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Meeting Notes July 2023

Meeting 06/07

Research

  • Investigating Representation Collapse in Reinforcement Learning Agents from Vision
    • plan/structure?
    • what RL algorithms?
      • visual data
      • Gehart Neumann, Marc Toussaint, Joustus Piater (Innsburg)
      • Define a research question
      • Focus on some domain
      •  
  • Unnormalized Contrastive learning
    • All CL models use l2 normalization of the representation
      • Stability: Normalizing the representations ensures that they all have the same magnitude. This can make the learning process more stable, as it prevents the model from assigning arbitrarily large or small magnitudes to the representations.

      • Focus on direction: By constraining the representations to have a fixed magnitude, the learning process focuses on the direction of the vectors in the embedding space. This is often what we care about in tasks like contrastive learning, where the goal is to make the representations of similar inputs point in similar directions.

      • Computational convenience: As mentioned earlier, many computations, such as the dot product between two vectors, are easier to perform and interpret in normalized spaces.

      • Interpretability: Normalized representations are often more interpretable, as the angle between two vectors can be directly interpreted as a measure of similarity or dissimilarity.

    • BUT, this come to the expense of
      • Decreased Capacity: With normalization, the model’s capacity to represent data is reduced since it can only rely on the direction of vectors in the embedding space. This limitation may result in the model being less able to capture complex patterns in the data.
      • Missing Magnitude Information: The absence of magnitude information in normalized vectors removes the ability to convey meaningful data properties such as confidence levels or other relevant characteristics. Normalization discards this information, limiting the model’s understanding of the data.
    • IDEA: remove the l2 regularization
      • Regularize the model to penalize large magnitudes.
      • Scale the representations to a desired range.
      • Design a custom loss function considering both direction and magnitude
  • Breaking Binary: Towards a Continuum of Conceptual Similarities in Self-Supervised Learning
    • will take more time to set-up
    • will leave it for later

PhD Registration

  • registered

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin presenting next week her work until now.

ML Course

  • Publish Video Tutorial on pytorch

Miscellaneous

  • Summer School in Cambridge
    • Poster?

Meeting 25/07

Research

  • Goal-oriented working mode:
    • define subgoals and milestones
    • (make sure that you can evaluate them, and define criteria of success, scores, etc.)
    • till 17.08.2023 10:00
  • Define topic, sub-problem, open challenge, your approach, toy task, full experiment
  • RAAD2024, 20.12.2023 concept paper with first results
  • Spring 2024 A+ robotics conference paper on simulation experiments.
  • Summer 2024 A+ robotics paper on real robot experiments

M.Sc. Students/Interns

Miscellaneous

 




Meeting Notes June 2023

Meeting 15/06

Research

  • reviews for ECAI (2/6) (Vedant is working on one of them)
  • Research leads:
    1. Dimensionality Collapse of Visual Representations in Reinforcement Learning
    2. Improve SwAV architecture by creating better latent space clusters with the use of Sparse Autoencoders

PhD Registration

  • waiting for admission office response

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin has a working prototype

ML Course

  • Tutorial on pytorch
  • pending grading for assignments 5 and 6

Miscellaneous

  • Summer School
    • Registration done
    • Air tickets booked
    • accommodation booked
  • English course got postponed

 

Meeting 22/06

Research

  • Reviews for ECAI 2023 done.

M.Sc. Students/Interns

ML Course

Miscellaneous

 

Meeting 29/06

Research

M.Sc. Students/Interns

ML Course

Miscellaneous




Meeting Notes May 2023

Meeting 11/05

Research

  • submitted CR-VAE paper to ECAI
  • Research leads:
    1. Dimensionality Collapse of Visual Representations in Reinforcement Learning
    2. Improve SwAV architecture by creating better latent space clusters with the use of Sparse Autoencoders

PhD Registration

  • Signed Application
  • Will hand it over to the Admissions office

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Possible PhD position for Iye Szin
  • Early June first draft presentation

ML Course

  • Assignment 5

Miscellaneous

  • Kleinwassertal

 

Meeting 25/05

Research

Literature Review

  1. Dimensionality Collapse of Visual Representations in Reinforcement Learning
  2. Improve SwAV architecture by creating better latent space clusters with the use of Sparse Autoencoders

