The paper formalizes criteria for non-spurious and disentangled representations using causal methods.
problem Formalizing criteria for non-spurious and disentangled representations in representation learning.
method Causal perspective, counterfactual quantities, observable consequences of causal assertions.
result Computable metrics for assessing representation learning based on observed data.
This paper explores the complexity of learning representations in contextual linear bandits.
problem Understanding the complexity of representation learning in contextual linear bandits.
method Systematic approach to representation learning in contextual linear bandits, focusing on instance-dependent perspective.
result Representation learning is fundamentally more complex than linear bandits, with some cases being arbitrarily harder.
Proposes a new method to learn representations directly optimized for a task.
problem Learning representations optimized for unrelated tasks.
method Jointly learns representation and prediction function for a specific task.
result Learned representations outperform pre-trained ones and are more sample-efficient.
New framework improves reliability of learned representations by modeling uncertainty and structural constraints.
problem Uncertainty in learned representations treated as deterministic, leading to unreliable models.
method Proposes a principled framework for reliable representation learning with uncertainty-aware regularization and structural constraints.
result Improves stability, calibration, and robustness of learned representations.
Learning representations of data is an important problem in statistics and machine learning. While the origin of learning representations can be traced back to factor analysis and multidimensional scaling in statistics, it has become a central theme in deep learning with important applications in computer vision and co…
The paper shows how to learn causal representations with few environments and finite samples.
problem Learning causal representations from limited data and environments.
method Explicit, finite-sample guarantees with a logarithmic number of interventions.
result Consistent recovery of latent causal graph, mixing matrix, and unknown intervention targets.
State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision from rewards is a challenging open problem. We introduce a method that learns state…
Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more challenging problems. Most prior work on representation learning has focused on gene…
New model-free algorithms learn representations for low-rank MDPs efficiently.
problem Learning representations in reinforcement learning for low-rank MDPs.
method Developed minimax representation learning objective and interleaved with reward-free exploration.
result Proven sample efficiency and scalability to complex environments.
Paper addresses the disparity between sampled and mean representations in disentangled learning.
problem Disparity between sampled and mean representations in disentangled learning.
method Proposes a method to eliminate the disparity by proving and utilizing the relationship between total correlation of sampled and mean representations for multivariate normal distributions.
result Demonstrates that a factorized mean representation can have lower total correlation than the sampled representation.
This work improves understanding of reinforcement learning state representations.
problem Lack of precise characterization of how and when state representations generalize.
method Developed a bound on the generalization error based on effective dimension.
result Bound quantifies the tension between generalization and approximation.
Information in electronic health records (EHR), such as clinical narratives, examination reports, lab measurements, demographics, and other patient encounter entries, can be transformed into appropriate data representations that can be used for downstream clinical machine learning tasks using representation learning. L…
Advances in neural network based classifiers have transformed automatic feature learning from a pipe dream of stronger AI to a routine and expected property of practical systems. Since the emergence of AlexNet every winning submission of the ImageNet challenge has employed end-to-end representation learning, and due to…
New method learns stochastic process representations without exact reconstruction.
problem Learning exact representations of high-dimensional noisy stochastic processes.
method CReSP framework for contrastive learning of stochastic processes.
result Effective for learning representations of various stochastic processes.
Self-supervised and supervised methods learn similar intermediate visual representations but diverge in final layers.
problem Comparing self-supervised and supervised methods for visual learning.
method Comparison of contrastive self-supervised and supervised methods on simple image data.
result Contrastive and supervised methods learn similar intermediate representations but diverge in final layers.
Learning representations with diversified information remains as an open problem. Towards learning diversified representations, a new approach, termed Information Competing Process (ICP), is proposed in this paper. Aiming to enrich the information carried by feature representations, ICP separates a representation into …
Survey categorizes methods for learning state representations in reinforcement learning.
problem Addressing challenges in complex observation spaces for sequential decision making.
method Categorizes six main classes of methods for learning state representations.
result Enhances understanding of state representation learning in reinforcement learning.
