tl;dr: A image-text dataset benchmark where model training is fixed and participants iterate on data curation strategies.
Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8 billion image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing the resulting model on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple compute scales spanning four orders of magnitude, which enables the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow leads to better training sets. Our best baseline, DataComp-1B, enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points while using the same training procedure and compute. We release \datanet and all accompanying code at www.datacomp.ai.
tl;dr: We present a holistic evaluation framework for text-to-image generation models, assessing their performance across 12 important aspects in real-world deployment. We release all the generated images and evaluation results.
The stunning qualitative improvement of text-to-image models has led to their widespread attention and adoption. However, we lack a comprehensive quantitative understanding of their capabilities and risks. To fill this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Holistic Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models (HEIM). Whereas previous evaluations focus mostly on image-text alignment and image quality, we identify 12 aspects, including text-image alignment, image quality, aesthetics, originality, reasoning, knowledge, bias, toxicity, fairness, robustness, multilinguality, and efficiency. We curate 62 scenarios encompassing these aspects and evaluate 26 state-of-the-art text-to-image models on this benchmark. Our results reveal that no single model excels in all aspects, with different models demonstrating different strengths. We release the generated images and human evaluation results for full transparency at https://crfm.stanford.edu/heim/latest and the code at https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm, which is integrated with the HELM codebase
tl;dr: ClimSim is the largest dataset for multi-scale, physics-informed machine learning climate simulations along with a wide range of baselines for the modeling of atmospheric convection and radiation.
Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore's Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale physical state.
The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.
tl;dr: We crowd-source a high-quality dataset of human demonstrations for assistant-finetuning of LLMs.
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has proven to drastically improve usability and has driven rapid adoption as demonstrated by ChatGPT.
Alignment techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (\textit{SFT}) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (\textit{RLHF}) greatly reduce the required skill and domain knowledge to effectively harness the capabilities of LLMs, increasing their accessibility and utility across various domains.
However, state-of-the-art alignment techniques like \textit{RLHF} rely on high-quality human feedback data, which is expensive to create and often remains proprietary.
In an effort to democratize research on large-scale alignment, we release OpenAssistant Conversations, a human-generated, human-annotated assistant-style conversation corpus consisting of 161,443 messages in 35 different languages, annotated with 461,292 quality ratings, resulting in over 10,000 complete and fully annotated conversation trees.
The corpus is a product of a worldwide crowd-sourcing effort involving over 13,500 volunteers.
Models trained on OpenAssistant Conversations show consistent improvements on standard benchmarks over respective base models.
We release our code\footnote{\git} and data\footnote{\data} under a fully permissive licence.
tl;dr: Practical recommendations for responsibly curating human-centric computer vision datasets for fairness and robustness evaluations, addressing privacy and bias concerns
Human-centric computer vision (HCCV) data curation practices often neglect privacy and bias concerns, leading to dataset retractions and unfair models. HCCV datasets constructed through nonconsensual web scraping lack crucial metadata for comprehensive fairness and robustness evaluations. Current remedies are post hoc, lack persuasive justification for adoption, or fail to provide proper contextualization for appropriate application. Our research focuses on proactive, domain-specific recommendations, covering purpose, privacy and consent, and diversity, for curating HCCV evaluation datasets, addressing privacy and bias concerns. We adopt an ante hoc reflective perspective, drawing from current practices, guidelines, dataset withdrawals, and audits, to inform our considerations and recommendations.
Recent accelerations in multi-modal applications have been made possible with the plethora of image and text data available online. However, the scarcity of analogous data in the medical field, specifically in histopathology, has slowed comparable progress.
To enable similar representation learning for histopathology, we turn to YouTube, an untapped resource of videos, offering $1,087$ hours of valuable educational histopathology videos from expert clinicians.
From YouTube, we curate QUILT: a large-scale vision-language dataset consisting of $802, 144$ image and text pairs.
QUILT was automatically curated using a mixture of models, including large language models, handcrafted algorithms, human knowledge databases, and automatic speech recognition.
In comparison, the most comprehensive datasets curated for histopathology amass only around $200$K samples.
We combine QUILT with datasets from other sources, including Twitter, research papers, and the internet in general, to create an even larger dataset: QUILT-1M, with $1$M paired image-text samples, marking it as the largest vision-language histopathology dataset to date.
We demonstrate the value of QUILT-1M by fine-tuning a pre-trained CLIP model.
Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on both zero-shot and linear probing tasks for classifying new histopathology images across $13$ diverse patch-level datasets of $8$ different sub-pathologies and cross-modal retrieval tasks.
tl;dr: Demonstrate that the popular benchmark the Starcraft Multi-Agent Challenge lacks stochasticity and propose a new version, SMACv2 to address this shortcoming.
The availability of challenging benchmarks has played a key role in the recent progress of machine learning. In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC)
has become a popular testbed for centralised training with decentralised execution. However, after years of sustained improvement on SMAC, algorithms now achieve near-perfect performance. In this work, we conduct new analysis demonstrating that SMAC lacks the stochasticity and partial observability to require complex *closed-loop* policies. In particular, we show that an *open-loop* policy conditioned only on the timestep can achieve non-trivial win rates for many SMAC scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce SMACv2, a new version of the benchmark where scenarios are procedurally generated and require agents to generalise to previously unseen settings (from the same distribution) during evaluation. We also introduce the extended partial observability challenge (EPO), which augments SMACv2 to ensure meaningful partial observability. We show that these changes ensure the benchmark
requires the use of *closed-loop* policies. We evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms on SMACv2 and show that it presents significant challenges not present in the original benchmark. Our analysis illustrates that SMACv2 addresses the discovered deficiencies of SMAC and can help benchmark the next generation of MARL methods. Videos of training are available on our [website](https://sites.google.com/view/smacv2).
tl;dr: MADLAD-400 is a manually audited general domain monolingual dataset based on CommonCrawl spanning 419 languages.
We introduce MADLAD-400, a manually audited, general domain 3T token monolingual dataset based on CommonCrawl, spanning 419 languages. We discuss the limitations revealed by self-auditing MADLAD-400, and the role data auditing had in the dataset creation process. We then train and release a 10.7B-parameter multilingual machine translation model on 250 billion tokens covering over 450 languages using publicly available data, and find that it is competitive with models that are significantly larger, and report the results on different domains. In addition, we train a 8B-parameter language model, and assess the results on few-shot translation. We make the baseline models available to the research community.
We propose a novel neural algorithm for the fundamental problem of computing the entropic optimal transport (EOT) plan between probability distributions which are accessible by samples. Our algorithm is based on the saddle point reformulation of the dynamic version of EOT which is known as the Schrödinger Bridge problem. In contrast to the prior methods for large-scale EOT, our algorithm is end-to-end and consists of a single learning step, has fast inference procedure, and allows handling small values of the entropy regularization coefficient which is of particular importance in some applied problems. Empirically, we show the performance of the method on several large-scale EOT tasks. The code for the ENOT solver can be found at https://github.com/ngushchin/EntropicNeuralOptimalTransport
tl;dr: We introduce open toolkit, benchmarks, and retrieval-augmented language models for theorem proving in Lean.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in proving formal theorems using proof assistants such as Lean. However, existing methods are difficult to reproduce or build on, due to private code, data, and large compute requirements. This has created substantial barriers to research on machine learning methods for theorem proving. This paper removes these barriers by introducing LeanDojo: an open-source Lean playground consisting of toolkits, data, models, and benchmarks. LeanDojo extracts data from Lean and enables interaction with the proof environment programmatically. It contains fine-grained annotations of premises in proofs, providing valuable data for premise selection—a key bottleneck in theorem proving. Using this data, we develop ReProver (Retrieval-Augmented Prover): an LLM-based prover augmented with retrieval for selecting premises from a vast math library. It is inexpensive and needs only one GPU week of training. Our retriever leverages LeanDojo's program analysis capability to identify accessible premises and hard negative examples, which makes retrieval much more effective. Furthermore, we construct a new benchmark consisting of 98,734 theorems and proofs extracted from Lean's math library. It features challenging data split requiring the prover to generalize to theorems relying on novel premises that are never used in training. We use this benchmark for training and evaluation, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ReProver over non-retrieval baselines and GPT-4. We thus provide the first set of open-source LLM-based theorem provers without any proprietary datasets and release it under a permissive MIT license to facilitate further research.
tl;dr: Benchmark containing 6 classification and 6 segmentation datasets tailored to evaluate large pretrained model on remote sensing data
Recent progress in self-supervision has shown that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to substantial increases in generalization to downstream tasks.
Such models, recently coined foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing.
Variants have also been proposed for image data, but their applicability to remote sensing tasks is limited.
To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose a benchmark comprised of six classification and six segmentation tasks, which were carefully curated and adapted to be both relevant to the field and well-suited for model evaluation. We accompany this benchmark with a robust methodology for evaluating models and reporting aggregated results to enable a reliable assessment of progress. Finally, we report results for 20 baselines to gain information about the performance of existing models.
We believe that this benchmark will be a driver of progress across a variety of Earth monitoring tasks.
tl;dr: We present a comprehensive study of task arithmetic and find that linearizing models before fine-tuning improves their performance after editing.
Task arithmetic has recently emerged as a cost-effective and scalable approach to edit pre-trained models directly in weight space: By adding the fine-tuned weights of different tasks, the model's performance can be improved on these tasks, while negating them leads to task forgetting. Yet, our understanding of the effectiveness of task arithmetic and its underlying principles remains limited. We present a comprehensive study of task arithmetic in vision-language models and show that weight disentanglement is the crucial factor that makes it effective. This property arises during pre-training and manifests when distinct directions in weight space govern separate, localized regions in function space associated with the tasks. Notably, we show that fine-tuning models in their tangent space by linearizing them amplifies weight disentanglement. This leads to substantial performance improvements across multiple task arithmetic benchmarks and diverse models. Building on these findings, we provide theoretical and empirical analyses of the neural tangent kernel (NTK) of these models and establish a compelling link between task arithmetic and the spatial localization of the NTK eigenfunctions. Overall, our work uncovers novel insights into the fundamental mechanisms of task arithmetic and offers a more reliable and effective approach to edit pre-trained models through the NTK linearization.
In this paper, we propose a novel extra-gradient difference acceleration algorithm for solving constrained nonconvex-nonconcave (NC-NC) minimax problems. In particular, we design a new extra-gradient difference step to obtain an important quasi-cocoercivity property, which plays a key role to significantly improve the convergence rate in the constrained NC-NC setting without additional structural assumption. Then momentum acceleration is also introduced into our dual accelerating update step. Moreover, we prove that, to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the function $f$, our algorithm attains the complexity $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ in the constrained NC-NC setting, while the best-known complexity bound is $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4})$, where $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\cdot)$ hides logarithmic factors compared to $\mathcal{O}(\cdot)$. As the special cases of the constrained NC-NC setting, our algorithm can also obtain the same complexity $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ for both the nonconvex-concave (NC-C) and convex-nonconcave (C-NC) cases, while the best-known complexity bounds are $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2.5})$ for the NC-C case and $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4})$ for the C-NC case. For fair comparison with existing algorithms, we also analyze the complexity bound to find $\epsilon$-stationary point of the primal function $\phi$ for the constrained NC-C problem, which shows that our algorithm can improve the complexity bound from $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-3})$ to $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the proposed algorithm improves the best-known complexity bounds from $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ and $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-3})$ to $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ in both the NC-NC and NC-C settings.
tl;dr: We sample from GP posteriors using SGD and develop a spectral characterization for why it works, even in cases of non-convergence.
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to conditioning. We explore stochastic gradient algorithms as a computationally efficient method of approximately solving these linear systems: we develop low-variance optimization objectives for sampling from the posterior and extend these to inducing points. Counterintuitively, stochastic gradient descent often produces accurate predictions, even in cases where it does not converge quickly to the optimum. We explain this through a spectral characterization of the implicit bias from non-convergence. We show that stochastic gradient descent produces predictive distributions close to the true posterior both in regions with sufficient data coverage, and in regions sufficiently far away from the data. Experimentally, stochastic gradient descent achieves state-of-the-art performance on sufficiently large-scale or ill-conditioned regression tasks. Its uncertainty estimates match the performance of significantly more expensive baselines on a large-scale Bayesian~optimization~task.
tl;dr: We present Monarch Mixer, a new simple architecture that scales sub-quadratically in sequence length and model dimension.
Machine learning models are increasingly being scaled in both sequence length and model dimension to reach longer contexts and better performance. However, existing architectures such as Transformers scale quadratically along both these axes. We ask: are there performant architectures that can scale sub-quadratically along sequence length and model dimension? We introduce Monarch Mixer (M2), a new architecture that uses the same sub-quadratic primitive along both sequence length and model dimension: Monarch matrices, a simple class of expressive structured matrices that captures many linear transforms, achieves high hardware efficiency on GPUs, and scales sub-quadratically. As a proof of concept, we explore the performance of M2 in three domains: non-causal BERT-style language modeling, ViT-style image classification, and causal GPT-style language modeling. For non-causal BERT-style modeling, M2 matches BERT-base and BERT-large in downstream GLUE quality with up to 27% fewer parameters, and achieves up to 9.1$\times$ higher throughput at sequence length 4K. On ImageNet, M2 outperforms ViT-b by 1% in accuracy, with only half the parameters. Causal GPT-style models introduce a technical challenge: enforcing causality via masking introduces a quadratic bottleneck. To alleviate this bottleneck, we develop a novel theoretical view of Monarch matrices based on multivariate polynomial evaluation and interpolation, which lets us parameterize M2 to be causal while remaining sub-quadratic. Using this parameterization, M2 matches GPT-style Transformers at 360M parameters in pretraining perplexity on The PILE—showing for the first time that it may be possible to match Transformer quality without attention or MLPs.
tl;dr: To facilitate algorithm development for the BASALT benchmark, we provide a large-scale dataset of human demonstrations and evaluations, along with a streamlined codebase for training, evaluating, and analyzing algorithms.
The MineRL BASALT competition has served to catalyze advances in learning from human feedback through four hard-to-specify tasks in Minecraft, such as create and photograph a waterfall. Given the completion of two years of BASALT competitions, we offer to the community a formalized benchmark through the BASALT Evaluation and Demonstrations Dataset (BEDD), which serves as a resource for algorithm development and performance assessment. BEDD consists of a collection of 26 million image-action pairs from nearly 14,000 videos of human players completing the BASALT tasks in Minecraft. It also includes over 3,000 dense pairwise human evaluations of human and algorithmic agents. These comparisons serve as a fixed, preliminary leaderboard for evaluating newly-developed algorithms. To enable this comparison, we present a streamlined codebase for benchmarking new algorithms against the leaderboard. In addition to presenting these datasets, we conduct a detailed analysis of the data from both datasets to guide algorithm development and evaluation. The released code and data are available at https://github.com/minerllabs/basalt-benchmark.
Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, GPT-4 and Claude-2 have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present BIRD, a BIg benchmark for laRge-scale Database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most popular and effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. GPT-4, only achieve 54.89% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. We also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries.
We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research.
The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.
tl;dr: We provide the optimal competitive ratio for explainable k-medians.
We show that the RandomCoordinateCut algorithm gives the optimal competitive ratio for explainable $k$-medians in $\ell_1$. The problem of explainable $k$-medians was introduced by Dasgupta, Frost, Moshkovitz, and Rashtchian in 2020. Several groups of authors independently proposed a simple polynomial-time randomized algorithm for the problem and showed that this algorithm is $O(\log k \log\log k)$ competitive. We provide a tight analysis of the algorithm and prove that its competitive ratio is upper bounded by $2\ln k+2$. This bound matches the $\Omega(\log k)$ lower bound by Dasgupta et al (2020).
tl;dr: This paper theoretically and empirically show the utility of CoT in LLMs.
Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the enormous empirical success, the underlying mechanisms behind CoT and how it unlocks the potential of LLMs remain elusive. In this paper, we take a first step towards theoretically answering these questions. Specifically, we examine the \emph{expressivity} of LLMs with CoT in solving fundamental mathematical and decision-making problems. By using circuit complexity theory, we first give impossibility results showing that bounded-depth Transformers are unable to directly produce correct answers for basic arithmetic/equation tasks unless the model size grows \emph{super-polynomially} with respect to the input length. In contrast, we then prove by construction that autoregressive Transformers of \emph{constant size} suffice to solve both tasks by generating CoT derivations using a commonly used math language format. Moreover, we show LLMs with CoT can handle a general class of decision-making problems known as Dynamic Programming, thus justifying its power in tackling complex real-world tasks. Finally, an extensive set of experiments show that, while Transformers always fail to directly predict the answers, they can consistently learn to generate correct solutions step-by-step given sufficient CoT demonstrations.
tl;dr: We build a model of human concept learning by integrating language models with probabilistic reasoning
A core tension in models of concept learning is that the model must carefully balance the tractability of inference against the expressivity of the hypothesis class. Humans, however, can efficiently learn a broad range of concepts.
We introduce a model of inductive learning that seeks to be human-like in that sense.
It implements a Bayesian reasoning process where a language model first proposes candidate hypotheses expressed in natural language, which are then re-weighed by a prior and a likelihood.
By estimating the prior from human data, we can predict human judgments on learning problems involving numbers and sets, spanning concepts that are generative, discriminative, propositional, and higher-order.
tl;dr: This paper introduces Mesogeos, a large-scale multi-purpose dataset for wildfire modeling in the Mediterranean.
We introduce Mesogeos, a large-scale multi-purpose dataset for wildfire modeling in the Mediterranean. Mesogeos integrates variables representing wildfire drivers (meteorology, vegetation, human activity) and historical records of wildfire ignitions and burned areas for 17 years (2006-2022). It is designed as a cloud-friendly spatio-temporal dataset, namely a datacube, harmonizing all variables in a grid of 1km x 1km x 1-day resolution. The datacube structure offers opportunities to assess machine learning (ML) usage in various wildfire modeling tasks. We extract two ML-ready datasets that establish distinct tracks to demonstrate this potential: (1) short-term wildfire danger forecasting and (2) final burned area estimation given the point of ignition. We define appropriate metrics and baselines to evaluate the performance of models in each track. By publishing the datacube, along with the code to create the ML datasets and models, we encourage the community to foster the implementation of additional tracks for mitigating the increasing threat of wildfires in the Mediterranean.
tl;dr: A multimodal corpus consisting of 100M+ documents with 571M images interleaved in 43B English tokens.
In-context vision and language models like Flamingo support arbitrarily interleaved sequences of images and text as input.
This format not only enables few-shot learning via interleaving independent supervised (image, text) examples, but also, more complex prompts involving interaction between images, e.g., ``What do image A and image B have in common?''
To support this interface, pretraining occurs over web corpora that similarly contain interleaved images+text.
To date, however, large-scale data of this form have not been publicly available.
We release Multimodal C4, an augmentation of the popular text-only C4 corpus with images interleaved.
We use a linear assignment algorithm to place images into longer bodies of text using CLIP features, a process that we show outperforms alternatives.
Multimodal C4 spans everyday topics like cooking, travel, technology, etc. A manual inspection of a random sample of documents shows that a vast majority (88\%) of images are topically relevant, and that linear assignment frequently selects individual sentences specifically well-aligned with each image (80\%).
After filtering NSFW images, ads, etc., the resulting corpus consists of 101.2M documents with 571M images interleaved in 43B English tokens.
tl;dr: We establish the first unified theory connecting Bayesian, variational Bayesian, and ensemble methods for deep learning by leveraging Wasserstein Gradient Flows.
We establish the first mathematically rigorous link between Bayesian, variational Bayesian, and ensemble methods. A key step towards this it to reformulate the non-convex optimisation problem typically encountered in deep learning as a convex optimisation in the space of probability measures. On a technical level, our contribution amounts to studying generalised variational inference through the lense of Wasserstein gradient flows. The result is a unified theory of various seemingly disconnected approaches that are commonly used for uncertainty quantification in deep learning---including deep ensembles and (variational) Bayesian methods. This offers a fresh perspective on the reasons behind the success of deep ensembles over procedures based on parameterised variational inference, and allows the derivation of new ensembling schemes with convergence guarantees. We showcase this by proposing a family of interacting deep ensembles with direct parallels to the interactions of particle systems in thermodynamics, and use our theory to prove the convergence of these algorithms to a well-defined global minimiser on the space of probability measures.
tl;dr: We enable machine learning driven research on phase change phenomena by providing a comprehensive, open source dataset of high fidelity Boiling Simulations and relevant benchmarks.
In the field of phase change phenomena, the lack of accessible and diverse datasets suitable for machine learning (ML) training poses a significant challenge. Existing experimental datasets are often restricted, with limited availability and sparse ground truth, impeding our understanding of this complex multiphysics phenomena. To bridge this gap, we present the BubbleML dataset which leverages physics-driven simulations to provide accurate ground truth information for various boiling scenarios, encompassing nucleate pool boiling, flow boiling, and sub-cooled boiling. This extensive dataset covers a wide range of parameters, including varying gravity conditions, flow rates, sub-cooling levels, and wall superheat, comprising 79 simulations. BubbleML is validated against experimental observations and trends, establishing it as an invaluable resource for ML research. Furthermore, we showcase its potential to facilitate the exploration of diverse downstream tasks by introducing two benchmarks: (a) optical flow analysis to capture bubble dynamics, and (b) neural PDE solvers for learning temperature and flow dynamics. The BubbleML dataset and its benchmarks aim to catalyze progress in ML-driven research on multiphysics phase change phenomena, providing robust baselines for the development and comparison of state-of-the-art techniques and models.