 ECAI review papers

  • 6 papers assigned = 16hours(2 days)/paper = 96 hours(12 days)
  • More feasible to review 2 papers.
  • deadline 16 June

M.Sc. Students/Interns

ML Course

  • Graded up to assignment 4
  • Assignment 6 out

Miscellaneous

 




Meeting Notes April 2023

Meeting 20/04

Research

  • reviewing paper for IROS
  • working on CR-VAE paper
  • experiment for the SL competition

PhD Registration

  • waiting for Toussaint’s response
  • maybe contact other professors?
    • rudolf

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin
    • SL competition; deadline May 1

ML Course

  • grades for assignment 2 out

Miscellaneous

  • Summer Schools
    • ProbAI accepted (registration until 26/04)
    • ETH & RLSS waiting list
  • May-June Leaves
    • 19 May
    • 30 May – 6 June
  • Move May 1 to May 10 vacation

 

Meeting 27/04

Research

  • working on CR-VAE paper
  • image encoder for the SL competition

PhD Registration

  • Mentor: Rudolf Lioutikov
  • Application need signature from Rudolf

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin
    • SL competition; deadline May 1

ML Course

  • Assignment 4: Regression

Miscellaneous

  • Summer Schools
    • Accepted:
      • M2LSS registered
      • ProbAI declined it
    • Rejected
      • ETH
      • RLSS
    • Applied:
      • LxMLS
      • Ellis Recommendation letter
  • internship application



Meeting Notes March 2023

Meeting 10/03

Research

  • Plan to participate in the air hockey challenge
  • Literature review for the right model

PhD Registration

  • todo: prepare Email

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin work plan
  • Internship will lead to her thesis

ML Assistantship

  • Syllabus
  • Prepare exercises 

ML Course

  • Moodle to upload files (discussed)
  • Link to latex for the report (done)

Miscellaneous

  • No time to attend the research seminar, ML course takes too much of my time. (discussed)
  • 2 days work from home 31.05 & 01.06
  • Vacation 02.06 – 11.06
  • Medium GPUs for WS in the lab (RTX 3060 or 3070)

 

Meeting 13/03

Research

  • Rebuttal

ML Course

  • Assignment 1 preparation

Meeting 23/03

Research

  • respond to ICML Chairs about reviewer 1
  • Searched for alternative conferences
    • ECAI
    • BCCV
  • Literature review on SSL problems
  • RL Revision

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin steady progress

Ph.D. registration

  • Email send to Toussaint

ML Course

  • Assignment 1 grades
  • post pdf

Miscellaneous

  • Summer School Applications
  • Paper Review accepted for IROS 2023
  • fill the form for IAS retreat

 

Meeting 30/03​

Research

  • waiting for ICML final decision
  • when out, I will compile the comments
    • data augmentation influence on MI
    • etc
  • submit to
  • ECAI
    • ICVS ranking is C
  • Next on: Dimensionality collapse in representation learning
    • currently reading about it
  • Air hockey challenge
    • start with SAC
    • continue with a model-based RL method, like world models

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin struggling with ROS2 but in a logical frame

Ph.D. registration

  • Email sent to Toussaint. Waiting for responce

ML Course

  • Assignment 3 is out

Miscellaneous

  • Summer School Applications
  • Paper Review for IROS 2023
  • submitted the application for IAS retreat

 

Li Jing, Pascal Vincent, Yann LeCun, & Yuandong Tian (2021). Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.09348.



Meeting Notes February 2023

Meeting 02/02

Research

  • Follow up CR-VAE
    • Files on the papers folder
    • Create simple code to run experiments as described on paper
      • Upload on gitea
    • Create a webpage for CR-VAE paper
    • Wait for reviews (March 13)
    • Rebuttal (March 19)
  • Extend the representation learning work towards disentanglement
    • Literature Review
    • Dig deeper into Transformers
  • Literature Review on SOTA RL algorithms
    • Read and implement basic and SOTA RL algorithms
      • Can be the base of an RL course too.
  • Use CR-VAE with SOTA RL algorithms
    • First experiments with SAC
    • Explore sample efficiency
    • Explore gradient flow ablations
  • Develop an AR-ROS2 framework
    • Create a minimal working example of manipulating a physical robot (UR3) with Hololens2

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Melanie
    • Thesis Review
    • Code submission
  • Sign Language project
    • Define the project more clearly
      • Feedback needed
    • Send study details to the applicant
  • AR project
    • Is it within the scope of our research?