Proposes a deep learning method for effective data representation.
problem Constructing effective data representations for prediction.
method A deep dimension reduction approach to learning representations with sufficiency, low dimensionality, and disentanglement.
result The proposed deep nonparametric representation is consistent and performs better than existing methods.
Representation learning is an essential problem in a wide range of applications and it is important for performing downstream tasks successfully. In this paper, we propose a new model that learns coupled representations of domains, intents, and slots by taking advantage of their hierarchical dependency in a Spoken Lang…
Representation learning algorithms are designed to learn abstract features that characterize data. State representation learning (SRL) focuses on a particular kind of representation learning where learned features are in low dimension, evolve through time, and are influenced by actions of an agent. The representation i…
RELAX provides first attribution-based explanations for representations.
problem Lack of methods to explain what influences learned representations.
method RELAX, a first approach for attribution-based explanations of representations, measuring similarities in representation space.
result Significantly outperforms gradient-based baseline and models uncertainty in explanations.
Contrastive learning adapts to data intrinsic dimensions, learning low-dimensional representations.
problem Learning high-dimensional representations from multi-modal data.
method Multi-modal contrastive learning with temperature optimization.
result Contrastive learning adapts to intrinsic dimensions of data, not specified dimensions.
Unified data representation learning improves non-parametric two-sample testing.
problem Improving non-parametric two-sample testing accuracy.
method Proposes RL-TST framework combining IRs and DRs for better test power.
result RL-TST outperforms existing methods by leveraging both IRs and DRs.
Optimal transport metric transfers deep network representations efficiently.
problem Efficiently transfer deep network representations for new tasks.
method Use optimal transport to quantify representation similarity and regularize student network.
result Optimal transport distance promotes similarity between teacher and student representations.
The paper proposes a learning-theoretic perspective on representation alignment.
problem Understanding how AI models' representations become aligned as they scale.
method Reviewing and connecting different notions of alignment, focusing on stitching.
result Relating properties of stitching to kernel alignment of representations.
Unsupervised method learns hierarchical graph representations without labels.
problem Lack of hierarchical graph representations and need for labeled data in GNNs.
method Maximizes mutual information between local and global graph representations.
result Comparable performance to supervised methods on graph classification benchmarks.
New algorithm REFUEL shows multitask representation learning is more sample-efficient in RL.
problem Understanding the benefit of representation learning in reinforcement learning.
method Developed REFUEL algorithm for multitask low-rank RL, analyzing both upstream and downstream tasks.
result Multitask representation learning is provably more sample-efficient than individual task learning.
ExpCLR uses expert features to improve time-series representation learning.
problem Current representation learning approaches fail to ensure useful properties for time-series data.
method ExpCLR employs expert features to replace data transformations in contrastive learning, ensuring two useful properties for time-series representations.
result ExpCLR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world time-series datasets.
Survey of self-supervised image representation learning methods.
problem Learning meaningful image representations without labeled data.
method Comprehensive review and taxonomy of self-supervised methods.
result Quality of self-supervised representations is comparable to supervised learning.
Enhanced BCPNN learns hidden representations without labels.
problem Unsupervised learning of hierarchical representations in neural networks.
method Extended BCPNN architecture with local Hebbian learning mechanisms.
result Demonstrated capability for unsupervised learning of salient hidden representations.
A variety of representation learning approaches have been investigated for reinforcement learning; much less attention, however, has been given to investigating the utility of sparse coding. Outside of reinforcement learning, sparse coding representations have been widely used, with non-convex objectives that result in…
We investigate sparse representations for control in reinforcement learning. While these representations are widely used in computer vision, their prevalence in reinforcement learning is limited to sparse coding where extracting representations for new data can be computationally intensive. Here, we begin by demonstrat…
Sparse representations have been shown to be useful in deep reinforcement learning for mitigating catastrophic interference and improving the performance of agents in terms of cumulative reward. Previous results were based on a two step process were the representation was learned offline and the action-value function w…
STAR improves equivariant and invariant representation learning by routing projection heads.
problem Redundant feature learning in equivariant and invariant representation learning.
method Soft Task-Aware Routing (STAR) for projection heads specialization.
result Lower canonical correlations between invariant and equivariant embeddings.