A private learner is trained on a sample of labeled points and generatesa hypothesis that can be used for predicting the labels of newly sampled points while protecting the privacy of the training set [Kasiviswannathan et al., FOCS 2008]. Research uncovered that private learners may need to exhibit significantly higher sample complexity than non-private learners as is the case with, e.g., learning of one-dimensional threshold functions [Bun et al., FOCS 2015, Alon et al., STOC 2019].
We explore prediction as an alternative to learning. Instead of putting forward a hypothesis, a predictor answers a stream of classification queries. Earlier work has considered a private prediction model with just a single classification query [Dwork and Feldman, COLT 2018]. We observe that when answering a stream of queries, a predictor must modify the hypothesis it uses over time, and, furthermore, that it must use the queries for this modification, hence introducing potential privacy risks with respect to the queries themselves.
We introduce private everlasting prediction taking into account the privacy of both the training set and the (adaptively chosen) queries made to the predictor. We then present a generic construction of private everlasting predictors in the PAC model. The sample complexity of the initial training sample in our construction is quadratic (up to polylog factors) in the VC dimension of the concept class. Our construction allows prediction for all concept classes with finite VC dimension, and in particular threshold functions with constant size initial training sample, even when considered over infinite domains, whereas it is known that the sample complexity of privately learning threshold functions must grow as a function of the domain size and hence is impossible for infinite domains.
tl;dr: Some have argued that some improvements in model capabilities are unpredictable; we argue that many claimed emergent capabilities are predictable, either using better statistics or alternative metrics
Recent work claims that large language models display \textit{emergent abilities}, abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in larger-scale models.
What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold: their \textit{sharpness}, transitioning seemingly instantaneously from not present to present, and their \textit{unpredictability}, appearing at seemingly unforeseeable model scales.
Here, we present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, emergent abilities appear due the researcher’s choice of metric rather than due to fundamental changes in model behavior with scale. Specifically, nonlinear or discontinuous metrics produce apparent emergent abilities, whereas linear or continuous metrics produce smooth, continuous, predictable changes in model performance.
We present our alternative explanation in a simple mathematical model, then test it in three complementary ways: we (1) make, test and confirm three predictions on the effect of metric choice using the InstructGPT/GPT-3 family on tasks with claimed emergent abilities, (2) make, test and confirm two predictions about metric choices in a meta-analysis of emergent abilities on BIG-Bench; and (3) show how to choose metrics to produce never-before-seen seemingly emergent abilities in multiple vision tasks across diverse deep networks.
Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.
tl;dr: We present an extensive comparison of contrastive representation learning and representation learning via image captioning from large image-text data sets.
Contrastive pretraining on image-text pairs from the web is one of the most popular large-scale pretraining strategies for vision backbones, especially in the context of large multimodal models. At the same time, image captioning on this type of data is commonly considered an inferior pretraining strategy. In this paper, we perform a fair comparison of these two pretraining strategies, carefully matching training data, compute, and model capacity. Using a standard encoder-decoder transformer, we find that captioning alone is surprisingly effective: on classification tasks, captioning produces vision encoders competitive with contrastively pretrained encoders, while surpassing them on vision & language tasks. We further analyze the effect of the model architecture and scale, as well as the pretraining data on the representation quality, and find that captioning exhibits the same or better scaling behavior along these axes. Overall our results show that plain image captioning is a more powerful pretraining strategy than was previously believed.
tl;dr: We propose and validate a simulator that enables research on learning from human feedback at a low cost.
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have seen widespread adoption due to their ability to follow user instructions well.
Developing these LLMs involves a complex yet poorly understood workflow requiring training with human feedback. Replicating and understanding this instruction-following process faces three major challenges: the high cost of data collection, the lack of trustworthy evaluation, and the absence of reference method implementations. We address these bottlenecks with AlpacaFarm, a simulator that enables research and development for learning from feedback at a low cost. First, we design LLM based simulator for human feedback that is 45x cheaper than crowdworkers and displays high agreement with humans. Second, we identify an evaluation dataset representative of real-world instructions and propose an automatic evaluation procedure. Third, we contribute reference implementations for several methods (PPO, best-of-n, expert iteration, among others) that learn from pairwise feedback. Finally, as an end-to-end validation of AlpacaFarm, we train and evaluate eleven models on 10k pairs of human feedback and show that rankings of models trained in AlpacaFarm match rankings of models trained on human data. As a demonstration of the research possible in AlpacaFarm, we find that methods that use a reward model can substantially improve over supervised fine-tuning and that our reference PPO implementation leads to a +10% win-rate improvement against Davinci003.
tl;dr: We develop a method that enabling the finetuning of a 65B model on a single GPU without performance degradation achieving ChatGPT-quaity results on the Vicuna benchmark.
We present QLoRA, an efficient finetuning approach that reduces memory usage enough to finetune a 65B parameter model on a single 48GB GPU while preserving full 16-bit finetuning task performance. QLoRA backpropagates gradients through a frozen, 4-bit quantized pretrained language model into Low Rank Adapters~(LoRA). Our best model family, which we name Guanaco, outperforms all previous openly released models on the Vicuna benchmark, reaching 99.3% of the performance level of ChatGPT while only requiring 24 hours of finetuning on a single GPU. QLoRA introduces a number of innovations to save memory without sacrificing performance: (a) 4-bit NormalFloat (NF4), a new data type that is information-theoretically optimal for normally distributed weights (b) Double Quantization to reduce the average memory footprint by quantizing the quantization constants, and (c) Paged Optimziers to manage memory spikes. We use QLoRA to finetune more than 1,000 models, providing a detailed analysis of instruction following and chatbot performance across 8 instruction datasets, multiple model types (LLaMA, T5), and model scales that would be infeasible to run with regular finetuning (e.g. 33B and 65B parameter models). Our results show that QLoRA finetuning on a small, high-quality dataset leads to state-of-the-art results, even when using smaller models than the previous SoTA. We provide a detailed analysis of chatbot performance based on both human and GPT-4 evaluations, showing that GPT-4 evaluations are a cheap and reasonable alternative to human evaluation. Furthermore, we find that current chatbot benchmarks are not trustworthy to accurately evaluate the performance levels of chatbots. A lemon-picked analysis demonstrates where Guanaco fails compared to ChatGPT. We release all of our models and code, including CUDA kernels for 4-bit training.
tl;dr: Fine-tuning with RLHF is complicated; we show that it doesn't need to be.
While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the relative quality of model generations and fine-tune the unsupervised LM to align with these preferences, often with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF is a complex and often unstable procedure, first fitting a reward model that reflects the human preferences, and then fine-tuning the large unsupervised LM using reinforcement learning to maximize this estimated reward without drifting too far from the original model. In this paper, we leverage a mapping between reward functions and optimal policies to show that this constrained reward maximization problem can be optimized exactly with a single stage of policy training, essentially solving a classification problem on the human preference data. The resulting algorithm, which we call Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), is stable, performant, and computationally lightweight, eliminating the need for fitting a reward model, sampling from the LM during fine-tuning, or performing significant hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that DPO can fine-tune LMs to align with human preferences as well as or better than existing methods. Notably, fine-tuning with DPO exceeds RLHF's ability to control sentiment of generations and improves response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue while being substantially simpler to implement and train.
tl;dr: A novel, extendable and user-friendly Benchmark Platform for MetaBBO with Reinforcement Learning.
Recently, Meta-Black-Box Optimization with Reinforcement Learning (MetaBBO-RL) has showcased the power of leveraging RL at the meta-level to mitigate manual fine-tuning of low-level black-box optimizers. However, this field is hindered by the lack of a unified benchmark. To fill this gap, we introduce MetaBox, the first benchmark platform expressly tailored for developing and evaluating MetaBBO-RL methods. MetaBox offers a flexible algorithmic template that allows users to effortlessly implement their unique designs within the platform. Moreover, it provides a broad spectrum of over 300 problem instances, collected from synthetic to realistic scenarios, and an extensive library of 19 baseline methods, including both traditional black-box optimizers and recent MetaBBO-RL methods. Besides, MetaBox introduces three standardized performance metrics, enabling a more thorough assessment of the methods. In a bid to illustrate the utility of MetaBox for facilitating rigorous evaluation and in-depth analysis, we carry out a wide-ranging benchmarking study on existing MetaBBO-RL methods. Our MetaBox is open-source and accessible at: https://github.com/GMC-DRL/MetaBox.
Gaussian processes are used in many machine learning applications that rely on uncertainty quantification. Recently, computational tools for working with these models in geometric settings, such as when inputs lie on a Riemannian manifold, have been developed. This raises the question: can these intrinsic models be shown theoretically to lead to better performance, compared to simply embedding all relevant quantities into $\mathbb{R}^d$ and using the restriction of an ordinary Euclidean Gaussian process? To study this, we prove optimal contraction rates for intrinsic Matérn Gaussian processes defined on compact Riemannian manifolds. We also prove analogous rates for extrinsic processes using trace and extension theorems between manifold and ambient Sobolev spaces: somewhat surprisingly, the rates obtained turn out to coincide with those of the intrinsic processes, provided that their smoothness parameters are matched appropriately. We illustrate these rates empirically on a number of examples, which, mirroring prior work, show that intrinsic processes can achieve better performance in practice. Therefore, our work shows that finer-grained analyses are needed to distinguish between different levels of data-efficiency of geometric Gaussian processes, particularly in settings which involve small data set sizes and non-asymptotic behavior.
tl;dr: We formally define deception in the causal game framework and mitigate deception in reinforcement learning agents and language models.
Deceptive agents are a challenge for the safety, trustworthiness, and cooperation of AI systems. We focus on the problem that agents might deceive in order to achieve their goals (for instance, in our experiments with language models, the goal of being evaluated as truthful).
There are a number of existing definitions of deception in the literature on game theory and symbolic AI, but there is no overarching theory of deception for learning agents in games.
We introduce a formal
definition of deception in structural causal games, grounded in the philosophy
literature, and applicable to real-world machine learning systems.
Several examples and results illustrate that our formal definition aligns with the philosophical and commonsense meaning of deception.
Our main technical result is to provide graphical criteria for deception.
We show, experimentally, that these results can be used to mitigate deception in reinforcement learning agents and language models.
We present DiffInfinite, a hierarchical diffusion model that generates arbitrarily large histological images while preserving long-range correlation structural information. Our approach first generates synthetic segmentation masks, subsequently used as conditions for the high-fidelity generative diffusion process. The proposed sampling method can be scaled up to any desired image size while only requiring small patches for fast training. Moreover, it can be parallelized more efficiently than previous large-content generation methods while avoiding tiling artifacts. The training leverages classifier-free guidance to augment a small, sparsely annotated dataset with unlabelled data. Our method alleviates unique challenges in histopathological imaging practice: large-scale information, costly manual annotation, and protective data handling. The biological plausibility of DiffInfinite data is evaluated in a survey by ten experienced pathologists as well as a downstream classification and segmentation task. Samples from the model score strongly on anti-copying metrics which is relevant for the protection of patient data.
tl;dr: A RLHF dataset that decouples the dimensions of harmlessness and helpfulness in human preference
In this paper, we introduce the BeaverTails dataset, aimed at fostering research on safety alignment in large language models (LLMs). This dataset uniquely separates annotations of helpfulness and harmlessness for question-answering pairs, thus offering distinct perspectives on these crucial attributes. In total, we have gathered safety meta-labels for 333,963 question-answer (QA) pairs and 361,903 pairs of expert comparison data for both the helpfulness and harmlessness metrics. We further showcase applications of BeaverTails in content moderation and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), emphasizing its potential for practical safety measures in LLMs. We believe this dataset provides vital resources for the community, contributing towards the safe development and deployment of LLMs. Our project page is available at the following URL: https://sites.google.com/view/pku-beavertails.
tl;dr: A Multi-Modal Question Answering Dataset for Electronic Health Records with Chest X-ray Images
Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which contain patients' medical histories in various multi-modal formats, often overlook the potential for joint reasoning across imaging and table modalities underexplored in current EHR Question Answering (QA) systems. In this paper, we introduce EHRXQA, a novel multi-modal question answering dataset combining structured EHRs and chest X-ray images. To develop our dataset, we first construct two uni-modal resources: 1) The MIMIC- CXR-VQA dataset, our newly created medical visual question answering (VQA) benchmark, specifically designed to augment the imaging modality in EHR QA, and 2) EHRSQL (MIMIC-IV), a refashioned version of a previously established table-based EHR QA dataset. By integrating these two uni-modal resources, we successfully construct a multi-modal EHR QA dataset that necessitates both uni-modal and cross-modal reasoning. To address the unique challenges of multi-modal questions within EHRs, we propose a NeuralSQL-based strategy equipped with an external VQA API. This pioneering endeavor enhances engagement with multi-modal EHR sources and we believe that our dataset can catalyze advances in real-world medical scenarios such as clinical decision-making and research. EHRXQA is available at https://github.com/baeseongsu/ehrxqa.
There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AitW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10–13), and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance, and, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.
tl;dr: A large-scale digital library for head avatars with three key attributes: high-fidelity, high diversity and rich annotation. 5 benchmarks with 16 methods.
Synthesizing high-fidelity head avatars is a central problem for computer vision and graphics. While head avatar synthesis algorithms have advanced rapidly, the best ones still face great obstacles in real-world scenarios. One of the vital causes is the inadequate datasets -- 1) current public datasets can only support researchers to explore high-fidelity head avatars in one or two task directions; 2) these datasets usually contain digital head assets with limited data volume, and narrow distribution over different attributes, such as expressions, ages, and accessories. In this paper, we present RenderMe-360, a comprehensive 4D human head dataset to drive advance in head avatar algorithms across different scenarios. It contains massive data assets, with 243+ million complete head frames and over 800k video sequences from 500 different identities captured by multi-view cameras at 30 FPS. It is a large-scale digital library for head avatars with three key attributes: 1) High Fidelity: all subjects are captured in 360 degrees via 60 synchronized, high-resolution 2K cameras. 2) High Diversity: The collected subjects vary from different ages, eras, ethnicities, and cultures, providing abundant materials with distinctive styles in appearance and geometry. Moreover, each subject is asked to perform various dynamic motions, such as expressions and head rotations, which further extend the richness of assets. 3) Rich Annotations: the dataset provides annotations with different granularities: cameras' parameters, background matting, scan, 2D/3D facial landmarks, FLAME fitting, and text description.
Based on the dataset, we build a comprehensive benchmark for head avatar research, with 16 state-of-the-art methods performed on five main tasks: novel view synthesis, novel expression synthesis, hair rendering, hair editing, and talking head generation. Our experiments uncover the strengths and flaws of state-of-the-art methods. RenderMe-360 opens the door for future exploration in modern head avatars. All of the data, code, and models will be publicly available at https://renderme-360.github.io/.
tl;dr: We annotate Dollar Street, a geographically diverse image datasets of household objects, with factors to explain how object differ and why classifier mistakes arise across incomes and geographies.
Despite impressive advances in object-recognition, deep learning systems’ performance degrades significantly across geographies and lower income levels---raising pressing concerns of inequity. Addressing such performance gaps remains a challenge, as little is understood about why performance degrades across incomes or geographies.
We take a step in this direction by annotating images from Dollar Street, a popular benchmark of geographically and economically diverse images, labeling each image with factors such as color, shape, and background. These annotations unlock a new granular view into how objects differ across incomes/regions. We then use these object differences to pinpoint model vulnerabilities across incomes and regions.
We study a range of modern vision models, finding that performance disparities are most associated with differences in _texture, occlusion_, and images with _darker lighting_.
We illustrate how insights from our factor labels can surface mitigations to improve models' performance disparities.
As an example, we show that mitigating a model's vulnerability to texture
can improve performance on the lower income level.
**We release all the factor annotations along with an interactive dashboard
to facilitate research into more equitable vision systems.**
tl;dr: We introduce the first video-based retinal vessel dataset (RVD), a collection of 635 smartphone-based videos with detailed vessel annotation.
Retinal vessel segmentation is generally grounded in image-based datasets collected with bench-top devices.
The static images naturally lose the dynamic characteristics of retina fluctuation, resulting in diminished dataset richness, and the usage of bench-top devices further restricts dataset scalability due to its limited accessibility. Considering these limitations, we introduce the first video-based retinal dataset by employing handheld devices for data acquisition. The dataset comprises 635 smartphone-based fundus videos collected from four different clinics, involving 415 patients from 50 to 75 years old. It delivers comprehensive and precise annotations of retinal structures in both spatial and temporal dimensions, aiming to advance the landscape of vasculature segmentation. Specifically, the dataset provides three levels of spatial annotations: binary vessel masks for overall retinal structure delineation, general vein-artery masks for distinguishing the vein and artery, and fine-grained vein-artery masks for further characterizing the granularities of each artery and vein. In addition, the dataset offers temporal annotations that capture the vessel pulsation characteristics, assisting in detecting ocular diseases that require fine-grained recognition of hemodynamic fluctuation. In application, our dataset exhibits a significant domain shift with respect to data captured by bench-top devices, thus posing great challenges to existing methods. Thanks to rich annotations and data scales, our dataset potentially paves the path for more advanced retinal analysis and accurate disease diagnosis. In the experiments, we provide evaluation metrics and benchmark results on our dataset, reflecting both the potential and challenges it offers for vessel segmentation tasks. We hope this challenging dataset would significantly contribute to the development of eye disease diagnosis and early prevention.
tl;dr: We provide (almost) optimal learners, in terms of their sample complexity, for realizable regression in the context of PAC learning and in the context of online learning.
In this work, we aim to characterize the statistical complexity of realizable regression both in the PAC learning setting and the online learning setting. Previous work had established the sufficiency of finiteness of the fat shattering dimension for PAC learnability and the necessity of finiteness of the scaled Natarajan dimension, but little progress had been made towards a more complete characterization since the work of Simon 1997 (SICOMP '97). To this end, we first introduce a minimax instance optimal learner for realizable regression and propose a novel dimension that both qualitatively and quantitatively characterizes which classes of real-valued predictors are learnable. We then identify a combinatorial dimension related to the graph dimension that characterizes ERM learnability in the realizable setting. Finally, we establish a necessary condition for learnability based on a combinatorial dimension related to the DS dimension, and conjecture that it may also be sufficient in this context. Additionally, in the context of online learning we provide a dimension that characterizes the minimax instance optimal cumulative loss up to a constant factor and design an optimal online learner for realizable regression, thus resolving an open question raised by Daskalakis and Golowich in STOC '22.
tl;dr: We propose a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models considering diverse perspectives – including toxicity, stereotype bias, robustness, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications to healthcare and finance – where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives – including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially due to the reason that GPT-4 follows the (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/.
Many of the most commonly explored natural language processing (NLP) information extraction tasks can be thought of as evaluations of declarative knowledge, or fact-based information extraction. Procedural knowledge extraction, i.e., breaking down a described process into a series of steps, has received much less attention, perhaps in part due to the lack of structured datasets that capture the knowledge extraction process from end-to-end. To address this unmet need, we present FlaMBé (Flow annotations for Multiverse Biological entities), a collection of expert-curated datasets across a series of complementary tasks that capture procedural knowledge in biomedical texts. This dataset is inspired by the observation that one ubiquitous source of procedural knowledge that is described as unstructured text is within academic papers describing their methodology. The workflows annotated in FlaMBé are from texts in the burgeoning field of single cell research, a research area that has become notorious for the number of software tools and complexity of workflows used. Additionally, FlaMBé provides, to our knowledge, the largest manually curated named entity recognition (NER) and disambiguation (NED) datasets for tissue/cell type, a fundamental biological entity that is critical for knowledge extraction in the biomedical research domain. Beyond providing a valuable dataset to enable further development of NLP models for procedural knowledge extraction, automating the process of workflow mining also has important implications for advancing reproducibility in biomedical research.
tl;dr: We introduce the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC), the first public challenge to tackle this task and propose corresponding metrics.
Simulation with realistic, interactive agents represents a key task for autonomous vehicle software development. In this work, we introduce the Waymo Open Sim Agents Challenge (WOSAC). WOSAC is the first public challenge to tackle this task and propose corresponding metrics. The goal of the challenge is to stimulate the design of realistic simulators that can be used to evaluate and train a behavior model for autonomous driving. We outline our evaluation methodology, present results for a number of different baseline simulation agent methods, and analyze several submissions to the 2023 competition which ran from March 16, 2023 to May 23, 2023. The WOSAC evaluation server remains open for submissions and we discuss open problems for the task.
tl;dr: A method to construct E(n)- and O(n)-equivariant neural networks using Clifford algebras.
