Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoders (VQ-VAEs) are designed to compress a continuous input to a discrete latent space and reconstruct it with minimal distortion. They operate by maintaining a set of vectors---often referred to as the codebook---and quantizing each encoder output to the nearest vector in the codebook. However, as vector quantization is non-differentiable, the gradient to the encoder flows _around_ the vector quantization layer rather than _through_ it in a straight-through approximation. This approximation may be undesirable as all information from the vector quantization operation is lost. In this work, we propose a way to propagate gradients through the vector quantization layer of VQ-VAEs. We smoothly transform each encoder output into its corresponding codebook vector via a rotation and rescaling linear transformation that is treated as a constant during backpropagation. As a result, the relative magnitude and angle between encoder output and codebook vector becomes encoded into the gradient as it propagates through the vector quantization layer and back to the encoder. Across 11 different VQ-VAE training paradigms, we find this restructuring improves reconstruction metrics, codebook utilization, and quantization error.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT demonstrate a remarkable capacity to learn new concepts during inference without any fine-tuning. However, visual models trained to detect new objects during inference have been unable to replicate this ability, and instead either perform poorly or require meta-training and/or fine-tuning on similar objects. In this work, we propose a meta-learning algorithm that emulates Large Language Models by learning new visual concepts during inference without fine-tuning. Our approach leverages a frozen pre-trained feature extractor, and analogous to in-context learning, recasts meta-learning as sequence modeling over datapoints with known labels and a test datapoint with an unknown label. On 8 out of 11 meta-learning benchmarks, our approach---without meta-training or fine-tuning---exceeds or matches the state-of-the-art algorithm, P>M>F, which is meta-trained on these benchmarks.

Multi-task learning aims to solve multiple machine learning tasks at the same time, with good solutions being both generalizable and Pareto optimal. A multi-task deep learning model consists of a shared representation learned to capture task commonalities, and task-specific sub-networks capturing the specificities of each task. In this work, we offer insights on the under-explored trade-off between minimizing task training conflicts in multi-task learning and improving multi-task generalization, i.e. the generalization capability of the shared presentation across all tasks. The trade-off can be viewed as the tension between multi-objective optimization and shared representation learning: As a multi-objective optimization problem, sufficient parameterization is needed for mitigating task conflicts in a constrained solution space; However, from a representation learning perspective, over-parameterizing the task-specific sub-networks may give the model too many ”degrees of freedom” and impedes the generalizability of the shared representation.

Multi-task learning can leverage information learned by one task to benefit the training of other tasks. Despite this capacity, naively training all tasks together in one model often degrades performance, and exhaustively searching through combinations of task groupings can be prohibitively expensive. As a result, efficiently identifying the tasks that would benefit from training together remains a challenging design question without a clear solution. In this paper, we suggest an approach to select which tasks should train together in multi-task learning models. Our method determines task groupings in a single run by training all tasks together and quantifying the effect to which one task's gradient would affect another task's loss. On the large-scale Taskonomy computer vision dataset, we find this method can decrease test loss by 10.0% compared to simply training all tasks together while operating 11.6 times faster than a state-of-the-art task grouping method.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have experienced significant attention and have become the de facto methods for learning graph representations. GCNs derive inspiration primarily from recent deep learning approaches, and as a result, may inherit unnecessary complexity and redundant computation. In this paper, we reduce this excess complexity through successively removing nonlinearities and collapsing weight matrices between consecutive layers. We theoretically analyze the resulting linear model and show that it corresponds to a fixed low-pass filter followed by a linear classifier. Notably, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that these simplifications do not negatively impact accuracy in many downstream applications. Moreover, the resulting model scales to larger datasets, is naturally interpretable, and yields up to two orders of magnitude speedup over FastGCN.