ML Assistantship

  • Syllabus
  • Prepare exercises 

Miscellaneous

  • Ph.D. registration
    • Mentor
      • Ortner Ronald?
      • Other UNI?
  • Retreats
    • expectations/requirements
  • Summer School
  • Neural Coffee (ML Reading Group)
    • When: Every Friday 10:00-12:00
    • Where: CPS Kitchen (?)
    • Poster
  • Floor and Desk Lamps

Meeting 16/02

Research

  • create a new research draft
    • implement CURL
    • substitute contrastive learning with CR-VAE representations
  • Literature review on unsupervised learning (Hinton’s work) to find out ankles that have room for improvement
    • write a journal on that

Summer School

  • Cv &  motivation letter feedback
  • Applied

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Melanie: thesis review done
  • Iye Szin:
    • Gave her resources to study (ML/NN/ROS2)
    • Discussed a plan for internship

Ph.D. registration

  • PhD in Computer Science
    • Not possible
    • probably doesn’t matter(?)
  • Call with Dean of Studies
  • Mentor
    • I would like someone exposed to sample-efficient and robust Reinforcement Learning. Hopefully to Robot Learning too
    • Someone that can also extend my scientific network of people  
    • Can I ask professors from other universities?
  • Mentor Candidates
    • Marc Toussaint, Learning and Intelligent Systems lab, TU Berlin, Germany
    • Abhinav Valada, Robot Learning Lab, University of Freiburg, Germany
    • Georgia Chalvatzaki, IAS, TU Darmstadt, Germany
    • Edward Johns, Robot Learning Lab, Imperial College London, UK
    • Sepp Hochreiter, Institute of Machine Learning, JKU Linz, Austria
  • Write a paper with a mentor

ML Course

  • Jupyter notebooks or old code? If Jyputer notebooks, why not google collab?
  • What will the context of lectures be so that I can prepare exercises accordingly?
    • lectures are up
  • 20% of the final exam is from the lab exercises
  • Decide on the lecture format
  • Find an appropriate dataset

Miscellaneous

Science Breakfast @MUL: 14/02 11:00-12:00

Anymal Robot at Mining chair on 15/02?

Effective Communication In Academia Seminar

  • Feedback on CPS presentation template:
    • Size: Make the slide size the same as PowerPoint (more rectangular).
    • Outline (left outline)
      • We could skip the subsections. Keep only the higher sections
      • Make the fonts darker. They are not easily visible on a projector
    • Colors
      • Color of boxes (frames) must become darker, otherwise it is not easily distinguishable from the white background on a projector
  • Idea: Create a Google Slide template
    • Easier to use
    • Can add arrows, circles, etc
    • Easier with tables

Meeting 28/02

Research

  • air-hokey challenge

M.Sc. Students/Interns

  • Iye Szin:
    • starts 2 March
    • Elmar has to sign documents (permanent position)
    • Allocation of HW
    • transpornder

Ph.D. registration

  • Mentor can be from anywhere
  • Mentor has to be a recognized scientist (with a “venia docendi” if he/she is from the German-speaking world)
  • No courses or ects needed
  • the mentor must not be a reviewer of your thesis. He can be an examiner, though.
  • Email to Marc Toussaint?
  • Officially: no obligations
  • Unofficially: propose common reasearch

ML Course

  • Google Collab
    • Uses the jupyter format.
    • Runs online
    • Even supports limited access to GPU/TPU
    • Speeds up learning process
  • Do we need latex?
    • yes
  • Update slides for the Lab accordingly
  • Submission at a folder in the cloud
    • ipynb file
    • report
    • zipped and named : firstname_lastname_m00000_assignment1.zip
  • Online lectures -> webex more stable
  • Google slides template
  • Grading
    • 100 pts
    • latex report: +10
    • optional exercise: +20
  • tweetback: 3 questions