We introduce Clifford Group Equivariant Neural Networks: a novel approach for constructing $\mathrm{O}(n)$- and $\mathrm{E}(n)$-equivariant models. We identify and study the *Clifford group*: a subgroup inside the Clifford algebra tailored to achieve several favorable properties. Primarily, the group's action forms an orthogonal automorphism that extends beyond the typical vector space to the entire Clifford algebra while respecting the multivector grading. This leads to several non-equivalent subrepresentations corresponding to the multivector decomposition. Furthermore, we prove that the action respects not just the vector space structure of the Clifford algebra but also its multiplicative structure, i.e., the geometric product. These findings imply that every polynomial in multivectors, including their grade projections, constitutes an equivariant map with respect to the Clifford group, allowing us to parameterize equivariant neural network layers. An advantage worth mentioning is that we obtain expressive layers that can elegantly generalize to inner-product spaces of any dimension. We demonstrate, notably from a single core implementation, state-of-the-art performance on several distinct tasks, including a three-dimensional $n$-body experiment, a four-dimensional Lorentz-equivariant high-energy physics experiment, and a five-dimensional convex hull experiment.
The design of \emph{de novo} functional proteins that bind with specific ligand molecules is crucial in various domains like therapeutics and bio-engineering. One vital yet challenging step is to design the protein pocket, the cavity region of protein where the ligand binds with. Existing methods suffer from inefficient generation, insufficient context modeling (ligand molecule), and incapability of generating sidechain atoms. To overcome the limitations, we propose a \textbf{F}ull-\textbf{A}tom \textbf{I}terative \textbf{R}efinement framework (\textbf{FAIR}) for protein pocket sequence (i.e., residue types) and 3D structure co-design. Generally, FAIR consists of two steps that follow a coarse-to-fine pipeline (backbone atoms to full atoms including sidechain) for full-atom generation. For efficiency, all residue types and structures are updated together in each round (i.e., full-shot refinement). In the first step, the residue types and backbone coordinates are updated with a hierarchical context encoder and two structure refinement modules capturing inter-residue and pocket-ligand interactions. The second step further models the sidechain atoms of pockets and updates residue types to achieve sequence-structure consistency. The structure of the binding ligand is also updated along with the above refinement iterations accounting for its flexibility. Finally, extensive evaluations show
that FAIR outperforms baselines in efficiently designing high-quality pocket sequences and structures. Specifically, the average improvements on AAR and RMSD are over 10$\%$.
As societal awareness of climate change grows, corporate climate policy engagements are attracting attention.
We propose a dataset to estimate corporate climate policy engagement from various PDF-formatted documents.
Our dataset comes from LobbyMap (a platform operated by global think tank InfluenceMap) that provides engagement categories and stances on the documents.
To convert the LobbyMap data into the structured dataset, we developed a pipeline using text extraction and OCR.
Our contributions are: (i) Building an NLP dataset including 10K documents on corporate climate policy engagement. (ii) Analyzing the properties and challenges of the dataset. (iii) Providing experiments for the dataset using pre-trained language models.
The results show that while Longformer outperforms baselines and other pre-trained models, there is still room for significant improvement.
We hope our work begins to bridge research on NLP and climate change.
tl;dr: An optimal and extremely scalable algorithm for differentially private marginals with unbiased noise, exact variance/covariance guarantees and customizable loss function
Noisy marginals are a common form of confidentiality-protecting data release and are useful for many downstream tasks such as contingency table analysis, construction of Bayesian networks, and even synthetic data generation. Privacy mechanisms that provide unbiased noisy answers to linear queries (such as marginals) are known as matrix mechanisms.
We propose ResidualPlanner, a matrix mechanism for marginals with Gaussian noise that is both optimal and scalable. ResidualPlanner can optimize for many loss functions that can be written as a convex function of marginal variances (prior work was restricted to just one predefined objective function). ResidualPlanner can optimize the accuracy of marginals in large scale settings in seconds, even when the previous state of the art (HDMM) runs out of memory. It even runs on datasets with 100 attributes in a couple of minutes. Furthermore ResidualPlanner can efficiently compute variance/covariance values for each marginal (prior methods quickly run out of memory, even for relatively small datasets).
tl;dr: We prove that online SGD on a smoothed loss achieves optimal sample complexity for learning single index models.
We focus on the task of learning a single index model $\sigma(w^\star \cdot x)$ with respect to the isotropic Gaussian distribution in $d$ dimensions. Prior work has shown that the sample complexity of learning $w^\star$ is governed by the information exponent $k^\star$ of the link function $\sigma$, which is defined as the index of the first nonzero Hermite coefficient of $\sigma$. Ben Arous et al. (2021) showed that $n \gtrsim d^{k^\star-1}$ samples suffice for learning $w^\star$ and that this is tight for online SGD. However, the CSQ lower bound for gradient based methods only shows that $n \gtrsim d^{k^\star/2}$ samples are necessary. In this work, we close the gap between the upper and lower bounds by showing that online SGD on a smoothed loss learns $w^\star$ with $n \gtrsim d^{k^\star/2}$ samples. We also draw connections to statistical analyses of tensor PCA and to the implicit regularization effects of minibatch SGD on empirical losses.
tl;dr: We introduce video timeline modeling, provide the YouTube-News-Timeline dataset, propose evaluation metrics, and benchmark baselines.
In this paper, we present a novel problem, namely video timeline modeling. Our objective is to create a video-associated timeline from a set of videos related to a specific topic, thereby facilitating the content and structure understanding of the story being told. This problem has significant potential in various real-world applications, for instance, news story summarization. To bootstrap research in this area, we curate a realistic benchmark dataset, YouTube-News-Timeline, consisting of over $12$k timelines and $300$k YouTube news videos. Additionally, we propose a set of quantitative metrics to comprehensively evaluate and compare methodologies. With such a testbed, we further develop and benchmark several deep learning approaches to tackling this problem. We anticipate that this exploratory work will pave the way for further research in video timeline modeling. The assets are available via https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/video_timeline_modeling.
tl;dr: We make the first attempt to annotate the relevance intensity across related affections.
Human communication has a multi-modal and multi-affection nature. The inter-relatedness of different emotions and sentiments poses a challenge to jointly detect multiple human affections with multi-modal clues. Recent advances in this field employed multi-task learning paradigms to render the inter-relatedness across tasks, but the scarcity of publicly available resources sets a limit to the potential of works. To fill this gap, we build the first Chinese Multi-modal Multi-Affection conversation (CMMA) dataset, which contains 3,000 multi-party conversations and 21,795 multi-modal utterances collected from various styles of TV-series. CMMA contains a wide variety of affection labels, including sentiment, emotion, sarcasm and humor, as well as the novel inter-correlations values between certain pairs of tasks. Moreover, it provides the topic and speaker information in conversations, which promotes better modeling of conversational context. On the dataset, we empirically analyze the influence of different data modalities and conversational contexts on different affection analysis tasks, and exhibit the practical benefit of inter-task correlations. The full dataset will be publicly available for research\footnote{https://github.com/annoymity2022/Chinese-Dataset}
tl;dr: In this work, we focused on unsupervised and supervised online label shift settings. For both settings, we developed algorithms with minimax optimal dynamic regret. Experimental results on numerous datasets highlight the effectiveness of our methods.
This paper focuses on supervised and unsupervised online label shift,
where the class marginals $Q(y)$ varies
but the class-conditionals $Q(x|y)$ remain invariant. In the unsupervised setting, our goal is to adapt a learner, trained on some offline labeled data, to changing label distributions given unlabeled online data. In the supervised setting, we must both learn a classifier and adapt to the dynamically evolving class marginals given only labeled online data. We develop novel algorithms that reduce the adaptation problem to online regression and guarantee optimal dynamic regret without any prior knowledge of the extent of drift in the label distribution. Our solution is based on bootstrapping the estimates of *online regression oracles* that track the drifting proportions. Experiments across numerous simulated and real-world online label shift scenarios demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approaches, often achieving 1-3% improvement in accuracy while being sample and computationally efficient. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anon-djiwh/OnlineLabelShift
tl;dr: We fit a model of human perception on a synthetic dataset, and show that it aligns better with image attributes that humans are sensitive to.
Current perceptual similarity metrics operate at the level of pixels and patches. These metrics compare images in terms of their low-level colors and textures, but fail to capture mid-level similarities and differences in image layout, object pose, and semantic content. In this paper, we develop a perceptual metric that assesses images holistically. Our first step is to collect a new dataset of human similarity judgments over image pairs that are alike in diverse ways. Critical to this dataset is that judgments are nearly automatic and shared by all observers. To achieve this we use recent text-to-image models to create synthetic pairs that are perturbed along various dimensions. We observe that popular perceptual metrics fall short of explaining our new data, and we introduce a new metric, DreamSim, tuned to better align with human perception. We analyze how our metric is affected by different visual attributes, and find that it focuses heavily on foreground objects and semantic content while also being sensitive to color and layout. Notably, despite being trained on synthetic data, our metric generalizes to real images, giving strong results on retrieval and reconstruction tasks. Furthermore, our metric outperforms both prior learned metrics and recent large vision models on these tasks. Our project page: https://dreamsim-nights.github.io/
tl;dr: We prove identifiability of causal representation learning from interventions with general nonlinear mixing functions and unknown, latent interventions, and propose a contrastive learning algorithm to learn it.
We study the problem of learning causal representations from unknown, latent interventions in a general setting, where the latent distribution is Gaussian but the mixing function is completely general. We prove strong identifiability results given unknown single-node interventions, i.e., without having access to the intervention targets. This generalizes prior works which have focused on weaker classes, such as linear maps or paired counterfactual data. This is also the first instance of identifiability from non-paired interventions for deep neural network embeddings and general causal structures. Our proof relies on carefully uncovering the high-dimensional geometric structure present in the data distribution after a non-linear density transformation, which we capture by analyzing quadratic forms of precision matrices of the latent distributions. Finally, we propose a contrastive algorithm to identify the latent variables in practice and evaluate its performance on various tasks.
tl;dr: Scaling laws for training LLMs on multiple epochs & code filling + filtering experiments
The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are freely available at https://github.com/huggingface/datablations.
We introduce general tools for designing efficient private estimation algorithms, in the high-dimensional settings, whose statistical guarantees almost match those of the best known non-private algorithms.
To illustrate our techniques, we consider two problems: recovery of stochastic block models and learning mixtures of spherical Gaussians.
For the former, we present the first efficient $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm for both weak recovery and exact recovery. Previously known algorithms achieving comparable guarantees required quasi-polynomial time.
For the latter, we design an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm that recovers the centers of the $k$-mixture when the minimum separation is at least $ O(k^{1/t}\sqrt{t})$. For all choices of $t$, this algorithm requires sample complexity $n\geq k^{O(1)}d^{O(t)}$ and time complexity $(nd)^{O(t)}$. Prior work required either an additional additive $\Omega(\sqrt{\log n})$ term in the minimum separation or an explicit upper bound on the Euclidean norm of the centers.
tl;dr: Renku is a platform that enables and encourages sustainable data science and machine learning practices, from dataset creation to dissemination.
Data and code working together is fundamental to machine learning (ML), but the context around datasets and interactions between datasets and code are in general captured only rudimentarily. Context such as how the dataset was prepared and created, what source data were used, what code was used in processing, how the dataset evolved, and where it has been used and reused can provide much insight, but this information is often poorly documented. That is unfortunate since it makes datasets into black-boxes with potentially hidden characteristics that have downstream consequences. We argue that making dataset preparation more accessible and dataset usage easier to record and document would have significant benefits for the ML community: it would allow for greater diversity in datasets by inviting modification to published sources, simplify use of alternative datasets and, in doing so, make results more transparent and robust, while allowing for all contributions to be adequately credited. We present a platform, Renku, designed to support and encourage such sustainable development and use of data, datasets, and code, and we demonstrate its benefits through a few illustrative projects which span the spectrum from dataset creation to dataset consumption and showcasing.
tl;dr: We give a generic transformation of any item-level DP algorithm to a user-level DP algorithm, that holds even when each user has only a few examples.
Previous work on user-level differential privacy (DP) [Ghazi et al. NeurIPS 2021, Bun et al. STOC 2023] obtained generic algorithms that work for various learning tasks. However, their focus was on the *example-rich* regime, where the users have so many examples that each user could themselves solve the problem. In this work we consider the *example-scarce* regime, where each user has only a few examples, and obtain the following results:
* For approximate-DP, we give a generic transformation of any item-level DP algorithm to a user-level DP algorithm. Roughly speaking, the latter gives a (multiplicative) savings of $O_{\varepsilon,\delta}(\sqrt{m})$ in terms of the number of users required for achieving the same utility, where $m$ is the number of examples per user. This algorithm, while recovering most known bounds for specific problems, also gives new bounds, e.g., for PAC learning.
* For pure-DP, we present a simple technique for adapting the exponential mechanism [McSherry & Talwar, FOCS 2007] to the user-level setting. This gives new bounds for a variety of tasks, such as private PAC learning, hypothesis selection, and distribution learning. For some of these problems, we show that our bounds are near-optimal.
tl;dr: We provide the first convergence rate for a local Bayesian optimization algorithm in both the noisy and noiseless settings.
A recent development in Bayesian optimization is the use of local optimization strategies, which can deliver strong empirical performance on high-dimensional problems compared to traditional global strategies. The "folk wisdom" in the literature is that the focus on local optimization sidesteps the curse of dimensionality; however, little is known concretely about the expected behavior or convergence of Bayesian local optimization routines. We first study the behavior of the local approach, and find that the statistics of individual local solutions of Gaussian process sample paths are surprisingly good compared to what we would expect to recover from global methods. We then present the first rigorous analysis of such a Bayesian local optimization algorithm recently proposed by Müller et al. (2021), and derive convergence rates in both the noisy and noiseless settings.
tl;dr: We propose a novel training loss that significantly boosts the performance of a Concept Embedding Model when expert concept interventions are available.
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) tackle the opacity of neural architectures by constructing and explaining their predictions using a set of high-level concepts. A special property of these models is that they permit concept interventions, wherein users can correct mispredicted concepts and thus improve the model's performance. Recent work, however, has shown that intervention efficacy can be highly dependent on the order in which concepts are intervened on and on the model's architecture and training hyperparameters. We argue that this is rooted in a CBM's lack of train-time incentives for the model to be appropriately receptive to concept interventions. To address this, we propose Intervention-aware Concept Embedding models (IntCEMs), a novel CBM-based architecture and training paradigm that improves a model's receptiveness to test-time interventions. Our model learns a concept intervention policy in an end-to-end fashion from where it can sample meaningful intervention trajectories at train-time. This conditions IntCEMs to effectively select and receive concept interventions when deployed at test-time. Our experiments show that IntCEMs significantly outperform state-of-the-art concept-interpretable models when provided with test-time concept interventions, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
tl;dr: Predicting mass spectra from molecules by first predicting molecular formulae (factorized as an autoregressive prefix tree generation task) and secondly estimating intensities at each formula peak (set2set transformer).
Computational predictions of mass spectra from molecules have enabled the discovery of clinically relevant metabolites. However, such predictive tools are still limited as they occupy one of two extremes, either operating (a) by fragmenting molecules combinatorially with overly rigid constraints on potential rearrangements and poor time complexity or (b) by decoding lossy and nonphysical discretized spectra vectors. In this work, we use a new intermediate strategy for predicting mass spectra from molecules by treating mass spectra as sets of molecular formulae, which are themselves multisets of atoms. After first encoding an input molecular graph, we decode a set of molecular subformulae, each of which specify a predicted peak in the mass spectrum, the intensities of which are predicted by a second model. Our key insight is to overcome the combinatorial possibilities for molecular subformulae by decoding the formula set using a prefix tree structure, atom-type by atom-type, representing a general method for ordered multiset decoding. We show promising empirical results on mass spectra prediction tasks.
tl;dr: We learn a transferable flow model that predicts the future state of a molecule to accelerate Molecular Dynamics simulations
*Molecular dynamics* (MD) simulation is a widely used technique to simulate molecular systems, most commonly at the all-atom resolution where equations of motion are integrated with timesteps on the order of femtoseconds ($1\textrm{fs}=10^{-15}\textrm{s}$).
MD is often used to compute equilibrium properties, which requires sampling from an equilibrium distribution such as the Boltzmann distribution.
However, many important processes, such as binding and folding, occur over timescales of milliseconds or beyond, and cannot be efficiently sampled with conventional MD.
Furthermore, new MD simulations need to be performed for each molecular system studied.
We present *Timewarp*, an enhanced sampling method which uses a normalising flow as a proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo method targeting the Boltzmann distribution.
The flow is trained offline on MD trajectories and learns to make large steps in time, simulating the molecular dynamics of $10^{5} - 10^{6} \textrm{fs}$.
Crucially, Timewarp is *transferable* between molecular systems: once trained, we show that it generalises to unseen small peptides (2-4 amino acids) at all-atom resolution, exploring their metastable states and providing wall-clock acceleration of sampling compared to standard MD.
Our method constitutes an important step towards general, transferable algorithms for accelerating MD.
We present an exact Bayesian inference method for discrete statistical models, which can find exact solutions to a large class of discrete inference problems, even with infinite support and continuous priors.
To express such models, we introduce a probabilistic programming language that supports discrete and continuous sampling, discrete observations, affine functions, (stochastic) branching, and conditioning on discrete events.
Our key tool is *probability generating functions*:
they provide a compact closed-form representation of distributions that are definable by programs, thus enabling the exact computation of posterior probabilities, expectation, variance, and higher moments.
Our inference method is provably correct and fully automated in a tool called *Genfer*, which uses automatic differentiation (specifically, Taylor polynomials), but does not require computer algebra.
Our experiments show that Genfer is often faster than the existing exact inference tools PSI, Dice, and Prodigy.
On a range of real-world inference problems that none of these exact tools can solve, Genfer's performance is competitive with approximate Monte Carlo methods, while avoiding approximation errors.
We consider a statistical model for matrix factorization in a regime where the rank of the two hidden matrix factors grows linearly with their dimension and their product is corrupted by additive noise. Despite various approaches, statistical and algorithmic limits of such problems have remained elusive. We study a Bayesian setting with the assumptions that (a) one of the matrix factors is symmetric, (b) both factors as well as the additive noise have rotational invariant priors, (c) the priors are known to the statistician. We derive analytical formulas for Rotation Invariant Estimators to reconstruct the two matrix factors, and conjecture that these are optimal in the large-dimension limit, in the sense that they minimize the average mean-square-error. We provide numerical checks which confirm the optimality conjecture when confronted to Oracle Estimators which are optimal by definition, but involve the ground-truth. Our derivation relies on a combination of tools, namely random matrix theory transforms, spherical integral formulas, and the replica method from statistical mechanics.
tl;dr: Datasets and evaluation tasks for protein 3D structure data.
We present ProteinShake, a Python software package that simplifies dataset
creation and model evaluation for deep learning on protein structures. Users can
create custom datasets or load an extensive set of pre-processed datasets from
the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and AlphaFoldDB. Each dataset is associated with
prediction tasks and evaluation functions covering a broad array of biological
challenges. A benchmark on these tasks shows that pre-training almost always
improves performance, the optimal data modality (graphs, voxel grids, or point
clouds) is task-dependent, and models struggle to generalize to new structures.
ProteinShake makes protein structure data easily accessible and comparison
among models straightforward, providing challenging benchmark settings with
real-world implications.
ProteinShake is available at: https://proteinshake.ai
66. Optimizing Solution-Samplers for Combinatorial Problems: The Landscape of Policy-Gradient Method
tl;dr: We theoretically study the problem of optimizing solution-samplers for combinatorial problems via gradient-based methods.
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by gradient-based methods (e.g., policy gradient) to successively obtain better solution distributions.
In this work we introduce a novel theoretical framework for analyzing the effectiveness of such methods. We ask whether there exist generative models that (i) are expressive enough to generate approximately optimal solutions; (ii) have a tractable, i.e, polynomial in the size of the input, number of parameters; (iii) their optimization landscape is benign in the sense that it does not contain sub-optimal stationary points. Our main contribution is a positive answer to this question. Our result holds for a broad class of combinatorial problems including Max- and Min-Cut, Max-$k$-CSP, Maximum-Weight-Bipartite-Matching, and the Traveling Salesman Problem. As a byproduct of our analysis we introduce a novel regularization process over vanilla gradient descent and provide theoretical and experimental evidence that it helps address vanishing-gradient issues and escape bad stationary points.
tl;dr: We give a sum-of-squares-free polynomial time algorithm for list-decodable Gaussian covariance estimation in relative Frobenius norm
We study the problem of list-decodable Gaussian covariance estimation. Given a multiset $T$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that an unknown $\alpha<1/2$ fraction of points in $T$ are i.i.d. samples from an unknown Gaussian $\mathcal{N}(\mu, \Sigma)$, the goal is to output a list of $O(1/\alpha)$ hypotheses at least one of which is close to $\Sigma$ in relative Frobenius norm. Our main result is a $\mathrm{poly}(d,1/\alpha)$ sample and time algorithm for this task that guarantees relative Frobenius norm error of $\mathrm{poly}(1/\alpha)$. Importantly, our algorithm relies purely on spectral techniques. As a corollary, we obtain an efficient spectral algorithm for robust partial clustering of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) --- a key ingredient in the recent work of [BakDJKKV22] on robustly learning arbitrary GMMs. Combined with the other components of [BakDJKKV22], our new method yields the first Sum-of-Squares-free algorithm for robustly learning GMMs, resolving an open problem proposed by Vempala and Kothari. At the technical level, we develop a novel multi-filtering method for list-decodable covariance estimation that may be useful in other settings.
tl;dr: Model distillation is not resistant to strong membership inference attacks, and we investigate why.