A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation that is useful for many tasks, a.k.a. representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting for Markov decision processes (MDPs) where multiple experts' trajectories are available. We formulate representation learning …
FSRL balances fairness and sufficiency in learning representations.
problem Ensuring unbiased predictions and decisions in machine learning.
method A convex combination of sufficiency and fairness objectives using distance covariance.
result FSRL achieves a superior trade-off between fairness and accuracy.
Robots could learn their own state and world representation from perception and experience without supervision. This desirable goal is the main focus of our field of interest, state representation learning (SRL). Indeed, a compact representation of such a state is beneficial to help robots grasp onto their environment …
Proposes a method to learn representations of higher-dimensional simplicial complexes.
problem Lack of methods for representing entire simplicial complexes.
method Geometric message passing schemes for end-to-end learning of simplicial complex representations.
result First method for learning representations of entire simplicial complexes.
We propose a representation learning framework for medical diagnosis domain. It is based on heterogeneous network-based model of diagnostic data as well as modified metapath2vec algorithm for learning latent node representation. We compare the proposed algorithm with other representation learning methods in two practic…
SupSiam and SupBYOL improve supervised representation learning with ANCL.
problem Improving supervised representation learning with ANCL.
method Proposed supervised ANCL framework leveraging labels to avoid collapse.
result Supervised ANCL improves representation learning across various datasets and tasks.
Contrastive learning harms minority group representations, affecting downstream tasks.
problem Representation harm in contrastive learning, especially affecting minority groups.
method Causal mediation analysis and stochastic block model explanation.
result Representation harm in contrastive learning is partly responsible for allocation harm in downstream tasks.
Paper defines and solves a problem in representation learning to ensure fairness with high confidence.
problem Learning fair representations with high confidence guarantees for all downstream tasks.
method Formally defines the problem, introduces FRG framework, proves high probability fairness, and demonstrates effectiveness empirically.
result FRG framework provides high-confidence guarantees for limiting unfairness across all downstream models and tasks.
BOIL updates model body only, showing better few-shot learning performance.
problem Few-shot learning efficiency with model reuse vs. change.
method Proposes BOIL, updating only model body, freezing head.
result Significantly outperforms MAML on cross-domain tasks.
FairMixRep learns fair representations from mixed data types.
problem Representation learning in mixed numerical and categorical data with fairness constraints.
method Efficient encoder-decoder framework + fairness constraints.
result Excellent performance in preserving information and fairness in mixed data representations.
GraphCL learns node representations by maximizing similarity between perturbed node features.
problem Learning node representations in graph data without labeled data.
method Contrastive learning of node embeddings using graph neural networks and a loss function.
result Significantly outperforms state-of-the-art in unsupervised node classification benchmarks.
Study on how optimal representations emerge during deep learning training, focusing on the role of implicit regularization.
problem Understanding how optimal representations for tasks are learned during training.
method Investigates the role of implicit regularization in learning minimal sufficient representations, analyzing changes in representation content during training.
result Semantically meaningful but ultimately irrelevant information is encoded in early transient dynamics of training, which is later discarded.
Recent improvements in Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs) have shown their ability to generate higher quality samples as well as to learn good representations for transfer learning. Most of the representation learning methods based on GANs learn representations ignoring their post-use scenario, which can lea…
Unsupervised learning models can be indistinguishable without identifiability, leading to unreliable representations.
problem Unsupervised learning models may be indistinguishable without identifiability, making it impossible to recover a ground truth generative model.
method Construction based on nonlinear independent component analysis theory to illustrate potential failure cases.
result Counterexamples show that identifiability is crucial for reliable unsupervised representation learning.