Miscellaneous

    • IAS retreat
    • Melanie’s presentation



Meeting Notes December 2022

Meeting 01/12

Updates

  • experiments with caltech 101
    • too small dataset. Network needs pretraining
    • too big bictures. problems with gpu memory when training and big storage space when saving models
  • refactor code to better scale for more evaluation techniques
  • reviewed XAI methods.
  • Further literature review for representation learning

MS Student Updates

  • Melanie
    • Image Segmentation on Steel Defect dataset
    • Next on: Deep Optical Flow

Other activities

  • Hololens 2 review
  • plan to publish the AR project as internship position
    • LinkedIn -> CPS page?
    • MUL
    • Emails
  • Share Christmas video with the public relations team of MUL
  • linked in account ->  page

Next on

  • do experiments for interpolating latent space
  • run experiments with more datasets
  • reconstruct the paper for
  • literature review on representation learning
  • seminar talk for latent space representation and explainability in neural networks, feature maps. organize meetings (1 paper per week)

Meeting 08/12

Updates

  •  

MS Student Updates

  • Melanie
    •  
    • Next on:

Other activities

  • PhD in Computer Science

Next on

  •  



Meeting Notes November 2022

Meeting 03/11​

Done

  • Virtual machine setup & running experiments
    • speed is x3 slower than RTX 3090

Started working on

  • develop experiments with new dataset (Caltech101)
  • assess experiments
  • test transfer learning capabilities of CR-VAE

MS Students Updates

  • Melanie
    • Object Detection using Resnet
  • Julian
    • basic tutorials on ROS
    • Teleoperation of Turtlebot using PS5 controller
    • UR3 on ROS using MoveIt

Next on

  • description of caltech
  • talk with Konrad about the cluster
  • Update paper with correct results and send it to CVPR
  • Hyperparameter grid search experiments
  • literature review on representation learning
  • experiments with artificial datasets
  • develop methods
    • contrastive learning for spiking neural networks.
    • mode-seeking kl divergence

  

Meeting 11/11​

Progress

  • Updated draft of the CR-VAE paper.
  • Missed author registration deadline for CVPR >_<*
  • Run experiments with simple AE / CR-AE
  • Test if InfoMax objective actually works -> it doesn’t.
  • New implementation of the loss function
  • Tried input normalization and MSE for reconstruction error
  • Assess experiments
  • Hyperparameter grid search experiments for CR-VAE
  • Literature review on representation learning (review paper)
  • Going through ROS 2 documentation
  • Get acquanted with UR3

MS Students Updates

  • Melanie
    • Object Detection using Resnet
    • Next on: Image Segmentation
  • Julian
    • Teleoperation of Turtlebot using PS5 controller
    • Next on: UR3 on Gazebo using MoveIt

Other activities

  • Discussion with Sahar and Vedant about how Sahar could frame her Reinforcement learning research problem.

Next on

  • assess experiments from grid search with the new loss function
    • hopefully there will be some distinct difference of the 3 methods
  • further assess the value of MI as an auxilary task for unsupervised representation learnning
    • show that MI in InfoMax actually introduce noise
  • Denoising AE/CR-AE/VAE/CR-VAE with augmented images.
  • develop experiments with new dataset (Caltech101)
  • description of caltech
  • test transfer learning capabilities of CR-VAE
  • literature review on representation learning
  • experiments with artificial datasets
  • develop methods
    • contrastive learning for spiking neural networks.
    • mode-seeking kl divergence

     

Journal ideas

  • Find the best CL method for CR-VAE
  • Transfer learning

 

Meeting 17/11

Progress

  • gpu grid setbacks
  • caltech101 dataset
  • ROS2 refresh
  • new results

MS Students Updates

  • Melanie
    • Image Segmentation on Steel Defect dataset
    • Next on: Contrastive Learning
  • Julian
    • Sick
    • Next on: UR3 on Gazebo using MoveIt