Model distillation is frequently proposed as a technique to reduce the privacy leakage of machine learning. These empirical privacy defenses rely on the intuition that distilled ``student'' models protect the privacy of training data, as they only interact with this data indirectly through a ``teacher'' model. In this work, we design membership inference attacks to systematically study the privacy provided by knowledge distillation to both the teacher and student training sets. Our new attacks show that distillation alone provides only limited privacy across a number of domains. We explain the success of our attacks on distillation by showing that membership inference attacks on a private dataset can succeed even if the target model is never queried on any actual training points, but only on inputs whose predictions are highly influenced by training data. Finally, we show that our attacks are strongest when student and teacher sets are similar, or when the attacker can poison the teacher set.
Language models learn a great quantity of factual information during pretraining, and recent work localizes this information to specific model weights like mid-layer MLP weights. In this paper, we find that we can change how a fact is stored in a model by editing weights that are in a different location than where existing methods suggest that the fact is stored. This is surprising because we would expect that localizing facts to specific model parameters would tell us where to manipulate knowledge in models, and this assumption has motivated past work on model editing methods. Specifically, we show that localization conclusions from representation denoising (also known as Causal Tracing) do not provide any insight into which model MLP layer would be best to edit in order to override an existing stored fact with a new one. This finding raises questions about how past work relies on Causal Tracing to select which model layers to edit. Next, we consider several variants of the editing problem, including erasing and amplifying facts. For one of our editing problems, editing performance does relate to localization results from representation denoising, but we find that which layer we edit is a far better predictor of performance. Our results suggest, counterintuitively, that better mechanistic understanding of how pretrained language models work may not always translate to insights about how to best change their behavior.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for a variety of tasks with implicit graphical structures, such as planning in robotics, multi-hop question answering or knowledge probing, structured commonsense reasoning, and more. While LLMs have advanced the state-of-the-art on these tasks with structure implications, whether LLMs could explicitly process textual descriptions of graphs and structures, map them to grounded conceptual spaces, and perform structured operations remains underexplored. To this end, we propose NLGraph (Natural Language Graph), a comprehensive benchmark of graph-based problem solving designed in natural language. NLGraph contains 29,370 problems, covering eight graph reasoning tasks with varying complexity from simple tasks such as connectivity and shortest path up to complex problems such as maximum flow and simulating graph neural networks. We evaluate LLMs (GPT-3/4) with various prompting approaches on the NLGraph benchmark and find that 1) language models do demonstrate preliminary graph reasoning abilities, 2) the benefit of advanced prompting and in-context learning diminishes on more complex graph problems, while 3) LLMs are also (un)surprisingly brittle in the face of spurious correlations in graph and problem settings. We then propose Build-a-Graph Prompting and Algorithmic Prompting, two instruction-based approaches to enhance LLMs in solving natural language graph problems. Build-a-Graph and Algorithmic prompting improve the performance of LLMs on NLGraph by 3.07% to 16.85% across multiple tasks and settings, while how to solve the most complicated graph reasoning tasks in our setup with language models remains an open research question.
tl;dr: We show how to compute lower bounds on the privacy parameters of an algorithm with only one run of that algorithm.
We propose a scheme for auditing differentially private machine learning systems with a single training run. This exploits the parallelism of being able to add or remove multiple training examples independently. We analyze this using the connection between differential privacy and statistical generalization, which avoids the cost of group privacy. Our auditing scheme requires minimal assumptions about the algorithm and can be applied in the black-box or white-box setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by applying it to DP-SGD, where we can achieve meaningful empirical privacy lower bounds by training only one model. In contrast, standard methods would require training hundreds of models.
tl;dr: We develop a theoretical understanding of the training objective of diffusion models as a the ELBOs subject to data augmentation.
To achieve the highest perceptual quality, state-of-the-art diffusion models are optimized with objectives that typically look very different from the maximum likelihood and the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) objectives. In this work, we reveal that diffusion model objectives are actually closely related to the ELBO.
Specifically, we show that all commonly used diffusion model objectives equate to a weighted integral of ELBOs over different noise levels, where the weighting depends on the specific objective used. Under the condition of monotonic weighting, the connection is even closer: the diffusion objective then equals the ELBO, combined with simple data augmentation, namely Gaussian noise perturbation. We show that this condition holds for a number of state-of-the-art diffusion models.
In experiments, we explore new monotonic weightings and demonstrate their effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art FID scores on the high-resolution ImageNet benchmark.
tl;dr: We propose EgoSchema, a new very long-form video question answering dataset, offering over 5000 multiple-choice questions over which current SOTA models achieve accuracies less than 33% on 0-shot question answering, while humans achieve about 76%.
We introduce EgoSchema, a very long-form video question-answering dataset, and benchmark to evaluate long video understanding capabilities of modern vision and language systems. Derived from Ego4D, EgoSchema consists of over 5000 human curated multiple choice question answer pairs, spanning over 250 hours of real video data, covering a very broad range of natural human activity and behavior. For each question, EgoSchema requires the correct answer to be selected between five given options based on a three-minute-long video clip. While some prior works have proposed video datasets with long clip lengths, we posit that merely the length of the video clip does not truly capture the temporal difficulty of the video task that is being considered. To remedy this, we introduce temporal certificate sets, a general notion for capturing the intrinsic temporal understanding length associated with a broad range of video understanding tasks & datasets. Based on this metric, we find EgoSchema to have intrinsic temporal lengths over 5.7x longer than the second closest dataset and 10x to 100x longer than any other video understanding dataset. Further, our evaluation of several current state-of-the-art video and language models shows them to be severely lacking in long-term video understanding capabilities. Even models with several billions of parameters achieve QA accuracy less than 33% (random is 20%) on the EgoSchema multi-choice question answering task, while humans achieve about 76% accuracy. We posit that EgoSchema, with its long intrinsic temporal structures and diverse complexity, would serve as a valuable evaluation probe for developing effective long-term video understanding systems in the future. Data and Zero-shot model evaluation code will all be open-sourced under the Ego4D license at http://egoschema.github.io.
tl;dr: We propose to use tool embeddings to augment large language models with tools
Integrating large language models (LLMs) with various tools has led to increased attention in the field. Existing approaches either involve fine-tuning the LLM, which is both computationally costly and limited to a fixed set of tools, or prompting LLMs by in-context tool demonstrations. Although the latter method offers adaptability to new tools, it struggles with the inherent context length constraint of LLMs when many new tools are presented, and mastering a new set of tools with few-shot examples remains challenging, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel solution, named **ToolkenGPT**, wherein LLMs effectively learn to master tools as predicting tokens through **tool embeddings** for solving complex tasks. In this framework, each tool is transformed into vector embeddings and plugged into the language model head. Once the function is triggered during text generation, the LLM enters a special function mode to execute the tool calls. Our experiments show that function embeddings effectively help LLMs understand tool use and improve on several tasks, including numerical reasoning, knowledge-based question answering and embodied decision-making.
In this work we explore recent advances in instruction-tuning language models on a range of open instruction-following datasets. Despite recent claims that open models can be on par with state-of-the-art proprietary models, these claims are often accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to compare models across the board and determine the utility of various resources. We provide a large set of instruction-tuned models from 6.7B to 65B parameters in size, trained on 12 instruction datasets ranging from manually curated (e.g., OpenAssistant) to synthetic and distilled (e.g., Alpaca) and systematically evaluate them on their factual knowledge, reasoning, multilinguality, coding, safety, and open-ended instruction following abilities through a collection of automatic, model-based, and human-based metrics. We further introduce Tülu, our best performing instruction-tuned model suite finetuned on a combination of high-quality open resources.
Our experiments show that different instruction-tuning datasets can uncover or enhance specific skills, while no single dataset (or combination) provides the best performance across all evaluations. Interestingly, we find that model and human preference-based evaluations fail to reflect differences in model capabilities exposed by benchmark-based evaluations, suggesting the need for the type of systemic evaluation performed in this work. Our evaluations show that the best model in any given evaluation reaches on average 87% of ChatGPT performance, and 73% of GPT-4 performance, suggesting that further investment in building better base models and instruction-tuning data is required to close the gap. We release our instruction-tuned models, including a fully finetuned 65B Tülu, along with our code, data, and evaluation framework to facilitate future research.
Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has yielded success on diverse downstream tasks, but as LMs grow in size, backpropagation requires a prohibitively large amount of memory. Zeroth-order (ZO) methods can in principle estimate gradients using only two forward passes but are theorized to be catastrophically slow for optimizing large models. In this work, we propose a memory-efficient zerothorder optimizer (MeZO), adapting the classical ZO-SGD method to operate in-place, thereby fine-tuning LMs with the same memory footprint as inference. For example, with a single A100 80GB GPU, MeZO can train a 30-billion parameter model, whereas fine-tuning with backpropagation can train only a 2.7B LM with the same budget. We conduct comprehensive experiments across model types (masked and autoregressive LMs), model scales (up to 66B), and downstream tasks (classification, multiple-choice, and generation). Our results demonstrate that (1) MeZO significantly outperforms in-context learning and linear probing; (2) MeZO achieves comparable performance to fine-tuning with backpropagation across multiple tasks, with up to 12× memory reduction and up to 2× GPU-hour reduction in our implementation; (3) MeZO is compatible with both full-parameter and parameter-efficient tuning techniques such as LoRA and prefix tuning; (4) MeZO can effectively optimize non-differentiable objectives (e.g., maximizing accuracy or F1). We support our empirical findings with theoretical insights, highlighting how adequate pre-training and task prompts enable MeZO to fine-tune huge models, despite classical ZO analyses suggesting otherwise.
tl;dr: The paper introduces a novel dataset for real-world fact-checking that provides both question-answer decomposition and justifications, and avoids issues of context dependence, evidence insufficiency, and temporal leakage.
Existing datasets for automated fact-checking have substantial limitations, such as relying on artificial claims, lacking annotations for evidence and intermediate reasoning, or including evidence published after the claim. In this paper we introduce AVeriTeC, a new dataset of 4,568 real-world claims covering fact-checks by 50 different organizations. Each claim is annotated with question-answer pairs supported by evidence available online, as well as textual justifications explaining how the evidence combines to produce a verdict. Through a multi-round annotation process, we avoid common pitfalls including context dependence, evidence insufficiency, and temporal leakage, and reach a substantial inter-annotator agreement of $\kappa=0.619$ on verdicts. We develop a baseline as well as an evaluation scheme for verifying claims through question-answering against the open web.
tl;dr: We present a benchmark suite and a dataset for investigating channel-adaptive models that are invariant to the number and type of channels. We also propose five channel-adaptive strategies and evaluate them using the CHAMMI benchmark.
Most neural networks assume that input images have a fixed number of channels (three for RGB images). However, there are many settings where the number of channels may vary, such as microscopy images where the number of channels changes depending on instruments and experimental goals. Yet, there has not been a systemic attempt to create and evaluate neural networks that are invariant to the number and type of channels. As a result, trained models remain specific to individual studies and are hardly reusable for other microscopy settings. In this paper, we present a benchmark for investigating channel-adaptive models in microscopy imaging, which consists of 1) a dataset of varied-channel single-cell images, and 2) a biologically relevant evaluation framework. In addition, we adapted several existing techniques to create channel-adaptive models and compared their performance on this benchmark to fixed-channel, baseline models. We find that channel-adaptive models can generalize better to out-of-domain tasks and can be computationally efficient. We contribute a curated dataset and an evaluation API to facilitate objective comparisons in future research and applications.
tl;dr: We learn "environment-aware" ego-video representations that encode not just a short 1-2s clip, but also the local surroundings of the camera-wearer (e.g., what objects are nearby, how far are they).
First-person video highlights a camera-wearer's activities in the context of their persistent environment. However, current video understanding approaches reason over visual features from short video clips that are detached from the underlying physical space and capture only what is immediately visible. To facilitate human-centric environment understanding, we present an approach that links egocentric video and the environment by learning representations that are predictive of the camera-wearer's (potentially unseen) local surroundings. We train such models using videos from agents in simulated 3D environments where the environment is fully observable, and test them on human-captured real-world videos from unseen environments. On two human-centric video tasks, we show that models equipped with our environment-aware features consistently outperform their counterparts with traditional clip features. Moreover, despite being trained exclusively on simulated videos, our approach successfully handles real-world videos from HouseTours and Ego4D, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Ego4D NLQ challenge.
tl;dr: PG method converges whenever there exists an adequate linear function that ranks actions in the same order as the ground-truth reward function.
We prove that, for finite-arm bandits with linear function approximation, the global convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods depends on inter-related properties between the policy update and the representation. textcolor{blue}{First}, we establish a few key observations that frame the study: \textbf{(i)} Global convergence can be achieved under linear function approximation without policy or reward realizability, both for the standard Softmax PG and natural policy gradient (NPG). \textbf{(ii)} Approximation error is not a key quantity for characterizing global convergence in either algorithm. \textbf{(iii)} The conditions on the representation that imply global convergence are different between these two algorithms. Overall, these observations call into question approximation error as an appropriate quantity for characterizing the global convergence of PG methods under linear function approximation. \textcolor{blue}{Second}, motivated by these observations, we establish new general results: \textbf{(i)} NPG with linear function approximation achieves global convergence \emph{if and only if} the projection of the reward onto the representable space preserves the optimal action's rank, a quantity that is not strongly related to approximation error. \textbf{(ii)} The global convergence of Softmax PG occurs if the representation satisfies a non-domination condition and can preserve the ranking of rewards, which goes well beyond policy or reward realizability. We provide experimental results to support these theoretical findings.
tl;dr: The Digital Typhoon dataset, a 40+ year-long, high-quality typhoon satellite image dataset, is released for machine learning research on tropical cyclones.
This paper presents the official release of the Digital Typhoon dataset, the longest typhoon satellite image dataset for 40+ years aimed at benchmarking machine learning models for long-term spatio-temporal data. To build the dataset, we developed a workflow to create an infrared typhoon-centered image for cropping using Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection referring to the best track data. We also address data quality issues such as inter-satellite calibration to create a homogeneous dataset. To take advantage of the dataset, we organized machine learning tasks by the types and targets of inference, with other tasks for meteorological analysis, societal impact, and climate change. The benchmarking results on the analysis, forecasting, and reanalysis for the intensity suggest that the dataset is challenging for recent deep learning models, due to many choices that affect the performance of various models. This dataset reduces the barrier for machine learning researchers to meet large-scale real-world events called tropical cyclones and develop machine learning models that may contribute to advancing scientific knowledge on tropical cyclones as well as solving societal and sustainability issues such as disaster reduction and climate change. The dataset is publicly available at http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/digital-typhoon/dataset/ and https://github.com/kitamoto-lab/digital-typhoon/.
Robotic perception requires the modeling of both 3D geometry and semantics. Existing methods typically focus on estimating 3D bounding boxes, neglecting finer geometric details and struggling to handle general, out-of-vocabulary objects. 3D occupancy prediction, which estimates the detailed occupancy states and semantics of a scene, is an emerging task to overcome these limitations.
To support 3D occupancy prediction, we develop a label generation pipeline that produces dense, visibility-aware labels for any given scene. This pipeline comprises three stages: voxel densification, occlusion reasoning, and image-guided voxel refinement. We establish two benchmarks, derived from the Waymo Open Dataset and the nuScenes Dataset, namely Occ3D-Waymo and Occ3D-nuScenes benchmarks.
Furthermore, we provide an extensive analysis of the proposed dataset with various baseline models.
Lastly, we propose a new model, dubbed Coarse-to-Fine Occupancy (CTF-Occ) network, which demonstrates superior performance on the Occ3D benchmarks.The code, data, and benchmarks are released at \url{https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/Occ3D/}.
tl;dr: By demonstrating that the double descent shape observed in recent studies of non-deep ML methods is a direct consequence of the x-axes used to present it, we provide a resolution to the tension between statistical intuition and double descent.
Conventional statistical wisdom established a well-understood relationship between model complexity and prediction error, typically presented as a _U-shaped curve_ reflecting a transition between under- and overfitting regimes. However, motivated by the success of overparametrized neural networks, recent influential work has suggested this theory to be generally incomplete, introducing an additional regime that exhibits a second descent in test error as the parameter count $p$ grows past sample size $n$ -- a phenomenon dubbed _double descent_. While most attention has naturally been given to the deep-learning setting, double descent was shown to emerge more generally across non-neural models: known cases include _linear regression, trees, and boosting_. In this work, we take a closer look at the evidence surrounding these more classical statistical machine learning methods and challenge the claim that observed cases of double descent truly extend the limits of a traditional U-shaped complexity-generalization curve therein. We show that once careful consideration is given to _what is being plotted_ on the x-axes of their double descent plots, it becomes apparent that there are implicitly multiple, distinct complexity axes along which the parameter count grows. We demonstrate that the second descent appears exactly (and _only_) when and where the transition between these underlying axes occurs, and that its location is thus _not_ inherently tied to the interpolation threshold $p=n$. We then gain further insight by adopting a classical nonparametric statistics perspective. We interpret the investigated methods as _smoothers_ and propose a generalized measure for the _effective_ number of parameters they use _on unseen examples_, using which we find that their apparent double descent curves do indeed fold back into more traditional convex shapes -- providing a resolution to the ostensible tension between double descent and traditional statistical intuition.
Network embedding plays a significant role in a variety of applications. To capture the topology of the network, most of the existing network embedding algorithms follow a sampling training procedure, which maximizes the similarity (e.g., embedding vectors' dot product) between positively sampled node pairs and minimizes the similarity between negatively sampled node pairs in the embedding space. Typically, close node pairs function as positive samples while distant node pairs are usually considered as negative samples. However, under different or even competing sampling strategies, some methods champion sampling distant node pairs as positive samples to encapsulate longer distance information in link prediction, whereas others advocate adding close nodes into the negative sample set to boost the performance of node recommendation. In this paper, we seek to understand the intrinsic relationships between these competing strategies. To this end, we identify two properties (discrimination and monotonicity) that given any node pair proximity distribution, node embeddings should embrace.
Moreover, we quantify the empirical error of the trained similarity score w.r.t. the sampling strategy, which leads to an important finding that the discrimination property and the monotonicity property for all node pairs can not be satisfied simultaneously in real-world applications. Guided by such analysis, a simple yet novel model (SENSEI) is proposed, which seamlessly fulfills the discrimination property and the partial monotonicity within the top-$K$ ranking list. Extensive experiments show that SENSEI outperforms the state-of-the-arts in plain network embedding.
85. Precise asymptotic generalization for multiclass classification with overparameterized linear models
We study the asymptotic generalization of an overparameterized linear model for multiclass classification under the Gaussian covariates bi-level model introduced in Subramanian et al. (NeurIPS'22), where the number of data points, features, and classes all grow together. We fully resolve the conjecture posed in Subramanian et al. '22, matching the predicted regimes for which the model does and does not generalize. Furthermore, our new lower bounds are akin to an information-theoretic strong converse: they establish that the misclassification rate goes to 0 or 1 asymptotically. One surprising consequence of our tight results is that the min-norm interpolating classifier can be asymptotically suboptimal relative to noninterpolating classifiers in the regime where the min-norm interpolating regressor is known to be optimal.
The key to our tight analysis is a new variant of the Hanson-Wright inequality which is broadly useful for multiclass problems with sparse labels. As an application, we show that the same type of analysis can be used to analyze the related multi-label classification problem under the same bi-level ensemble.
tl;dr: We show that using analytic activations, one can construct finite-size NNs that are injective on multisets and discrete measures. As corollaries, we improve known results on approximation of multiset functions, and on equivalence of GNNs and WL tests
Injective multiset functions have a key role in the theoretical study of machine learning on multisets and graphs. Yet, there remains a gap between the provably injective multiset functions considered in theory, which typically rely on polynomial moments, and the multiset functions used in practice, which rely on $\textit{neural moments}$ — whose injectivity on multisets has not been studied to date.
In this paper, we bridge this gap by showing that moments of neural networks do define injective multiset functions, provided that an analytic non-polynomial activation is used. The number of moments required by our theory is optimal essentially up to a multiplicative factor of two. To prove this result, we state and prove a $\textit{finite witness theorem}$, which is of independent interest.
As a corollary to our main theorem, we derive new approximation results for functions on multisets and measures, and new separation results for graph neural networks. We also provide two negative results: (1) moments of piecewise-linear neural networks cannot be injective multiset functions; and (2) even when moment-based multiset functions are injective, they can never be bi-Lipschitz.
tl;dr: A new dataset for industrial anomaly detection.
High-precision point cloud anomaly detection is the gold standard for identifying the defects of advancing machining and precision manufacturing. Despite some methodological advances in this area, the scarcity of datasets and the lack of a systematic benchmark hinder its development. We introduce Real3D-AD, a challenging high-precision point cloud anomaly detection dataset, addressing the limitations in the field. With 1,254 high-resolution 3D items (from forty thousand to millions of points for each item), Real3D-AD is the largest dataset for high-precision 3D industrial anomaly detection to date. Real3D-AD surpasses existing 3D anomaly detection datasets available in terms of point cloud resolution (0.0010mm-0.0015mm), $360^{\circ}$ degree coverage and perfect prototype. Additionally, we present a comprehensive benchmark for Real3D-AD, revealing the absence of baseline methods for high-precision point cloud anomaly detection. To address this, we propose Reg3D-AD, a registration-based 3D anomaly detection method incorporating a novel feature memory bank that preserves local and global representations. Extensive experiments on the Real3D-AD dataset highlight the effectiveness of Reg3D-AD. For reproducibility and accessibility, we provide the Real3D-AD dataset, benchmark source code, and Reg3D-AD on our website: https://github.com/M-3LAB/Real3D-AD.
tl;dr: We give the first sample complexity result for the classical Bayesian forecast aggregation problem.
