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Paper · 1808.07593 · 2018

Caveats for information bottleneck in deterministic scenarios

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

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RepositoryRoleRan
artemyk/ibcurve canonical 1 of 4
FunctionStatusWhere it lives
one_hot Ran artemyk/ibcurve/rundata.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("e222c7d8f6af3765")
GMM_entropy Not yet run artemyk/ibcurve/entropy.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("7871484af5235933")
GMM_negative_LLH Not yet run artemyk/ibcurve/entropy.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("a83047e65c528b73")
Gaussian_entropy Not yet run artemyk/ibcurve/entropy.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("7bc934ace5894a34")

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Abstract

Information bottleneck (IB) is a method for extracting information from one random variable $X$ that is relevant for predicting another random variable $Y$. To do so, IB identifies an intermediate "bottleneck" variable $T$ that has low mutual information $I(X;T)$ and high mutual information $I(Y;T)$. The "IB curve" characterizes the set of bottleneck variables that achieve maximal $I(Y;T)$ for a given $I(X;T)$, and is typically explored by maximizing the "IB Lagrangian", $I(Y;T) - βI(X;T)$. In some cases, $Y$ is a deterministic function of $X$, including many classification problems in supervised learning where the output class $Y$ is a deterministic function of the input $X$. We demonstrate three caveats when using IB in any situation where $Y$ is a deterministic function of $X$: (1) the IB curve cannot be recovered by maximizing the IB Lagrangian for different values of $β$; (2) there are "uninteresting" trivial solutions at all points of the IB curve; and (3) for multi-layer classifiers that achieve low prediction error, different layers cannot exhibit a strict trade-off between compression and prediction, contrary to a recent proposal. We also show that when $Y$ is a small perturbation away from being a deterministic function of $X$, these three caveats arise in an approximate way. To address problem (1), we propose a functional that, unlike the IB Lagrangian, can recover the IB curve in all cases. We demonstrate the three caveats on the MNIST dataset.

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