Other activities

  • Study abroad fair speech

Next on

  • study the big performance gap in KLD between CR-VAE and VAE
  • further assess the value of MI as an auxilary task for unsupervised representation learnning
    • show that MI in InfoMax actually introduce noise
  • Denoising AE/CR-AE/VAE/CR-VAE with augmented images.
  • develop experiments with new dataset (Caltech101)
  • description of caltech
  • test transfer learning capabilities of CR-VAE
  • literature review on representation learning
  • experiments with artificial datasets
  • develop methods
    • contrastive learning for spiking neural networks.
    • mode-seeking kl divergence

     

Journal ideas

  • Find the best CL method for CR-VAE
  • Transfer learning
  • develop a contrastive regularization layer for NN

Meeting 23/11

Updates

  • AAAI paper submission update
    • received an email that the file was never uploaded even though I have a verification email. Still in the process of figuring out
  • new results on smaller architecture -> more distinct results

MS Students Updates

  • Melanie
    • Image Segmentation on Steel Defect dataset
    • Next on: Contrastive Learning
  • Julian
    • Dropped
    • Subject was not aligned with his program
    • working at the lab did not fit his schedule

Other activities

  • christmas & hololens 2 unboxing videos
  • storage place or display for PS5 controler, hololense, etc?
  • plan to publish the AR project as internship position
    • LinkedIn -> CPS page?
    • MUL
    • Emails

Next on

  • reconstruct the paper
  • caltech101 dataset
  • literature review on representation learning
  • Hololens 2 review
  • seminar talk for latent space representation and explainability in neural networks, feature maps. organize meetings (1 paper per week)

Meeting 30/11​

Updates

  • experiments with caltech 101
    • too small dataset. Network needs pretraining
    • too big bictures. problems with gpu memory when training and big storage space when saving models
  • refactor code to better scale for more evaluation techniques
  • reviewed XAI methods.
  • Further literature review for representation learning

MS Student Updates

  • Melanie
    • Image Segmentation on Steel Defect dataset
    • Next on: Deep Optical Flow

Other activities

  • Hololens 2 review
  • plan to publish the AR project as internship position
    • LinkedIn -> CPS page?
    • MUL
    • Emails
  • Share Christmas video with the public relations team of MUL
  • linked in account ->  page

Next on

  • do experiments for interpolating latent space
  • run experiments with more datasets
  • reconstruct the paper for
  • literature review on representation learning
  • seminar talk for latent space representation and explainability in neural networks, feature maps. organize meetings (1 paper per week)



Meeting Notes October 2022

Meeting 21/10

Done

  • experiment assessing with small custom architecture

Next on

  • find a new controller
  • set up computer for Melanie & Julian
  • Virtual machine setup

Meeting 25/10

Done

  • preliminary experiment assessing with resnet architecture
  • schedule new experiments on resnet architecure
  • preparation and meetings with MS studentsmeetings notes per month

Next on

  • assess experiments
  • literature review on representation learning
  • Virtual machine setup
  • experiments with artificial datasets
  • develop methods
    • contrastive learning for spiking neural networks.
    • mode-seeking kl divergence



Retreat notes and progress untill 05.09.2022

Agenda

Next steps after AAAI submission

Upcoming research questions to answer

  1. Normalize total loss
  2. What is the performance of CR-VAE with ResNet architecture on MNIST and CIFAR-10 Datasets?
  3. What is the performance of MoCo on MNIST and CIFAR-10 Datasets?
  4. How does CR-VAE-BIG compare with MoCo?
  5. What is better, SGD or Adam? Why?
  6. What is better, E2E or Modular? Why?
  7. How can we train on ImageNet? Maybe alternative datasets?
  8. New architecture: decoder input -> concatenated latent representations from q and k encoders.
  9. Can we incorporate all representation techniques into one?

post paper submission setbacks

  • KL divergence computation was wrong. When fixed, performance was different
  • With a weight factor of 1 for the KL divergence, the learned features performance in classification task diminish.
  • This report shows this problem.
  • Same behavior for CR-VAE. Untill the reconstruction and the contrastive losses are in the same scale with the KLD loss, the performance will continue to deviate. This happens because KLD dominates numerically the total loss.
  • Way to mitigate it:
    • Descending beta value
      • currently exploring different scheduling techniques
      • report
  • Note: CR-VAE does not seem novel now
  • Normalizing total loss (weight loss inversively with their magnitude) might lead to better performance