We consider a Bayesian forecast aggregation model where $n$ experts, after observing private signals about an unknown binary event, report their posterior beliefs about the event to a principal, who then aggregates the reports into a single prediction for the event. The signals of the experts and the outcome of the event follow a joint distribution that is unknown to the principal, but the principal has access to i.i.d. "samples" from the distribution, where each sample is a tuple of the experts' reports (not signals) and the realization of the event. Using these samples, the principal aims to find an $\varepsilon$-approximately optimal aggregator, where optimality is measured in terms of the expected squared distance between the aggregated prediction and the realization of the event. We show that the sample complexity of this problem is at least $\tilde \Omega(m^{n-2} / \varepsilon)$ for arbitrary discrete distributions, where $m$ is the size of each expert's signal space. This sample complexity grows exponentially in the number of experts $n$. But, if the experts' signals are independent conditioned on the realization of the event, then the sample complexity is significantly reduced, to $\tilde O(1 / \varepsilon^2)$, which does not depend on $n$. Our results can be generalized to non-binary events. The proof of our results uses a reduction from the distribution learning problem and reveals the fact that forecast aggregation is almost as difficult as distribution learning.
The meteoric rise in the adoption of deep neural networks as computational models of vision has inspired efforts to ``align” these models with humans. One dimension of interest for alignment includes behavioral choices, but moving beyond characterizing choice patterns to capturing temporal aspects of visual decision-making has been challenging. Here, we sketch a general-purpose methodology to construct computational accounts of reaction times from a stimulus-computable, task-optimized model. Specifically, we introduce a novel metric leveraging insights from subjective logic theory summarizing evidence accumulation in recurrent vision models. We demonstrate that our metric aligns with patterns of human reaction times for stimulus manipulations across four disparate visual decision-making tasks spanning perceptual grouping, mental simulation, and scene categorization. This work paves the way for exploring the temporal alignment of model and human visual strategies in the context of various other cognitive tasks toward generating testable hypotheses for neuroscience. Links to the code and data can be found on the project page: https://serre-lab.github.io/rnn_rts_site/.
Intrigued by the claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in LLMs trained on general web corpora, in this paper, we set out to investigate their planning capabilities. We aim to evaluate (1) the effectiveness of LLMs in generating plans autonomously in commonsense planning tasks and (2) the potential of LLMs as a source of heuristic guidance for other agents (AI planners) in their planning tasks. We conduct a systematic study by generating a suite of instances on domains similar to the ones employed in the International Planning Competition and evaluate LLMs in two distinct modes: autonomous and heuristic. Our findings reveal that LLMs’ ability to generate executable plans autonomously is rather limited, with the best model (GPT-4) having an average success rate of ~12% across the domains. However, the results in the heuristic mode show more promise. In the heuristic mode, we demonstrate that LLM-generated plans can improve the search process for underlying sound planners and additionally show that external verifiers can help provide feedback on the generated plans and back-prompt the LLM for better plan generation.
tl;dr: We show formally and empirically (through experiments with BC agents and language models) that it is possible to learn generalize strategies for causal experimentation and goal seeking from purely passive imitation learning.
What can be learned about causality and experimentation from passive data? This question is salient given recent successes of passively-trained language models in interactive domains such as tool use. Passive learning is inherently limited. However, we show that purely passive learning can in fact allow an agent to learn generalizable strategies for determining and using causal structures, as long as the agent can intervene at test time. We formally illustrate that learning a strategy of first experimenting, then seeking goals, can allow generalization from passive learning in principle. We then show empirically that agents trained via imitation on expert data can indeed generalize at test time to infer and use causal links which are never present in the training data; these agents can also generalize experimentation strategies to novel variable sets never observed in training.
We then show that strategies for causal intervention and exploitation can be generalized from passive data even in a more complex environment with high-dimensional observations, with the support of natural language explanations. Explanations can even allow passive learners to generalize out-of-distribution from perfectly-confounded training data. Finally, we show that language models, trained only on passive next-word prediction, can generalize causal intervention strategies from a few-shot prompt containing explanations and reasoning. These results highlight the surprising power of passive learning of active causal strategies, and have implications for understanding the behaviors and capabilities of language models.
tl;dr: This paper gives a theoretical analysis of a list labeling data structure in the learning augmented algorithm competitive analysis model.
A growing line of work shows how learned predictions can be used to break through worst-case barriers to improve the running time of an algorithm. However, incorporating predictions into data structures with strong theoretical guarantees remains underdeveloped. This paper takes a step in this direction by showing that predictions can be leveraged in the fundamental online list labeling problem. In the problem, $n$ items arrive over time and must be stored in sorted order in an array of size $\Theta(n)$. The array slot of an element is its label and the goal is to maintain sorted order while minimizing the total number of elements moved (i.e., relabeled). We design a new list labeling data structure and bound its performance in two models. In the worst-case learning-augmented model, we give guarantees in terms of the error in the predictions. Our data structure provides strong guarantees: it is optimal for any prediction error and guarantees the best-known worst-case bound even when the predictions are entirely erroneous. We also consider a stochastic error model and bound the performance in terms of the expectation and variance of the error. Finally, the theoretical results are demonstrated empirically. In particular, we show that our data structure has strong performance on real temporal data sets where predictions are constructed from elements that arrived in the past, as is typically done in a practical use case.
tl;dr: We introduce Thought Cloning, a novel imitation learning framework that enhances agent capability, AI Safety, and Interpretability by training agents to think like humans.
Language is often considered a key aspect of human thinking, providing us with exceptional abilities to generalize, explore, plan, replan, and adapt to new situations. However, Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are far from human-level performance in any of these abilities. We hypothesize one reason for such cognitive deficiencies is that they lack the benefits of thinking in language and that we can improve AI agents by training them to $\textit{think like humans do}$. We introduce a novel Imitation Learning framework, Thought Cloning, where the idea is to not just clone the behaviors of human demonstrators, $\textit{but also the thoughts humans have as they perform these behaviors}$. While we expect Thought Cloning to truly shine at scale on internet-sized datasets (e.g. online videos with transcripts), here we conduct experiments in a domain where the thinking and action data are synthetically generated. Results reveal that Thought Cloning learns much faster than Behavioral Cloning and its performance advantage grows the further out of distribution test tasks are, highlighting its ability to better handle novel situations. Thought Cloning also provides important benefits for AI Safety and Interpretability, and makes it easier to debug and improve AI. Because we can observe the agent’s thoughts, we can (1) more easily diagnose why things are going wrong, making it easier to fix the problem, (2) steer the agent by correcting its thinking, or (3) prevent it from doing unsafe things it plans to do. Overall, by training agents $\textit{how to think}$ as well as behave, Thought Cloning creates safer, more powerful agents.
tl;dr: Chain-of-thought reasoning is effective in autoregressive language models because of the local structure of the training data.
Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when large language models generate intermediate steps (a chain of thought) before answering a question, they often produce better answers than they would directly. We investigate why and how chain-of-thought reasoning is useful in language models, testing the hypothesis that reasoning is effective when training data consists of overlapping local clusters of variables that influence each other strongly. These training conditions enable the chaining of accurate local inferences to estimate relationships between variables that were not seen together in training. We prove that there will exist a "reasoning gap", where reasoning through intermediate variables reduces bias, for the simple case of an autoregressive density estimator trained on local samples from a chain-structured probabilistic model. We then test our hypothesis experimentally in more complex models, training an autoregressive language model on samples from Bayes nets but only including a subset of variables in each sample. We test language models’ ability to match conditional probabilities with and without intermediate reasoning steps, finding that intermediate steps are only helpful when the training data is locally structured with respect to dependencies between variables. The combination of locally structured observations and reasoning is much more data-efficient than training on all variables. Our results illustrate how the effectiveness of reasoning step by step is rooted in the local statistical structure of the training data.
tl;dr: Safe AI is a better AI for Everyone. But everyone has different perceptions of safety. The DICES dataset offers a shared resource to understand these differences and benchmark safety evaluation for conversational AI systems
Machine learning approaches often require training and evaluation datasets with a clear separation between positive and negative examples. This requirement overly simplifies the natural subjectivity present in many tasks, and obscures the inherent diversity in human perceptions and opinions about many content items. Preserving the variance in content and diversity in human perceptions in datasets is often quite expensive and laborious. This is especially troubling when building safety datasets for conversational AI systems, as safety is socio-culturally situated in this context. To demonstrate this crucial aspect of conversational AI safety, and to facilitate in-depth model performance analyses, we introduce the DICES (Diversity In Conversational AI Evaluation for Safety) dataset that contains fine-grained demographics information about raters, high replication of ratings per item to ensure statistical power for analyses, and encodes rater votes as distributions across different demographics to allow for in-depth explorations of different aggregation strategies. The DICES dataset enables the observation and measurement of variance, ambiguity, and diversity in the context of safety for conversational AI. We further describe a set of metrics that show how rater diversity influences safety perception across different geographic regions, ethnicity groups, age groups, and genders. The goal of the DICES dataset is to be used as a shared resource and benchmark that respects diverse perspectives during safety evaluation of conversational AI systems.
We give the first tester-learner for halfspaces that succeeds universally over a wide class of structured distributions. Our universal tester-learner runs in fully polynomial time and has the following guarantee: the learner achieves error $O(\mathrm{opt}) + \epsilon$ on any labeled distribution that the tester accepts, and moreover, the tester accepts whenever the marginal is any distribution that satisfies a Poincare inequality. In contrast to prior work on testable learning, our tester is not tailored to any single target distribution but rather succeeds for an entire target class of distributions. The class of Poincare distributions includes all strongly log-concave distributions, and, assuming the Kannan--Lovasz--Simonovits (KLS) conjecture, includes all log-concave distributions. In the special case where the label noise is known to be Massart, our tester-learner achieves error $\mathrm{opt} + \epsilon$ while accepting all log-concave distributions unconditionally (without assuming KLS).
Our tests rely on checking hypercontractivity of the unknown distribution using a sum-of-squares (SOS) program, and crucially make use of the fact that Poincare distributions are certifiably hypercontractive in the SOS framework.
tl;dr: We show that existing benchmarks for vision-language compositionality are hackable. We present SugarCrepe, a new benchmark that remedies this vulnerability to faithfully evaluate a vision-language model's compositionality.
In the last year alone, a surge of new benchmarks to measure $\textit{compositional}$ understanding of vision-language models have permeated the machine learning ecosystem.
Given an image, these benchmarks probe a model's ability to identify its associated caption amongst a set of compositional distractors.
Surprisingly, we find significant biases in $\textit{all}$ these benchmarks rendering them hackable. This hackability is so dire that blind models with no access to the image outperform state-of-the-art vision-language models.
To remedy this rampant vulnerability, we introduce $\textit{SugarCrepe}$, a new benchmark for vision-language compositionality evaluation.
We employ large language models, instead of rule-based templates used in previous benchmarks, to generate fluent and sensical hard negatives, and utilize an adversarial refinement mechanism to maximally reduce biases. We re-evaluate state-of-the-art models and recently proposed compositionality inducing strategies, and find that their improvements were hugely overestimated, suggesting that more innovation is needed in this important direction.
We release $\textit{SugarCrepe}$ and the code for evaluation at: https://github.com/RAIVNLab/sugar-crepe.
Minimising upper bounds on the population risk or the generalisation gap has been widely used in structural risk minimisation (SRM) -- this is in particular at the core of PAC-Bayesian learning. Despite its successes and unfailing surge of interest in recent years, a limitation of the PAC-Bayesian framework is that most bounds involve a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term (or its variations), which might exhibit erratic behavior and fail to capture the underlying geometric structure of the learning problem -- hence restricting its use in practical applications.
As a remedy, recent studies have attempted to replace the KL divergence in the PAC-Bayesian bounds with the Wasserstein distance. Even though these bounds alleviated the aforementioned issues to a certain extent, they either hold in expectation, are for bounded losses, or are nontrivial to minimize in an SRM framework. In this work, we contribute to this line of research and prove novel Wasserstein distance-based PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds for both batch learning with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, and online learning with potentially non-i.i.d. data. Contrary to previous art, our bounds are stronger in the sense that (i) they hold with high probability, (ii) they apply to unbounded (potentially heavy-tailed) losses, and (iii) they lead to optimizable training objectives that can be used in SRM. As a result we derive novel Wasserstein-based PAC-Bayesian learning algorithms and we illustrate their empirical advantage on a variety of experiments.
tl;dr: We propose the Latent Slot Diffusion which combines an object-centric encoder with diffusion decoders. It achieves unsupervised learning of object segmentation, compositional generation, and image editing, surpassing the state-of-the-art models.
The recent success of transformer-based image generative models in object-centric learning highlights the importance of powerful image generators for handling complex scenes. However, despite the high expressiveness of diffusion models in image generation, their integration into object-centric learning remains largely unexplored in this domain. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and potential of integrating diffusion models into object-centric learning and investigate the pros and cons of this approach. We introduce Latent Slot Diffusion (LSD), a novel model that serves dual purposes: it is the first object-centric learning model to replace conventional slot decoders with a latent diffusion model conditioned on object slots, and it is also the first unsupervised compositional conditional diffusion model that operates without the need for supervised annotations like text. Through experiments on various object-centric tasks, including the first application of the FFHQ dataset in this field, we demonstrate that LSD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art transformer-based decoders, particularly in more complex scenes, and exhibits superior unsupervised compositional generation quality. In addition, we conduct a preliminary investigation into the integration of pre-trained diffusion models in LSD and demonstrate its effectiveness in real-world image segmentation and generation. Project page is available at https://latentslotdiffusion.github.io
tl;dr: This study demonstrates that shape bias can emerge through the principle of efficient coding, paving the way for more human-like visual perception in CNNs.
Current deep-learning models for object recognition are known to be heavily biased toward texture. In contrast, human visual systems are known to be biased toward shape and structure. What could be the design principles in human visual systems that led to this difference? How could we introduce more shape bias into the deep learning models? In this paper, we report that sparse coding, a ubiquitous principle in the brain, can in itself introduce shape bias into the network. We found that enforcing the sparse coding constraint using a non-differential Top-K operation can lead to the emergence of structural encoding in neurons in convolutional neural networks, resulting in a smooth decomposition of objects into parts and subparts and endowing the networks with shape bias. We demonstrated this emergence of shape bias and its functional benefits for different network structures with various datasets. For object recognition convolutional neural networks, the shape bias leads to greater robustness against style and pattern change distraction. For the image synthesis generative adversary networks, the emerged shape bias leads to more coherent and decomposable structures in the synthesized images. Ablation studies suggest that sparse codes tend to encode structures, whereas the more distributed codes tend to favor texture. Our code is host at the github repository:
\url{https://github.com/Crazy-Jack/nips2023_shape_vs_texture}
Counterfactual examples have proven to be valuable in the field of natural language processing (NLP) for both evaluating and improving the robustness of language models to spurious correlations in datasets. Despite their demonstrated utility for NLP, multimodal counterfactual examples have been relatively unexplored due to the difficulty of creating paired image-text data with minimal counterfactual changes. To address this challenge, we introduce a scalable framework for automatic generation of counterfactual examples using text-to-image diffusion models. We use our framework to create COCO-Counterfactuals, a multimodal counterfactual dataset of paired image and text captions based on the MS-COCO dataset. We validate the quality of COCO-Counterfactuals through human evaluations and show that existing multimodal models are challenged by our counterfactual image-text pairs. Additionally, we demonstrate the usefulness of COCO-Counterfactuals for improving out-of-domain generalization of multimodal vision-language models via training data augmentation. We make our code and the COCO-Counterfactuals dataset publicly available.
Multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) methods aim to transfer knowledge from multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. Although current methods achieve target joint distribution identifiability by enforcing minimal changes across domains, they often necessitate stringent conditions, such as an adequate number of domains, monotonic transformation of latent variables, and invariant label distributions. These requirements are challenging to satisfy in real-world applications. To mitigate the need for these strict assumptions, we propose a subspace identification theory that guarantees the disentanglement of domain-invariant and domain-specific variables under less restrictive constraints regarding domain numbers and transformation properties and thereby facilitating domain adaptation by minimizing the impact of domain shifts on invariant variables. Based on this theory, we develop a Subspace Identification Guarantee (SIG) model that leverages variational inference. Furthermore, the SIG model incorporates class-aware conditional alignment to accommodate target shifts where label distributions change with the domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our SIG model outperforms existing MSDA techniques on various benchmark datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world applications.
tl;dr: We analyze and fix pathologies of Expected Improvement and its variants for single and multiple-objective problems, leading to significant improvements in empirical optimization performance.
Expected Improvement (EI) is arguably the most popular acquisition function in Bayesian optimization and has found countless successful applications, but its performance is often exceeded by that of more recent methods. Notably, EI and its variants, including for the parallel and multi-objective settings, are challenging to optimize because their acquisition values vanish numerically in many regions. This difficulty generally increases as the number of observations, dimensionality of the search space, or the number of constraints grow, resulting in performance that is inconsistent across the literature and most often sub-optimal. Herein, we propose LogEI, a new family of acquisition functions whose members either have identical or approximately equal optima as their canonical counterparts, but are substantially easier to optimize numerically. We demonstrate that numerical pathologies manifest themselves in “classic” analytic EI, Expected Hypervolume Improvement (EHVI), as well as their constrained, noisy, and parallel variants, and propose corresponding reformulations that remedy these pathologies. Our empirical results show that members of the LogEI family of acquisition functions substantially improve on the optimization performance of their canonical counterparts and surprisingly, are on par with or exceed the performance of recent state-of-the-art acquisition functions, highlighting the understated role of numerical optimization in the literature.
tl;dr: We cast existing state-of-the-art knowledge graph embedding models into generative models that enable us to perform exact and efficient marginalisation, sampling and to integrate hard constraints with theoretical guarantees.
Some of the most successful knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models for link prediction – CP, RESCAL, TuckER, ComplEx – can be interpreted as energy-based models. Under this perspective they are not amenable for exact maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE), sampling and struggle to integrate logical constraints. This work re-interprets the score functions of these KGEs as circuits – constrained computational graphs allowing efficient marginalisation. Then, we design two recipes to obtain efficient generative circuit models by either restricting their activations to be non-negative or squaring their outputs. Our interpretation comes with little or no loss of performance for link prediction, while the circuits framework unlocks exact learning by MLE, efficient sampling of new triples, and guarantee that logical constraints are satisfied by design. Furthermore, our models scale more gracefully than the original KGEs on graphs with millions of entities.
Choosing the optimal hyperparameters, including learning rate and momentum, for specific optimization instances is a significant yet non-convex challenge. This makes conventional iterative techniques such as hypergradient descent \cite{baydin2017online} insufficient in obtaining global optimality guarantees.
We consider the more general task of meta-optimization -- online learning of the best optimization algorithm given problem instances, and introduce a novel approach based on control theory. We show how meta-optimization can be formulated as an optimal control problem, departing from existing literature that use stability-based methods to study optimization. Our approach leverages convex relaxation techniques in the recently-proposed nonstochastic control framework to overcome the challenge of nonconvexity, and obtains regret guarantees vs. the best offline solution. This guarantees that in meta-optimization, we can learn a method that attains convergence comparable to that of the best optimization method in hindsight from a class of methods.
tl;dr: We propose a principled framework (CODA) for a new and challenging domain generalization setting where both domain shift and open class occur on test data.
The generalization capability of machine learning systems degenerates notably when the test distribution drifts from the training distribution. Recently, Domain Generalization (DG) has been gaining momentum in enabling machine learning models to generalize to unseen domains. However, most DG methods assume that training and test data share an identical label space, ignoring the potential unseen categories in many real-world applications. In this paper, we delve into a more general but difficult problem termed Open Test-Time DG (OTDG), where both domain shift and open class may occur on the unseen test data. We propose Compaction and Disambiguation (CODA), a novel two-stage framework for learning compact representations and adapting to open classes in the wild. To meaningfully regularize the model's decision boundary, CODA introduces virtual unknown classes and optimizes a new training objective to insert unknowns into the latent space by compacting the embedding space of source known classes. To adapt target samples to the source model, we then disambiguate the decision boundaries between known and unknown classes with a test-time training objective, mitigating the adaptivity gap and catastrophic forgetting challenges. Experiments reveal that CODA can significantly outperform the previous best method on standard DG datasets and harmonize the classification accuracy between known and unknown classes.
tl;dr: We developed a dimensionality reduction framework for characterizing the multi-dimensional, concurrent flow of signals across multiple neuronal populations.
