the conventional cross-entropy loss and backpropagation that has a number of distinct advantages. It mitigates exploding and vanishing gradients, resulting in the ability…
New learning rules from information bottleneck improve deep learning without precise labels.
problem Training deep neural networks with backpropagation is biologically implausible.
method Kernelized information bottleneck principle with 3-factor Hebbian structure.
result The new learning rules perform nearly as well as backpropagation on image classification tasks.
PCBMs turn any neural network into interpretable models without dense annotations.
problem Restrictive nature of CBMs and lack of dense concept annotations in training data.
method Introduce PCBMs that can turn any neural network into interpretable models without dense annotations.
result PCBMs can turn any neural network into interpretable models without dense annotations, improving interpretability and performance.
The paper identifies network bottlenecks using minimax paths in stochastic networks.
problem Identifying bottlenecks in networks with stochastic weights.
method Modeling as combinatorial semi-bandit problem, applying combinatorial Thompson Sampling, and approximating the original objective due to computational intractability.
result Established an upper bound on Bayesian regret and evaluated Thompson Sampling performance on real-world networks.
This work analyzes how bottleneck layers and skip connections affect linear denoising autoencoders' generalization.
problem Understanding the generalization of linear denoising autoencoders in overparameterized regimes.
method Analyzes two-layer linear denoising autoencoders with a bottleneck layer and skip connection, deriving test risk formulas.
result Bottleneck layers introduce an additional complexity measure, while skip connections can mitigate variance.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are incredibly brittle due to adversarial examples. To robustify DNNs, adversarial training was proposed, which requires large-scale but well-labeled data. However, it is quite expensive to annotate large-scale data well. To compensate for this shortage, several seminal works are utilizing l…
Deep latent variable models are powerful tools for representation learning. In this paper, we adopt the deep information bottleneck model, identify its shortcomings and propose a model that circumvents them. To this end, we apply a copula transformation which, by restoring the invariance properties of the information b…
New objective function improves model robustness.
problem Machine Learning robustness issues.
method Conditional Entropy Bottleneck (CEB) objective function.
result CEB models improve robust generalization.
Proposes a new method to selectively access privileged information in reinforcement learning.
problem Selective compression of privileged information in reinforcement learning.
method Formulates a variational bandwidth bottleneck to decide stochastically whether to access privileged information.
result Improves generalization and reduces access to costly information in reinforcement learning experiments.
LogDet estimator improves entropy estimation in neural networks.
problem Inconsistent observations and diversified interpretation in neural networks.
method Proposes LogDet estimator for reliable entropy approximation.
result LogDet estimator overcomes distributional diversity issues.
HCBM improves deep learning explainability by non-linear concept aggregation.
problem Lack of explainable and accurate predictions in deep learning for high-stake decisions.
method Introduce Hoeffding Concept Bottleneck Models (HCBM) using Hoeffding functional decomposition of gradient-boosted trees for non-linear and sparse concept aggregation.
result HCBM outperforms standard linear CBM and is robust to interconcept leakage.