Pointer Network (Ptr-Net)
We introduce a new neural architecture to learn the conditional probability of an output sequence with elements that are discrete tokens corresponding to positions in an input sequence. Such problems cannot be trivially addressed by existent approaches such as sequence-to-sequence and Neural Turing Machines, because the number of target classes in each step of the output depends on the length of the input, which is variable. Problems such as sorting variable sized sequences, and various combinatorial optimization problems belong to this class. Our model solves the problem of variable size output dictionaries using a recently proposed mechanism of neural attention. It differs from the previous attention attempts in that, instead of using attention to blend hidden units of an encoder to a context vector at each decoder step, it uses attention as a pointer to select a member of the input sequence as the output. We call this architecture a Pointer Net (Ptr-Net). We show Ptr-Nets can be used to learn approximate solutions to three challenging geometric problems — finding planar convex hulls, computing Delaunay triangulations, and the planar Travelling Salesman Problem — using training examples alone. Ptr-Nets not only improve over sequence-to-sequence with input attention, but also allow us to generalize to variable size output dictionaries. We show that the learnt models generalize beyond the maximum lengths they were trained on. We hope our results on these tasks will encourage a broader exploration of neural learning for discrete problems. …

Sparse Ternary Compression (STC)
Federated Learning allows multiple parties to jointly train a deep learning model on their combined data, without any of the participants having to reveal their local data to a centralized server. This form of privacy-preserving collaborative learning however comes at the cost of a significant communication overhead during training. To address this problem, several compression methods have been proposed in the distributed training literature that can reduce the amount of required communication by up to three orders of magnitude. These existing methods however are only of limited utility in the Federated Learning setting, as they either only compress the upstream communication from the clients to the server (leaving the downstream communication uncompressed) or only perform well under idealized conditions such as iid distribution of the client data, which typically can not be found in Federated Learning. In this work, we propose Sparse Ternary Compression (STC), a new compression framework that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Federated Learning environment. Our experiments on four different learning tasks demonstrate that STC distinctively outperforms Federated Averaging in common Federated Learning scenarios where clients either a) hold non-iid data, b) use small batch sizes during training, or where c) the number of clients is large and the participation rate in every communication round is low. We furthermore show that even if the clients hold iid data and use medium sized batches for training, STC still behaves pareto-superior to Federated Averaging in the sense that it achieves fixed target accuracies on our benchmarks within both fewer training iterations and a smaller communication budget. …

Unsupervised Continual Learning (UCL)
We first pose the Unsupervised Continual Learning (UCL) problem: learning salient representations from a non-stationary stream of unlabeled data in which the number of object classes varies with time. Given limited labeled data just before inference, those representations can also be associated with specific object types to perform classification. To solve the UCL problem, we propose an architecture that involves a single module, called Self-Taught Associative Memory (STAM), which loosely models the function of a cortical column in the mammalian brain. Hierarchies of STAM modules learn based on a combination of Hebbian learning, online clustering, detection of novel patterns, forgetting outliers, and top-down predictions. We illustrate the operation of STAMs in the context of learning handwritten digits in a continual manner with only 3-12 labeled examples per class. STAMs suggest a promising direction to solve the UCL problem without catastrophic forgetting. …

Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor (NetLSD)
Comparison among graphs is ubiquitous in graph analytics. However, it is a hard task in terms of the expressiveness of the employed similarity measure and the efficiency of its computation. Ideally, graph comparison should be invariant to the order of nodes and the sizes of compared graphs, adaptive to the scale of graph patterns, and scalable. Unfortunately, these properties have not been addressed together. Graph comparisons still rely on direct approaches, graph kernels, or representation-based methods, which are all inefficient and impractical for large graph collections. In this paper, we propose NetLSD (Network Laplacian Spectral Descriptor), a permutation- and size-invariant, scale-adaptive, and scalably computable graph representation method that allows for straightforward comparisons. NetLSD hears the shape of a graph by extracting a compact signature that inherits the formal properties of the Laplacian spectrum, specifically its heat or wave kernel. To our knowledge, NetLSD is the first expressive graph representation that allows for efficient comparisons of large graphs, our evaluation on a variety of real-world graphs demonstrates that it outperforms previous works in both expressiveness and efficiency. …