Modern recording techniques now allow us to record from distinct neuronal populations in different brain networks. However, especially as we consider multiple (more than two) populations, new conceptual and statistical frameworks are needed to characterize the multi-dimensional, concurrent flow of signals among these populations. Here, we develop a dimensionality reduction framework that determines (1) the subset of populations described by each latent dimension, (2) the direction of signal flow among those populations, and (3) how those signals evolve over time within and across experimental trials. We illustrate these features in simulation, and further validate the method by applying it to previously studied recordings from neuronal populations in macaque visual areas V1 and V2. Then we study interactions across select laminar compartments of areas V1, V2, and V3d, recorded simultaneously with multiple Neuropixels probes. Our approach uncovered signatures of selective communication across these three areas that related to their retinotopic alignment. This work advances the study of concurrent signaling across multiple neuronal populations.
Recovering the latent factors of variation of high dimensional data has so far focused on simple synthetic settings. Mostly building on unsupervised and weakly-supervised objectives, prior work missed out on the positive implications for representation learning on real world data. In this work, we propose to leverage knowledge extracted from a diversified set of supervised tasks to learn a common disentangled representation. Assuming each supervised task only depends on an unknown subset of the factors of variation, we disentangle the feature space of a supervised multi-task model, with features activating sparsely across different tasks and information being shared as appropriate. Importantly, we never directly observe the factors of variations but establish that access to multiple tasks is sufficient for identifiability under sufficiency and minimality assumptions.
We validate our approach on six real world distribution shift benchmarks, and different data modalities (images, text), demonstrating how disentangled representations can be transferred to real settings.
tl;dr: Neural ODE model which learns the deterministic transport equation that solves the Fokker-Planck equation of the diffusion process, allowing block-wise training inspired by the JKO scheme at reduced computation and memory cost.
Normalizing flow is a class of deep generative models for efficient sampling and likelihood estimation, which achieves attractive performance, particularly in high dimensions. The flow is often implemented using a sequence of invertible residual blocks. Existing works adopt special network architectures and regularization of flow trajectories. In this paper, we develop a neural ODE flow network called JKO-iFlow, inspired by the Jordan-Kinderleherer-Otto (JKO) scheme, which unfolds the discrete-time dynamic of the Wasserstein gradient flow. The proposed method stacks residual blocks one after another, allowing efficient block-wise training of the residual blocks, avoiding sampling SDE trajectories and score matching or variational learning, thus reducing the memory load and difficulty in end-to-end training. We also develop adaptive time reparameterization of the flow network with a progressive refinement of the induced trajectory in probability space to improve the model accuracy further. Experiments with synthetic and real data show that the proposed JKO-iFlow network achieves competitive performance compared with existing flow and diffusion models at a significantly reduced computational and memory cost.
tl;dr: Adaptive MMD two-sample tests without data splitting, by fusing kernels.
We propose novel statistics which maximise the power of a two-sample test based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), by
adapting over the set of kernels used in defining it.
For finite sets, this reduces to combining (normalised) MMD values under each of these kernels via a weighted soft maximum.
Exponential concentration bounds are proved for our proposed statistics under the null and alternative.
We further show how these kernels can be chosen in a data-dependent but permutation-independent way, in a well-calibrated test, avoiding data splitting.
This technique applies more broadly to general permutation-based MMD testing, and includes the use of deep kernels with features learnt using unsupervised models such as auto-encoders.
We highlight the applicability of our MMD-Fuse tests on both synthetic low-dimensional and real-world high-dimensional data, and compare its performance in terms of power against current state-of-the-art kernel tests.
tl;dr: We improve on the upper and lower bounds for the regret of online learning with undirected feedback graphs
In this work, we improve on the upper and lower bounds for the regret of online learning with strongly observable undirected feedback graphs. The best known upper bound for this problem is $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T\ln K}\bigr)$, where $K$ is the number of actions, $\alpha$ is the independence number of the graph, and $T$ is the time horizon. The $\sqrt{\ln K}$ factor is known to be necessary when $\alpha = 1$ (the experts case). On the other hand, when $\alpha = K$ (the bandits case), the minimax rate is known to be $\Theta\bigl(\sqrt{KT}\bigr)$, and a lower bound $\Omega\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T}\bigr)$ is known to hold for any $\alpha$. Our improved upper bound $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T(1+\ln(K/\alpha))}\bigr)$ holds for any $\alpha$ and matches the lower bounds for bandits and experts, while interpolating intermediate cases. To prove this result, we use FTRL with $q$-Tsallis entropy for a carefully chosen value of $q \in [1/2, 1)$ that varies with $\alpha$. The analysis of this algorithm requires a new bound on the variance term in the regret. We also show how to extend our techniques to time-varying graphs, without requiring prior knowledge of their independence numbers. Our upper bound is complemented by an improved $\Omega\bigl(\sqrt{\alpha T(\ln K)/(\ln\alpha)}\bigr)$ lower bound for all $\alpha > 1$, whose analysis relies on a novel reduction to multitask learning. This shows that a logarithmic factor is necessary as soon as $\alpha < K$.
Regularization in modern machine learning is crucial, and it can take various forms in algorithmic design: training set, model family, error function, regularization terms, and optimizations.
In particular, the learning rate, which can be interpreted as a temperature-like parameter within the statistical mechanics of learning, plays a crucial role in neural network training.
Indeed, many widely adopted training strategies basically just define the decay of the learning rate over time.
This process can be interpreted as decreasing a temperature, using either a global learning rate (for the entire model) or a learning rate that varies for each parameter.
This paper proposes TempBalance, a straightforward yet effective layer-wise learning rate method. TempBalance is based on Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) Theory, an approach which characterizes the implicit self-regularization of different layers in trained models.
We demonstrate the efficacy of using HT-SR-motivated metrics to guide the scheduling and balancing of temperature across all network layers during model training, resulting in improved performance during testing.
We implement TempBalance on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and TinyImageNet datasets using ResNets, VGGs and WideResNets with various depths and widths.
Our results show that TempBalance significantly outperforms ordinary SGD and carefully-tuned spectral norm regularization.
We also show that TempBalance outperforms a number of state-of-the-art optimizers and learning rate schedulers.
tl;dr: We introduce Mind2Web, the first dataset for developing and evaluating generalist agents for the web that can follow language instructions to complete complex tasks on any website.
We introduce Mind2Web, the first dataset for developing and evaluating generalist agents for the web that can follow language instructions to complete complex tasks on any website. Existing datasets for web agents either use simulated websites or only cover a limited set of websites and tasks, thus not suitable for generalist web agents. With over 2,000 open-ended tasks collected from 137 websites spanning 31 domains and crowdsourced action sequences for the tasks, Mind2Web provides three necessary ingredients for building generalist web agents: 1) diverse domains, websites, and tasks, 2) use of real-world websites instead of simulated and simplified ones, and 3) a broad spectrum of user interaction patterns. Based on Mind2Web, we conduct an initial exploration of using large language models (LLMs) for building generalist web agents. While the raw HTML of real-world websites are often too large to be fed to LLMs, we show that first filtering it with a small LM significantly improves the effectiveness and efficiency of LLMs. Our solution demonstrates a decent level of performance, even on websites or entire domains the model has never seen before, but there is still a substantial room to improve towards truly generalizable agents. We open-source our dataset, model implementation, and trained models (https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/Mind2Web) to facilitate further research on building a generalist agent for the web.
tl;dr: We provide efficient methods to sequentially audit the fairness of models which handle continuous monitoring of data, randomized data collection policies, and distribution shift.
We provide practical, efficient, and nonparametric methods for auditing the fairness of deployed classification and regression models. Whereas previous work relies on a fixed-sample size, our methods are sequential and allow for the continuous monitoring of incoming data, making them highly amenable to tracking the fairness of real-world systems. We also allow the data to be collected by a probabilistic policy as opposed to sampled uniformly from the population. This enables auditing to be conducted on data gathered for another purpose. Moreover, this policy may change over time and different policies may be used on different subpopulations. Finally, our methods can handle distribution shift resulting from either changes to the model or changes in the underlying population. Our approach is based on recent progress in anytime-valid inference and game-theoretic statistics---the ``testing by betting'' framework in particular. These connections ensure that our methods are interpretable, fast, and easy to implement. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on three benchmark fairness datasets.
tl;dr: We identify the problematic assumptions made by Influence Functions methods and clarify what can be expected theoretically from them; based on this we propose to correct mis-predictions by taking a few fine-tuning steps on influential examples.
Influence functions (IF) have been seen as a technique for explaining model predictions through the lens of the training data. Their utility is assumed to be in identifying training examples "responsible" for a prediction so that, for example, correcting a prediction is possible by intervening on those examples (removing or editing them) and retraining the model. However, recent empirical studies have shown that the existing methods of estimating IF predict the leave-one-out-and-retrain effect poorly.
In order to understand the mismatch between the theoretical promise and the practical results, we analyse five assumptions made by IF methods which are problematic for modern-scale deep neural networks and which concern convexity, numeric stability, training trajectory and parameter divergence. This allows us to clarify what can be expected theoretically from IF. We show that while most assumptions can be addressed successfully, the parameter divergence poses a clear limitation on the predictive power of IF: influence fades over training time even with deterministic training. We illustrate this theoretical result with BERT and ResNet models.
Another conclusion from the theoretical analysis is that IF are still useful for model debugging and correcting even though some of the assumptions made in prior work do not hold: using natural language processing and computer vision tasks, we verify that mis-predictions can be successfully corrected by taking only a few fine-tuning steps on influential examples.
tl;dr: We identify the common workflow for mechanistic interpretability work, and automate its “systematic ablations” step with a new algorithm, ACDC.
Through considerable effort and intuition, several recent works have reverse-engineered nontrivial behaviors of
transformer models. This paper systematizes the mechanistic interpretability process they followed. First, researchers
choose a metric and dataset that elicit the desired model behavior. Then, they apply activation patching to find which
abstract neural network units are involved in the behavior. By varying the dataset, metric, and units under
investigation, researchers can understand the functionality of each component.
We automate one of the process' steps: finding the connections between the abstract neural network units that form a circuit. We propose several algorithms and reproduce previous interpretability results to validate them. For
example, the ACDC algorithm rediscovered 5/5 of the component types in a circuit in GPT-2 Small that computes the
Greater-Than operation. ACDC selected 68 of the 32,000 edges in GPT-2 Small, all of which were manually found by
previous work. Our code is available at https://github.com/ArthurConmy/Automatic-Circuit-Discovery
tl;dr: We demonstrate that fairness interventions in machine learning optimized solely for group fairness and accuracy can exacerbate predictive multiplicity.
Machine learning tasks may admit multiple competing models that achieve similar performance yet produce conflicting outputs for individual samples---a phenomenon known as predictive multiplicity. We demonstrate that fairness interventions in machine learning optimized solely for group fairness and accuracy can exacerbate predictive multiplicity. Consequently, state-of-the-art fairness interventions can mask high predictive multiplicity behind favorable group fairness and accuracy metrics. We argue that a third axis of ``arbitrariness'' should be considered when deploying models to aid decision-making in applications of individual-level impact.
To address this challenge, we propose an ensemble algorithm applicable to any fairness intervention that provably ensures more consistent predictions.
Continuous diffusion models are commonly acknowledged to display a deterministic probability flow, whereas discrete diffusion models do not. In this paper, we aim to establish the fundamental theory for the probability flow of discrete diffusion models. Specifically, we first prove that the continuous probability flow is the Monge optimal transport map under certain conditions, and also present an equivalent evidence for discrete cases. In view of these findings, we are then able to define the discrete probability flow in line with the principles of optimal transport. Finally, drawing upon our newly established definitions, we propose a novel sampling method that surpasses previous discrete diffusion models in its ability to generate more certain outcomes. Extensive experiments on the synthetic toy dataset and the CIFAR-10 dataset have validated the effectiveness of our proposed discrete probability flow. Code is released at: https://github.com/PangzeCheung/Discrete-Probability-Flow.
tl;dr: We propose a new model class for generating varying dimensional data using jump diffusions.
We propose a new class of generative model that naturally handles data of varying dimensionality by jointly modeling the state and dimension of each datapoint. The generative process is formulated as a jump diffusion process that makes jumps between different dimensional spaces. We first define a dimension destroying forward noising process, before deriving the dimension creating time-reversed generative process along with a novel evidence lower bound training objective for learning to approximate it.
Simulating our learned approximation to the time-reversed generative process then provides an effective way of sampling data of varying dimensionality by jointly generating state values and dimensions.
We demonstrate our approach on molecular and video datasets of varying dimensionality, reporting better compatibility with test-time diffusion guidance imputation tasks and improved interpolation capabilities versus fixed dimensional models that generate state values and dimensions separately.
tl;dr: We release a dataset of the full coded EHR data of ~7000 patients, in addition to the weights and code of a foundation model pretrained on over 2.5 million patient records
While the general machine learning (ML) community has benefited from public datasets, tasks, and models, the progress of ML in healthcare has been hampered by a lack of such shared assets. The success of foundation models creates new challenges for healthcare ML by requiring access to shared pretrained models to validate performance benefits. We help address these challenges through three contributions. First, we publish a new dataset, EHRSHOT, which contains de-identified structured data from the electronic health records (EHRs) of 6,739 patients from Stanford Medicine. Unlike MIMIC-III/IV and other popular EHR datasets, EHRSHOT is longitudinal and not restricted to ICU/ED patients. Second, we publish the weights of CLMBR-T-base, a 141M parameter clinical foundation model pretrained on the structured EHR data of 2.57M patients. We are one of the first to fully release such a model for coded EHR data; in contrast, most prior models released for clinical data (e.g. GatorTron, ClinicalBERT) only work with unstructured text and cannot process the rich, structured data within an EHR. We provide an end-to-end pipeline for the community to validate and build upon its performance. Third, we define 15 few-shot clinical prediction tasks, enabling evaluation of foundation models on benefits such as sample efficiency and task adaptation. Our model and dataset are available via a research data use agreement from here: https://stanfordaimi.azurewebsites.net/. Code to reproduce our results is available here: https://github.com/som-shahlab/ehrshot-benchmark.
tl;dr: Algorithms for PAC learning linear threshold functions from label proportions of random bags of Gaussian feature-vectors
Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a generalization of supervised learning in which the training data is available as sets or bags of feature-vectors (instances) along with the average instance-label of each bag. The goal is to train a good instance classifier. While most previous works on LLP have focused on training models on such training data, computational learnability of LLP was only
recently explored by Saket (2021, 2022) who showed worst case intractability of properly learning linear threshold functions (LTFs) from label proportions. However, their work did not rule out efficient algorithms for this problem for natural distributions.
In this work we show that it is indeed possible to efficiently learn LTFs using LTFs when given access to random bags of some label proportion in which feature-vectors are, conditioned on their labels, independently sampled from a Gaussian distribution $N(µ, Σ)$. Our work shows that a certain matrix – formed using covariances of the differences of feature-vectors sampled from the bags with and without replacement – necessarily has its principal component, after a transformation, in the direction of the normal vector of the LTF. Our algorithm estimates the means and covariance matrices using subgaussian concentration bounds which we show can be applied to efficiently sample bags for approximating the normal direction. Using this in conjunction with novel generalization error bounds in the bag setting, we show that a low error hypothesis LTF can be identified. For some special cases of the $N(0, I)$ distribution we provide a simpler mean estimation based algorithm. We include an experimental evaluation of our learning algorithms along with a comparison with those of Saket (2021, 2022) and random LTFs, demonstrating the effectiveness of our techniques.
tl;dr: Based on novel mixture martingales, we obtain tighter confidence bounds for linear bandits resulting in better algorithms with performance guarantees.
We present improved algorithms with worst-case regret guarantees for the stochastic linear bandit problem. The widely used "optimism in the face of uncertainty" principle reduces a stochastic bandit problem to the construction of a confidence sequence for the unknown reward function. The performance of the resulting bandit algorithm depends on the size of the confidence sequence, with smaller confidence sets yielding better empirical performance and stronger regret guarantees. In this work, we use a novel tail bound for adaptive martingale mixtures to construct confidence sequences which are suitable for stochastic bandits. These confidence sequences allow for efficient action selection via convex programming. We prove that a linear bandit algorithm based on our confidence sequences is guaranteed to achieve competitive worst-case regret. We show that our confidence sequences are tighter than competitors, both empirically and theoretically. Finally, we demonstrate that our tighter confidence sequences give improved performance in several hyperparameter tuning tasks.
tl;dr: Always guarantees the minimax regret, but adaptively queries (much) fewer labels when possible.
We consider online prediction of a binary sequence with expert advice. For this setting, we devise label-efficient forecasting algorithms, which use a selective sampling scheme that enables collecting much fewer labels than standard procedures. For the general case without a perfect expert, we prove best-of-both-worlds guarantees, demonstrating that the proposed forecasting algorithm always queries sufficiently many labels in the worst case to obtain optimal regret guarantees, while simultaneously querying much fewer labels in more benign settings. Specifically, for a scenario where one expert is strictly better than the others in expectation, we show that the label complexity of the label-efficient forecaster is roughly upper-bounded by the square root of the number of rounds. Finally, we present numerical experiments empirically showing that the normalized regret of the label-efficient forecaster can asymptotically match known minimax rates for pool-based active learning, suggesting it can optimally adapt to benign settings.
tl;dr: This paper introduces several advancements for continuous and distributed object-centric representations, scaling them from simple toy to real-world data, and thereby paving the way for a new paradigm in objects discovery.
The binding problem in human cognition, concerning how the brain represents and connects objects within a fixed network of neural connections, remains a subject of intense debate. Most machine learning efforts addressing this issue in an unsupervised setting have focused on slot-based methods, which may be limiting due to their discrete nature and difficulty to express uncertainty. Recently, the Complex AutoEncoder was proposed as an alternative that learns continuous and distributed object-centric representations. However, it is only applicable to simple toy data. In this paper, we present Rotating Features, a generalization of complex-valued features to higher dimensions, and a new evaluation procedure for extracting objects from distributed representations. Additionally, we show the applicability of our approach to pre-trained features. Together, these advancements enable us to scale distributed object-centric representations from simple toy to real-world data. We believe this work advances a new paradigm for addressing the binding problem in machine learning and has the potential to inspire further innovation in the field.
Sign languages are used as a primary language by approximately 70 million D/deaf people world-wide. However, most communication technologies operate in spoken and written languages, creating inequities in access. To help tackle this problem, we release ASL Citizen, the first crowdsourced Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) dataset, collected with consent and containing 83,399 videos for 2,731 distinct signs filmed by 52 signers in a variety of environments. We propose that this dataset be used for sign language dictionary retrieval for American Sign Language (ASL), where a user demonstrates a sign to their webcam to retrieve matching signs from a dictionary. We show that training supervised machine learning classifiers with our dataset advances the state-of-the-art on metrics relevant for dictionary retrieval, achieving 63\% accuracy and a recall-at-10 of 91\%, evaluated entirely on videos of users who are not present in the training or validation sets.
tl;dr: We investigate the intrinsic property of nodes in GCL and improve the training of GCL provably upon that property.
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a popular training approach for learning node embeddings from augmented graphs without labels. Despite the key principle that maximizing the similarity between positive node pairs while minimizing it between negative node pairs is well established, some fundamental problems are still unclear. Considering the complex graph structure, are some nodes consistently well-trained and following this principle even with different graph augmentations? Or are there some nodes more likely to be untrained across graph augmentations and violate the principle? How to distinguish these nodes and further guide the training of GCL? To answer these questions, we first present experimental evidence showing that the training of GCL is indeed imbalanced across all nodes. To address this problem, we propose the metric "node compactness", which is the lower bound of how a node follows the GCL principle related to the range of augmentations. We further derive the form of node compactness theoretically through bound propagation, which can be integrated into binary cross-entropy as a regularization. To this end, we propose the PrOvable Training (POT) for GCL, which regularizes the training of GCL to encode node embeddings that follows the GCL principle better. Through extensive experiments on various benchmarks, POT consistently improves the existing GCL approaches, serving as a friendly plugin.
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their recent impressive accomplishments, are notably cost-prohibitive to deploy, particularly for applications involving long-content generation, such as dialogue systems and story writing. Often, a large amount of transient state information, referred to as the $\mathsf{KV}$ $\mathsf{cache}$, is stored in GPU memory in addition to model parameters, scaling linearly with the sequence length and batch size. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for implementing the $\mathsf{KV}$ $\mathsf{cache}$ which significantly reduces its memory footprint. Our approach is based on the noteworthy observation that a small portion of tokens contributes most of the value when computing attention scores.
We call these tokens Heavy Hitters ($\mathsf{H_2}$). Through a comprehensive investigation, we find that ($i$) the emergence of $\mathsf{H_2}$ is natural and strongly correlates with the frequent co-occurrence of tokens in the text, and ($ii$) removing them results in significant performance degradation. Based on these insights, we propose Heavy Hitter Oracle ($\mathsf{H_2O}$), a $\mathsf{KV}$ $\mathsf{cache}$ eviction policy that dynamically retains a balance of recent and $\mathsf{H_2}$ tokens.
We formulate the $\mathsf{KV}$ $\mathsf{cache}$ eviction as a dynamic submodular problem and prove (under mild assumptions) a theoretical guarantee for our novel eviction algorithm which could help guide future work. We validate the accuracy of our algorithm with OPT, LLaMA, and GPT-NeoX across a wide range of tasks. Our implementation of $\mathsf{H_2O}$ with 20\% heavy hitters improves the throughput over three leading inference systems DeepSpeed Zero-Inference, Hugging Face Accelerate, and FlexGen by up to $29\times$, $29\times$, and $3\times$ on OPT-6.7B and OPT-30B. With the same batch size, $\mathsf{H_2O}$ can reduce the latency by up to $1.9\times$.
