Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

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Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. 
The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

Deep Learning

We demonstrate improved text-to-image synthesis with controllable object locations using an extension of Pixel Convolutional Neural Networks (PixelCNN). In addition to conditioning on text, we show how the model can generate images conditioned on part keypoints and segmentation masks. The character-level text encoder and image generation network are jointly trained end-to-end via maximum likelihood. We establish quantitative baselines in terms of text and structure-conditional pixel log-likelihood for three data sets: Caltech-UCSD Birds (CUB), MPII Human Pose (MHP), and Common Objects in Context (MS-COCO).

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Generating Interpretable Images with Controllable Structure

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, offers the prospect of policy optimization from large pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction It addresses challenges with regard to the cost of data collection and safety, both of which are particularly pertinent to real-world applications of RL Unfortunately, most off-policy algorithms perform poorly when learning from a fixed dataset In this paper, we propose a novel offline RL algorithm to learn policies from data using a form of critic-regularized regression (CRR) We find that CRR performs surprisingly well and scales to tasks with high-dimensional state and action spaces -- outperforming several state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms by a significant margin on a wide range of benchmark tasks

Critic Regularized Regression

Deep autoregressive models have shown state-of-the-art performance in density estimation for natural images on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet. However, such models require many thousands of gradient-based weight updates and unique image examples for training. Ideally, the models would rapidly learn visual concepts from only a handful of examples, similar to the manner in which humans learns across many vision tasks. In this paper, we show how 1) neural attention and 2) meta learning techniques can be used in combination with autoregressive models to enable effective few-shot density estimation. Our proposed modifications to PixelCNN result in state-of-the art few-shot density estimation on the Omniglot dataset. Furthermore, we visualize the learned attention policy and find that it learns intuitive algorithms for simple tasks such as image mirroring on ImageNet and handwriting on Omniglot without supervision. Finally, we extend the model to natural images and demonstrate few-shot image generation on the Stanford Online Products dataset.

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Few-shot Autoregressive Density Estimation: Towards Learning to Learn Distributions

We show that a critical vulnerability in adversarial imitation is the tendency of discriminator networks to learn spurious associations between visual features and expert labels. When the discriminator focuses on task-irrelevant features, it does not provide an informative reward signal, leading to poor task performance. We analyze this problem in detail and propose a solution that outperforms standard Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL). Our proposed method, Task-Relevant Adversarial Imitation Learning (TRAIL), uses constrained discriminator optimization to learn informative rewards. In comprehensive experiments, we show that TRAIL can solve challenging robotic manipulation tasks from pixels by imitating human operators without access to any task rewards, and clearly outperforms comparable baseline imitation agents, including those trained via behaviour cloning and conventional GAIL.

Scott Reed

Papers

Generating Interpretable Images with Controllable Structure

Critic Regularized Regression

Few-shot Autoregressive Density Estimation: Towards Learning to Learn Distributions

Task-Relevant Adversarial Imitation Learning

Few-shot Autoregressive Density Estimation: Towards Learning to Learn Distributions