When solving decision-making tasks, humans typically depend on information from two key sources: (1) Historical policy data, which provides interaction replay from the environment, and (2) Analytical insights in natural language form, exposing the invaluable thought process or strategic considerations. Despite this, the majority of preceding research focuses on only one source: they either use historical replay exclusively to directly learn policy or value functions, or engaged in language model training utilizing mere language corpus. In this paper, we argue that a powerful autonomous agent should cover both sources. Thus, we propose ChessGPT, a GPT model bridging policy learning and language modeling by integrating data from these two sources in Chess games. Specifically, we build a large-scale game and language dataset related to chess. Leveraging the dataset, we showcase two model examples ChessCLIP and ChessGPT, integrating policy learning and language modeling. Finally, we propose a full evaluation framework for evaluating language model's chess ability. Experimental results validate our model and dataset's effectiveness. We open source our code, model, and dataset at https://github.com/waterhorse1/ChessGPT.
tl;dr: We prove new sample complexity bounds for reinforcement learning (RL) and demonstrate they closely reflect the performance of deep RL algorithms.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance. Unfortunately, current theory does not quite have this ability. We compare standard deep RL algorithms to prior sample complexity bounds by introducing a new dataset, BRIDGE. It consists of 155 MDPs from common deep RL benchmarks, along with their corresponding tabular representations, which enables us to exactly compute instance-dependent bounds. We find that prior bounds do not correlate well with when deep RL succeeds vs. fails, but discover a surprising property that does. When actions with the highest Q-values under the *random* policy also have the highest Q-values under the *optimal* policy—i.e., when it is optimal to act greedily with respect to the random's policy Q function—deep RL tends to succeed; when they don't, deep RL tends to fail. We generalize this property into a new complexity measure of an MDP that we call the *effective horizon*, which roughly corresponds to how many steps of lookahead search would be needed in that MDP in order to identify the next optimal action, when leaf nodes are evaluated with random rollouts. Using BRIDGE, we show that the effective horizon-based bounds are more closely reflective of the empirical performance of PPO and DQN than prior sample complexity bounds across four metrics. We also show that, unlike existing bounds, the effective horizon can predict the effects of using reward shaping or a pre-trained exploration policy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/cassidylaidlaw/effective-horizon.
We introduce IMP-MARL, an open-source suite of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) environments for large-scale Infrastructure Management Planning (IMP), offering a platform for benchmarking the scalability of cooperative MARL methods in real-world engineering applications.
In IMP, a multi-component engineering system is subject to a risk of failure due to its components' damage condition.
Specifically, each agent plans inspections and repairs for a specific system component, aiming to minimise maintenance costs while cooperating to minimise system failure risk.
With IMP-MARL, we release several environments including one related to offshore wind structural systems, in an effort to meet today's needs to improve management strategies to support sustainable and reliable energy systems.
Supported by IMP practical engineering environments featuring up to 100 agents, we conduct a benchmark campaign, where the scalability and performance of state-of-the-art cooperative MARL methods are compared against expert-based heuristic policies.
The results reveal that centralised training with decentralised execution methods scale better with the number of agents than fully centralised or decentralised RL approaches, while also outperforming expert-based heuristic policies in most IMP environments.
Based on our findings, we additionally outline remaining cooperation and scalability challenges that future MARL methods should still address.
Through IMP-MARL, we encourage the implementation of new environments and the further development of MARL methods.
tl;dr: We present an algorithm that reweights how much of each domain/data source is in a language modeling dataset (e.g. The Pile), resulting in faster LM training and improvements in perplexity and downstream accuracy.
The mixture proportions of pretraining data domains (e.g., Wikipedia, books, web text) greatly affect language model (LM) performance. In this paper, we propose Domain Reweighting with Minimax Optimization (DoReMi), which first trains a small proxy model using group distributionally robust optimization (Group DRO) over domains to produce domain weights (mixture proportions) without knowledge of downstream tasks. We then resample a dataset with these domain weights and train a larger, full-sized model. In our experiments, we use DoReMi on a 280M-parameter proxy model to find domain weights for training an 8B-parameter model (30x larger) more efficiently. On The Pile, DoReMi improves perplexity across all domains, even when it downweights a domain. DoReMi improves average few-shot downstream accuracy by 6.5% points over a baseline model trained using The Pile's default domain weights and reaches the baseline accuracy with 2.6x fewer training steps. On the GLaM dataset, DoReMi, which has no knowledge of downstream tasks, even matches the performance of using domain weights tuned on downstream tasks.
132. LightZero: A Unified Benchmark for Monte Carlo Tree Search in General Sequential Decision Scenarios
tl;dr: A unified benchmark for deploying MCTS/MuZero reinforcement learning methods in general sequential decision scenarios
Building agents based on tree-search planning capabilities with learned models has achieved remarkable success in classic decision-making problems, such as Go and Atari.
However, it has been deemed challenging or even infeasible to extend Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based algorithms to diverse real-world applications, especially when these environments involve complex action spaces and significant simulation costs, or inherent stochasticity.
In this work, we introduce LightZero, the first unified benchmark for deploying MCTS/MuZero in general sequential decision scenarios.
Specificially, we summarize the most critical challenges in designing a general MCTS-style decision-making solver, then decompose the tightly-coupled algorithm and system design of tree-search RL methods into distinct sub-modules.
By incorporating more appropriate exploration and optimization strategies, we can significantly enhance these sub-modules and construct powerful LightZero agents to tackle tasks across a wide range of domains, such as board games, Atari, MuJoCo, MiniGrid and GoBigger.
Detailed benchmark results reveal the significant potential of such methods in building scalable and efficient decision intelligence.
The code is available as part of OpenDILab at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.
tl;dr: Armed with identifiability results, we demonstraste how to use normalizing flows to capture a causal model and perform causal inference with it.
In this work, we deepen on the use of normalizing flows for causal reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage recent results on non-linear ICA to show that causal models are identifiable from observational data given a causal ordering, and thus can be recovered using autoregressive normalizing flows (NFs). Second, we analyze different design and learning choices for *causal normalizing flows* to capture the underlying causal data-generating process. Third, we describe how to implement the *do-operator* in causal NFs, and thus, how to answer interventional and counterfactual questions. Finally, in our experiments, we validate our design and training choices through a comprehensive ablation study; compare causal NFs to other approaches for approximating causal models; and empirically demonstrate that causal NFs can be used to address real-world problems—where the presence of mixed discrete-continuous data and partial knowledge on the causal graph is the norm. The code for this work can be found at https://github.com/psanch21/causal-flows.
tl;dr: It's hard to evaluate and explore the social biases in outputs of text-to-image models; we propose a new non-parametric method for exploring these biases, accompanied by user-friendly tools to empower users to do their own explorations.
As machine learning-enabled Text-to-Image (TTI) systems are becoming increasingly prevalent and seeing growing adoption as commercial services, characterizing the social biases they exhibit is a necessary first step to lowering their risk of discriminatory outcomes. This evaluation, however, is made more difficult by the synthetic nature of these systems’ outputs: common definitions of diversity are grounded in social categories of people living in the world, whereas the artificial depictions of fictive humans created by these systems have no inherent gender or ethnicity. To address this need, we propose a new method for exploring the social biases in TTI systems. Our approach relies on characterizing the variation in generated images triggered by enumerating gender and ethnicity markers in the prompts, and comparing it to the variation engendered by spanning different professions. This allows us to (1) identify specific bias trends, (2) provide targeted scores to directly compare models in terms of diversity and representation, and (3) jointly model interdependent social variables to support a multidimensional analysis. We leverage this method to analyze images generated by 3 popular TTI systems (Dall·E 2 , Stable Diffusion v 1.4 and 2) and find that while all of their outputs show correlations with US labor demographics, they also consistently under-represent marginalized identities to different extents. We also release the datasets and low-code interactive bias exploration platforms developed for
this work, as well as the necessary tools to similarly evaluate additional TTI systems.
tl;dr: We introduce SSL4EO-L, the first SSL dataset for Landsat imagery and the largest Landsat dataset in history, in addition to the first foundation models for Landsat pre-trained on SSL4EO-L and evaluated on several new semantic segmentation datasets.
The Landsat program is the longest-running Earth observation program in history, with 50+ years of data acquisition by 8 satellites. The multispectral imagery captured by sensors onboard these satellites is critical for a wide range of scientific fields. Despite the increasing popularity of deep learning and remote sensing, the majority of researchers still use decision trees and random forests for Landsat image analysis due to the prevalence of small labeled datasets and lack of foundation models. In this paper, we introduce SSL4EO-L, the first ever dataset designed for Self-Supervised Learning for Earth Observation for the Landsat family of satellites (including 3 sensors and 2 product levels) and the largest Landsat dataset in history (5M image patches). Additionally, we modernize and re-release the L7 Irish and L8 Biome cloud detection datasets, and introduce the first ML benchmark datasets for Landsats 4–5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ SR. Finally, we pre-train the first foundation models for Landsat imagery using SSL4EO-L and evaluate their performance on multiple semantic segmentation tasks. All datasets and model weights are available via the TorchGeo library, making reproducibility and experimentation easy, and enabling scientific advancements in the burgeoning field of remote sensing for a multitude of downstream applications.
tl;dr: We derive minimax optimal statistical rates for learning Koopman operator and combine them with spectral perturbation theory to provide strong guarantees for learning Koopman eigenvalues and eigenfunctions.
Non-linear dynamical systems can be handily described by the associated Koopman operator, whose action evolves every observable of the system forward in time. Learning the Koopman operator and its spectral decomposition from data is enabled by a number of algorithms. In this work we present for the first time non-asymptotic learning bounds for the Koopman eigenvalues and eigenfunctions.
We focus on time-reversal-invariant stochastic dynamical systems, including the important example of Langevin dynamics.
We analyze two popular estimators: Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD) and Reduced Rank Regression (RRR). Our results critically hinge on novel {minimax} estimation bounds for the operator norm error, that may be of independent interest. Our spectral learning bounds are driven by the simultaneous control of the operator norm error and a novel metric distortion functional of the estimated eigenfunctions. The bounds indicates that both EDMD and RRR have similar variance, but EDMD suffers from a larger bias which might be detrimental to its learning rate. Our results shed new light on the emergence of spurious eigenvalues, an issue which is well known empirically. Numerical experiments illustrate the implications of the bounds in practice.
tl;dr: Fast vectorized RL environments written in JAX, including backgammon, chess, shogi, and Go.
We propose Pgx, a suite of board game reinforcement learning (RL) environments written in JAX and optimized for GPU/TPU accelerators. By leveraging JAX's auto-vectorization and parallelization over accelerators, Pgx can efficiently scale to thousands of simultaneous simulations over accelerators. In our experiments on a DGX-A100 workstation, we discovered that Pgx can simulate RL environments 10-100x faster than existing implementations available in Python. Pgx includes RL environments commonly used as benchmarks in RL research, such as backgammon, chess, shogi, and Go. Additionally, Pgx offers miniature game sets and baseline models to facilitate rapid research cycles. We demonstrate the efficient training of the Gumbel AlphaZero algorithm with Pgx environments. Overall, Pgx provides high-performance environment simulators for researchers to accelerate their RL experiments. Pgx is available at https://github.com/sotetsuk/pgx.
tl;dr: We develop white-box transformer-like deep network architectures which are mathematically interpretable and achieve performance very close to ViTs.
In this paper, we contend that the objective of representation learning is to compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens, towards a mixture of low-dimensional Gaussian distributions supported on incoherent subspaces. The quality of the final representation can be measured by a unified objective function called sparse rate reduction. From this perspective, popular deep networks such as transformers can be naturally viewed as realizing iterative schemes to optimize this objective incrementally. Particularly, we show that the standard transformer block can be derived from alternating optimization on complementary parts of this objective: the multi-head self-attention operator can be viewed as a gradient descent step to compress the token sets by minimizing their lossy coding rate, and the subsequent multi-layer perceptron can be viewed as attempting to sparsify the representation of the tokens. This leads to a family of white-box transformer-like deep network architectures which are mathematically fully interpretable. Despite their simplicity, experiments show that these networks indeed learn to optimize the designed objective: they compress and sparsify representations of large-scale real-world vision datasets such as ImageNet, and achieve performance very close to thoroughly engineered transformers such as ViT.
Code is at https://github.com/Ma-Lab-Berkeley/CRATE.
tl;dr: We establish an array of precise equivalences between the implicit regularization due to subsampling and explicit ridge regularization with mild data assumptions.
We establish precise structural and risk equivalences between subsampling and ridge regularization for ensemble ridge estimators. Specifically, we prove that linear and quadratic functionals of subsample ridge estimators, when fitted with different ridge regularization levels $\lambda$ and subsample aspect ratios $\psi$, are asymptotically equivalent along specific paths in the $(\lambda,\psi)$-plane (where $\psi$ is the ratio of the feature dimension to the subsample size). Our results only require bounded moment assumptions on feature and response distributions and allow for arbitrary joint distributions. Furthermore, we provide a data-dependent method to determine the equivalent paths of $(\lambda,\psi)$. An indirect implication of our equivalences is that optimally tuned ridge regression exhibits a monotonic prediction risk in the data aspect ratio. This resolves a recent open problem raised by Nakkiran et al. for general data distributions under proportional asymptotics, assuming a mild regularity condition that maintains regression hardness through linearized signal-to-noise ratios.
Normalization techniques that capture image style by statistical representation have become a popular component in deep neural networks.
Although image enhancement can be considered as a form of style transformation, there has been little exploration of how normalization affect the enhancement performance.
To fully leverage the potential of normalization, we present a novel Transition-Constant Normalization (TCN) for various image enhancement tasks.
Specifically, it consists of two streams of normalization operations arranged under an invertible constraint, along with a feature sub-sampling operation that satisfies the normalization constraint.
TCN enjoys several merits, including being parameter-free, plug-and-play, and incurring no additional computational costs.
We provide various formats to utilize TCN for image enhancement, including seamless integration with enhancement networks, incorporation into encoder-decoder architectures for downsampling, and implementation of efficient architectures.
Through extensive experiments on multiple image enhancement tasks, like low-light enhancement, exposure correction, SDR2HDR translation, and image dehazing, our TCN consistently demonstrates performance improvements.
Besides, it showcases extensive ability in other tasks including pan-sharpening and medical segmentation.
The code is available at \textit{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/huangkevinj/TCNorm}}.
tl;dr: We propose a generic framework that learns continuous representations for regression, which not only boosts performance but also improves robustness, data efficiency, and generalization.
Deep regression models typically learn in an end-to-end fashion without explicitly emphasizing a regression-aware representation. Consequently, the learned representations exhibit fragmentation and fail to capture the continuous nature of sample orders, inducing suboptimal results across a wide range of regression tasks. To fill the gap, we propose Rank-N-Contrast (RNC), a framework that learns continuous representations for regression by contrasting samples against each other based on their rankings in the target space. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that RNC guarantees the desired order of learned representations in accordance with the target orders, enjoying not only better performance but also significantly improved robustness, efficiency, and generalization. Extensive experiments using five real-world regression datasets that span computer vision, human-computer interaction, and healthcare verify that RNC achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its intriguing properties including better data efficiency, robustness to spurious targets and data corruptions, and generalization to distribution shifts.
Existing deep learning-based computer vision methods usually operate in the spatial and frequency domains, which are two orthogonal \textbf{individual} perspectives for image processing.
In this paper, we introduce a new spatial-frequency analysis tool, Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT), to provide comprehensive \textbf{unified} spatial-frequency perspectives.
The FRFT is a unified continuous spatial-frequency transform that simultaneously reflects an image's spatial and frequency representations, making it optimal for processing non-stationary image signals.
We explore the properties of the FRFT for image processing and present a fast implementation of the 2D FRFT, which facilitates its widespread use.
Based on these explorations, we introduce a simple yet effective operator, Multi-order FRactional Fourier Convolution (MFRFC), which exhibits the remarkable merits of processing images from more perspectives in the spatial-frequency plane. Our proposed MFRFC is a general and basic operator that can be easily integrated into various tasks for performance improvement.
We experimentally evaluate the MFRFC on various computer vision tasks, including object detection, image classification, guided super-resolution, denoising, dehazing, deraining, and low-light enhancement. Our proposed MFRFC consistently outperforms baseline methods by significant margins across all tasks.
Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult to measure through traditional means, machine learning offers a promising set of techniques for evaluating novelty, summarizing contributions, and embedding semantics. In this paper, we introduce the Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset (HUPD), a large-scale, well-structured, and multi-purpose corpus of English-language patent applications filed to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 2004 and 2018. With more than 4.5 million patent documents, HUPD is two to three times larger than comparable corpora. Unlike other NLP patent datasets, HUPD contains the inventor-submitted versions of patent applications, not the final versions of granted patents, allowing us to study patentability at the time of filing using NLP methods for the first time. It is also novel in its inclusion of rich structured data alongside the text of patent filings: By providing each application’s metadata along with all of its text fields, HUPD enables researchers to perform new sets of NLP tasks that leverage variation in structured covariates. As a case study on the types of research HUPD makes possible, we introduce a new task to the NLP community -- patent acceptance prediction. We additionally show the structured metadata provided in HUPD allows us to conduct explicit studies of concept shifts for this task. We find that performance on patent acceptance prediction decays when models trained in one context are evaluated on different innovation categories and over time. Finally, we demonstrate how HUPD can be used for three additional tasks: Multi-class classification of patent subject areas, language modeling, and abstractive summarization. Put together, our publicly-available dataset aims to advance research extending language and classification models to diverse and dynamic real-world data distributions.
Understanding the geometric properties of gradient descent dynamics is a key ingredient in deciphering the recent success of very large machine learning models. A striking observation is that trained over-parameterized models retain some properties of the optimization initialization. This "implicit bias" is believed to be responsible for some favorable properties of the trained models and could explain their good generalization properties. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, we rigorously expose the definition and basic properties of "conservation laws", that define quantities conserved during gradient flows of a given model (e.g. of a ReLU network with a given architecture) with any training data and any loss. Then we explain how to find the maximal number of independent conservation laws
by performing finite-dimensional algebraic manipulations on the Lie algebra generated by the Jacobian of the model. Finally, we provide algorithms to: a) compute a family of polynomial laws; b) compute the maximal number of (not necessarily polynomial) independent conservation laws. We provide showcase examples that we fully work out theoretically. Besides, applying the two algorithms confirms for a number of ReLU network architectures that all known laws are recovered by the algorithm, and that there are no other independent laws. Such computational tools pave the way to understanding desirable properties of optimization initialization in large machine learning models.
145. Optimistic Natural Policy Gradient: a Simple Efficient Policy Optimization Framework for Online RL
While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited---they are either restricted to tabular MDPs or suffer from highly suboptimal sample complexity, especial in online RL where exploration is necessary. This paper proposes a simple efficient policy optimization framework---Optimistic NPG for online RL. Optimistic NPG can be viewed as simply combining of the classic natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm [Kakade, 2001] with optimistic policy evaluation subroutines to encourage exploration. For $d$-dimensional linear MDPs, Optimistic NPG is computationally efficient, and learns an $\epsilon$-optimal policy within $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^2/\epsilon^3)$ samples, which is the first computationally efficient algorithm whose sample complexity has the optimal dimension dependence $\tilde{\Theta}(d^2)$. It also improves over state-of-the-art results of policy optimization algorithms [Zanette et al., 2021] by a factor of $d$. For general function approximation that subsumes linear MDPs, Optimistic NPG, to our best knowledge, is also the first policy optimization algorithm that achieves the polynomial sample complexity for learning near-optimal policies.
tl;dr: NIS3D: A Completely Annotated Benchmark for Dense 3D Nuclei Image Segmentation
3D segmentation of nuclei images is a fundamental task for many biological studies. Despite the rapid advances of large-volume 3D imaging acquisition methods and the emergence of sophisticated algorithms to segment the nuclei in recent years, a benchmark with all cells completely annotated is still missing, making it hard to accurately assess and further improve the performance of the algorithms. The existing nuclei segmentation benchmarks either worked on 2D only or annotated a small number of 3D cells, perhaps due to the high cost of 3D annotation for large-scale data. To fulfill the critical need, we constructed NIS3D, a 3D, high cell density, large-volume, and completely annotated Nuclei Image Segmentation benchmark, assisted by our newly designed semi-automatic annotation software. NIS3D provides more than 22,000 cells across multiple most-used species in this area. Each cell is labeled by three independent annotators, so we can measure the variability of each annotation. A confidence score is computed for each cell, allowing more nuanced testing and performance comparison. A comprehensive review on the methods of segmenting 3D dense nuclei was conducted. The benchmark was used to evaluate the performance of several selected state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms. The best of current methods is still far away from human-level accuracy, corroborating the necessity of generating such a benchmark. The testing results also demonstrated the strength and weakness of each method and pointed out the directions of further methodological development. The dataset can be downloaded here: https://github.com/yu-lab-vt/NIS3D.
Protein inverse folding has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, we observe that current methods are usually limited to the CATH dataset and the recovery metric. The lack of a unified framework for ensembling and comparing different methods hinders the comprehensive investigation. In this paper, we propose ProteinBench, a new benchmark for protein design, which comprises extended protein design tasks, integrated models, and diverse evaluation metrics. We broaden the application of methods originally designed for single-chain protein design to new scenarios of multi-chain and \textit{de novo} protein design. Recent impressive methods, including GraphTrans, StructGNN, GVP, GCA, AlphaDesign, ProteinMPNN, PiFold and KWDesign are integrated into our framework. In addition to the recovery, we also evaluate the confidence, diversity, sc-TM, efficiency, and robustness to thoroughly revisit current protein design approaches and inspire future work. As a result, we establish the first comprehensive benchmark for protein design, which is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/A4Bio/OpenCPD}.
tl;dr: A new and challenging complex query-based Information Retrieval Task Benchmark created with the help of LLM.
In scientific research, the ability to effectively retrieve relevant documents based on complex, multifaceted queries is critical. Existing evaluation datasets for this task are limited, primarily due to the high costs and effort required to annotate resources that effectively represent complex queries. To address this, we propose a novel task, $\textbf{S}$cientific $\textbf{Do}$cument $\textbf{R}$etrieval using $\textbf{M}$ulti-level $\textbf{A}$spect-based qu$\textbf{E}$ries (DORIS-MAE), which is designed to handle the complex nature of user queries in scientific research. We developed a benchmark dataset within the field of computer science, consisting of 100 human-authored complex query cases. For each complex query, we assembled a collection of 100 relevant documents and produced annotated relevance scores for ranking them. Recognizing the significant labor of expert annotation, we also introduce Anno-GPT, a scalable framework for evaluating the viability of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT-3.5 for expert-level dataset annotation tasks. The application of Anno-GPT to annotate the DORIS-MAE dataset resulted in a 500x reduction in cost, without compromising quality. Furthermore, due to the multi-tiered structure of these complex queries, our DORIS-MAE dataset can be extended to over 4,000 sub-query test cases without requiring additional annotation. We evaluated 17 recent retrieval methods on DORIS-MAE, observing notable performance drops compared to traditional datasets. This highlights DORIS-MAE's challenges and the need for better approaches to handle complex, multifaceted queries in scientific research. Our dataset and codebase are available at https://github.com/Real-Doris-Mae/Doris-Mae-Dataset .
tl;dr: We leverage biomedical figure-caption dataset from PubMed Central, use GPT-4 to self-instruct open-ended instruction-following data, and then train a large vision-language model using a novel curriculum learning method
Conversational generative AI has demonstrated remarkable promise for empowering biomedical practitioners, but current investigations focus on unimodal text. Multimodal conversational AI has seen rapid progress by leveraging billions of image-text pairs from the public web, but such general-domain vision-language models still lack sophistication in understanding and conversing about biomedical images. In this paper, we propose a cost-efficient approach for training a vision-language conversational assistant that can answer open-ended research questions of biomedical images. The key idea is to leverage a large-scale, broad-coverage biomedical figure-caption dataset extracted from PubMed Central, use GPT-4 to self-instruct open-ended instruction-following data from the captions, and then fine-tune a large general-domain vision-language model using a novel curriculum learning method. Specifically, the model first learns to align biomedical vocabulary using the figure-caption pairs as is, then learns to master open-ended conversational semantics using GPT-4 generated instruction-following data, broadly mimicking how a layperson gradually acquires biomedical knowledge. This enables us to train a Large Language and Vision Assistant for BioMedicine (LLaVA-Med) in less than 15 hours (with eight A100s). LLaVA-Med exhibits excellent multimodal conversational capability and can follow open-ended instruction to assist with inquiries about a biomedical image. On three standard biomedical visual question answering datasets, LLaVA-Med outperforms previous supervised state-of-the-art on certain metrics. To facilitate biomedical multimodal research, we will release our instruction-following data and the LLaVA-Med model.
tl;dr: We find that neural networks do not always rediscover known algorithms (Clock), but also discover new ones (Pizza), with modular addition as a prototypical example.
Do neural networks, trained on well-understood algorithmic tasks, reliably rediscover known algorithms? Several recent studies, on tasks ranging from group operations to in-context linear regression, have suggested that the answer is yes. Using modular addition as a prototypical problem, we show that algorithm discovery in neural networks is sometimes more complex: small changes to model hyperparameters and initializations can induce discovery of qualitatively different algorithms from a fixed training set, and even learning of multiple different solutions in parallel. In modular addition, we specifically show that models learn a known *Clock* algorithm, a previously undescribed, less intuitive, but comprehensible procedure we term the *Pizza* algorithm, and a variety of even more complex procedures. Our results show that even simple learning problems can admit a surprising diversity of solutions, motivating the development of new tools for mechanistically characterizing the behavior of neural networks across the algorithmic phase space.
tl;dr: A library offering modular implementation of combinatorial and mixed-space Bayesian optimisation solvers along for benchmarking on real world tasks.
This paper introduces a modular framework for Mixed-variable and Combinatorial Bayesian Optimization (MCBO) to address the lack of systematic benchmarking and standardized evaluation in the field. Current MCBO papers often introduce non-diverse or non-standard benchmarks to evaluate their methods, impeding the proper assessment of different MCBO primitives and their combinations. Additionally, papers introducing a solution for a single MCBO primitive often omit benchmarking against baselines that utilize the same methods for the remaining primitives. This omission is primarily due to the significant implementation overhead involved, resulting in a lack of controlled assessments and an inability to showcase the merits of a contribution effectively.
To overcome these challenges, our proposed framework enables an effortless combination of Bayesian Optimization components, and provides a diverse set of synthetic and real-world benchmarking tasks.
Leveraging this flexibility, we implement 47 novel MCBO algorithms and benchmark them against seven existing MCBO solvers and five standard black-box optimization algorithms on ten tasks, conducting over 4000 experiments.
Our findings reveal a superior combination of MCBO primitives outperforming existing approaches and illustrate the significance of model fit and the use of a trust region. We make our MCBO library available under the MIT license at \url{https://github.com/huawei-noah/HEBO/tree/master/MCBO}.
Offline inverse reinforcement learning (Offline IRL) aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of expertise in executing a task has applications in safety-sensitive applications such as clinical decision making and autonomous driving. However, the structure of an expert's preferences implicit in observed actions is closely linked to the expert's model of the environment dynamics (i.e. the ``world''). Thus, inaccurate models of the world obtained from finite data with limited coverage could compound inaccuracy in estimated rewards. To address this issue, we propose a bi-level optimization formulation of the estimation task wherein the upper level is likelihood maximization based upon a conservative model of the expert's policy (lower level). The policy model is conservative in that it maximizes reward subject to a penalty that is increasing in the uncertainty of the estimated model of the world. We propose a new algorithmic framework to solve the bi-level optimization problem formulation and provide statistical and computational guarantees of performance for the associated optimal reward estimator. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art offline IRL and imitation learning benchmarks by a large margin, over the continuous control tasks in MuJoCo and different datasets in the D4RL benchmark.
tl;dr: HyenaDNA is a genomic foundation model trained on the human genome using a context length of 450k tokens.
Genomic (DNA) sequences encode an enormous amount of information for gene regulation and protein synthesis. Similar to natural language models, researchers have proposed foundation models in genomics to learn generalizable features from unlabeled genome data that can then be fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as identifying regulatory elements. Due to the quadratic scaling of attention, previous Transformer-based genomic models have used 512 to 4k tokens as context (<0.001% of the human genome), significantly limiting the modeling of long-range interactions in DNA. In addition, these methods rely on tokenizers or fixed k-mers to aggregate meaningful DNA units, losing single nucleotide resolution (i.e. DNA "characters") where subtle genetic variations can completely alter protein function via single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Recently, Hyena, a large language model based on implicit convolutions was shown to match attention in quality while allowing longer context lengths and lower time complexity. Leveraging Hyena’s new long-range capabilities, we present HyenaDNA, a genomic foundation model pretrained on the human reference genome with context lengths of up to 1 million tokens at the single nucleotide-level – an up to 500x increase over previous dense attention-based models. HyenaDNA scales sub-quadratically in sequence length (training up to 160x faster than Transformer), uses single nucleotide tokens, and has full global context at each layer. We explore what longer context enables - including the first use of in-context learning in genomics for simple adaptation to novel tasks without updating pretrained model weights. On fine-tuned benchmarks from the Nucleotide Transformer, HyenaDNA reaches state-of-the-art (SotA) on 12 of 18 datasets using a model with orders of magnitude less parameters and pretraining data.1 On the GenomicBenchmarks, HyenaDNA surpasses SotA on 7 of 8 datasets on average by +10 accuracy points. Code at https://github.com/HazyResearch/hyena-dna.
Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) models have made significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on datasets written by annotators, which has resulted in a gap between academic research and real-world spoken con- versation scenarios. While several small-scale spoken TOD datasets are proposed to address robustness issues such as ASR errors, they ignore the unique challenges in spoken conversation. To tackle the limitations, we introduce SpokenWOZ, a large-scale speech-text dataset for spoken TOD, containing 8 domains, 203k turns, 5.7k dialogues and 249 hours of audios from human-to-human spoken conversations. SpokenWOZ further incorporates common spoken characteristics such as word-by-word processing and reasoning in spoken language. Based on these characteristics, we present cross-turn slot and reasoning slot detection as new challenges. We conduct experiments on various baselines, including text-modal models, newly proposed dual-modal models, and LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT. The results show that the current models still have substantial room for improvement in spoken conversation, where the most advanced dialogue state tracker only achieves 25.65% in joint goal accuracy and the SOTA end-to-end model only correctly completes the user request in 52.1% of dialogues. Our dataset, code, and leaderboard are available at https://spokenwoz.github.io/SpokenWOZ-github.io/.
tl;dr: We initiate the study of deep learning for the automated design of optimal contracts by introducing discontinuity into fully-connected networks with ReLU activation to better model the contractual agreements between the principal and the agent.
Contract design involves a principal who establishes contractual agreements about payments for outcomes that arise from the actions of an agent. In this paper, we initiate the study of deep learning for the automated design of optimal contracts. We introduce a novel representation: the Discontinuous ReLU (DeLU) network, which models the principal's utility as a discontinuous piecewise affine function of the design of a contract where each piece corresponds to the agent taking a particular action. DeLU networks implicitly learn closed-form expressions for the incentive compatibility constraints of the agent and the utility maximization objective of the principal, and support parallel inference on each piece through linear programming or interior-point methods that solve for optimal contracts. We provide empirical results that demonstrate success in approximating the principal's utility function with a small number of training samples and scaling to find approximately optimal contracts on problems with a large number of actions and outcomes.
The challenge of replicating research results has posed a significant impediment to the field of molecular biology. The advent of modern intelligent systems has led to notable progress in various domains. Consequently, we embarked on an investigation of intelligent monitoring systems as a means of tackling the issue of the reproducibility crisis. Specifically, we first curate a comprehensive multimodal dataset, named ProBio, as an initial step towards this objective. This dataset comprises fine-grained hierarchical annotations intended for the purpose of studying activity understanding in BioLab. Next, we devise two challenging benchmarks, transparent solution tracking and multimodal action recognition, to emphasize the unique characteristics and difficulties associated with activity understanding in BioLab settings. Finally, we provide a thorough experimental evaluation of contemporary video understanding models and highlight their limitations in this specialized domain to identify potential avenues for future research. We hope \dataset with associated benchmarks may garner increased focus on modern AI techniques in the realm of molecular biology.
tl;dr: We show Straight-Through works as a first-order approximation of the gradient and propose ReinMax, which achieves second-order accuracy with negligible computation overheads.
Backpropagation, the cornerstone of deep learning, is limited to computing gradients for continuous variables. This limitation poses challenges for problems involving discrete latent variables. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to approximate the gradient of parameters involved in generating discrete latent variables. First, we examine the widely used Straight-Through (ST) heuristic and demonstrate that it works as a first-order approximation of the gradient. Guided by our findings, we propose ReinMax, which achieves second-order accuracy by integrating Heun’s method, a second-order numerical method for solving ODEs. ReinMax does not require Hessian or other second-order derivatives, thus having negligible computation overheads. Extensive experimental results on various tasks demonstrate the superiority of ReinMax over the state of the art.
We consider an important problem in scientific discovery, namely identifying sparse governing equations for nonlinear dynamical systems. This involves solving sparse ridge regression problems to provable optimality in order to determine which terms drive the underlying dynamics. We propose a fast algorithm, OKRidge, for sparse ridge regression, using a novel lower bound calculation involving, first, a saddle point formulation, and from there, either solving (i) a linear system or (ii) using an ADMM-based approach, where the proximal operators can be efficiently evaluated by solving another linear system and an isotonic regression problem. We also propose a method to warm-start our solver, which leverages a beam search. Experimentally, our methods attain provable optimality with run times that are orders of magnitude faster than those of the existing MIP formulations solved by the commercial solver Gurobi.
Advances in optical and electrophysiological recording technologies have made it possible to record the dynamics of thousands of neurons, opening up new possibilities for interpreting and controlling large neural populations in behaving animals. A promising way to extract computational principles from these large datasets is to train data-constrained recurrent neural networks (dRNNs). Performing this training in real-time could open doors for research techniques and medical applications to model and control interventions at single-cell resolution and drive desired forms of animal behavior. However, existing training algorithms for dRNNs are inefficient and have limited scalability, making it a challenge to analyze large neural recordings even in offline scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce a training method termed Convex Optimization of Recurrent Neural Networks (CORNN). In studies of simulated recordings, CORNN attained training speeds $\sim$100-fold faster than traditional optimization approaches while maintaining or enhancing modeling accuracy. We further validated CORNN on simulations with thousands of cells that performed simple computations such as those of a 3-bit flip-flop or the execution of a timed response. Finally, we showed that CORNN can robustly reproduce network dynamics and underlying attractor structures despite mismatches between generator and inference models, severe subsampling of observed neurons, or mismatches in neural time-scales. Overall, by training dRNNs with millions of parameters in subminute processing times on a standard computer, CORNN constitutes a first step towards real-time network reproduction constrained on large-scale neural recordings and a powerful computational tool for advancing the understanding of neural computation.
tl;dr: A Bayesian approach to optimising stimulation parameters significantly improves the precision of two-photon optogenetics
Two-photon optogenetics has transformed our ability to probe the structure and function of neural circuits. However, achieving precise optogenetic control of neural ensemble activity has remained fundamentally constrained by the problem of off-target stimulation (OTS): the inadvertent activation of nearby non-target neurons due to imperfect confinement of light onto target neurons. Here we propose a novel computational approach to this problem called Bayesian target optimisation. Our approach uses nonparametric Bayesian inference to model neural responses to optogenetic stimulation, and then optimises the laser powers and optical target locations needed to achieve a desired activity pattern with minimal OTS. We validate our approach in simulations and using data from in vitro experiments, showing that Bayesian target optimisation considerably reduces OTS across all conditions we test. Together, these results establish our ability to overcome OTS, enabling optogenetic stimulation with substantially improved precision.
tl;dr: We propose OpenDataVal, an easy-to-use and unified benchmark framework for data valuation.
Assessing the quality and impact of individual data points is critical for improving model performance and mitigating undesirable biases within the training dataset. Several data valuation algorithms have been proposed to quantify data quality, however, there lacks a systemic and standardized benchmarking system for data valuation. In this paper, we introduce *OpenDataVal*, an easy-to-use and unified benchmark framework that empowers researchers and practitioners to apply and compare various data valuation algorithms. *OpenDataVal* provides an integrated environment that includes (i) a diverse collection of image, natural language, and tabular datasets, (ii) implementations of eleven different state-of-the-art data valuation algorithms, and (iii) a prediction model API that can import any models in scikit-learn. Furthermore, we propose four downstream machine learning tasks for evaluating the quality of data values. We perform benchmarking analysis using *OpenDataVal*, quantifying and comparing the efficacy of state-of-the-art data valuation approaches. We find that no single algorithm performs uniformly best across all tasks, and an appropriate algorithm should be employed for a user's downstream task. *OpenDataVal* is publicly available at https://opendataval.github.io with comprehensive documentation. Furthermore, we provide a leaderboard where researchers can evaluate the effectiveness of their own data valuation algorithms.
tl;dr: The first question answering dataset specifically designed for electrocardiogram.
Question answering (QA) in the field of healthcare has received much attention due to significant advancements in natural language processing. However, existing healthcare QA datasets primarily focus on medical images, clinical notes, or structured electronic health record tables. This leaves the vast potential of combining electrocardiogram (ECG) data with these systems largely untapped. To address this gap, we present ECG-QA, the first QA dataset specifically designed for ECG analysis. The dataset comprises a total of 70 question templates that cover a wide range of clinically relevant ECG topics, each validated by an ECG expert to ensure their clinical utility. As a result, our dataset includes diverse ECG interpretation questions, including those that require a comparative analysis of two different ECGs. In addition, we have conducted numerous experiments to provide valuable insights for future research directions. We believe that ECG-QA will serve as a valuable resource for the development of intelligent QA systems capable of assisting clinicians in ECG interpretations.
Generating plans of action, and reasoning about change have long been considered a core competence of intelligent agents. It is thus no surprise that evaluating the planning and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has become a hot topic of research. Most claims about LLM planning capabilities are however based on common sense tasks–where it becomes hard to tell whether LLMs are planning or merely retrieving from their vast world knowledge. There is a strong need for systematic and extensible planning benchmarks with sufficient diversity to evaluate whether LLMs have innate planning capabilities. Motivated by this, we propose PlanBench, an extensible benchmark suite based on the kinds of domains used in the automated planning community, especially in the International Planning Competition, to test the capabilities of LLMs in planning or reasoning about actions and change. PlanBench provides sufficient diversity in both the task domains and the specific planning capabilities. Our studies also show that on many critical capabilities–including plan generation–LLM performance falls quite short, even with the SOTA models. PlanBench can thus function as a useful marker of progress of LLMs in planning and reasoning.
Autoregressive Transformers adopted in Large Language Models (LLMs) are hard to scale to long sequences. Despite several works trying to reduce their computational cost, most of LLMs still adopt attention layers between all pairs of tokens in the sequence, thus incurring a quadratic cost. In this study, we present a novel approach that dynamically prunes contextual information while preserving the model's expressiveness, resulting in reduced memory and computational requirements during inference. Our method employs a learnable mechanism that determines which uninformative tokens can be dropped from the context at any point across the generation process. By doing so, our approach not only addresses performance concerns but also enhances interpretability, providing valuable insight into the model's decision-making process. Our technique can be applied to existing pre-trained models through a straightforward fine-tuning process, and the pruning strength can be specified by a sparsity parameter. Notably, our empirical findings demonstrate that we can effectively prune up to 80\% of the context without significant performance degradation on downstream tasks, offering a valuable tool for mitigating inference costs. Our reference implementation achieves up to $2\times$ increase in inference throughput and even greater memory savings.
tl;dr: We propose AMenuNet, a scalable neural network for DSIC affine maximizer auction design.
Automated auction design aims to find empirically high-revenue mechanisms through machine learning. Existing works on multi item auction scenarios can be roughly divided into RegretNet-like and affine maximizer auctions (AMAs) approaches. However, the former cannot strictly ensure dominant strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC), while the latter faces scalability issue due to the large number of allocation candidates. To address these limitations, we propose AMenuNet, a scalable neural network that constructs the AMA parameters (even including the allocation menu) from bidder and item representations. AMenuNet is always DSIC and individually rational (IR) due to the properties of AMAs, and it enhances scalability by generating candidate allocations through a neural network. Additionally, AMenuNet is permutation equivariant, and its number of parameters is independent of auction scale. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that AMenuNet outperforms strong baselines in both contextual and non-contextual multi-item auctions, scales well to larger auctions, generalizes well to different settings, and identifies useful deterministic allocations. Overall, our proposed approach offers an effective solution to automated DSIC auction design, with improved scalability and strong revenue performance in various settings.
tl;dr: We propose a new generative hierarchical clustering model that learns a flexible tree-based posterior distribution over latent variables.
We propose Tree Variational Autoencoder (TreeVAE), a new generative hierarchical clustering model
that learns a flexible tree-based posterior distribution over latent variables. TreeVAE hierarchically divides samples according to their intrinsic characteristics, shedding light on hidden structures in the data. It adapts its architecture to discover the optimal tree for encoding dependencies between latent variables. The proposed tree-based generative architecture enables lightweight conditional inference and improves generative performance by utilizing specialized leaf decoders.
We show that TreeVAE uncovers underlying clusters in the data and finds meaningful hierarchical relations between the different groups on a variety of datasets, including real-world imaging data.
We present empirically that TreeVAE provides a more competitive log-likelihood lower bound than the sequential counterparts.
Finally, due to its generative nature, TreeVAE is able to generate new samples from the discovered clusters via conditional sampling.
tl;dr: A personalized causal effect prediction framework that can generalize to novel treatments that did not exist during training (e.g. a newly invented drug that has never been prescribed before)
Predicting how different interventions will causally affect a specific individual is important in a variety of domains such as personalized medicine, public policy, and online marketing. There are a large number of methods to predict the effect of an existing intervention based on historical data from individuals who received it.
However, in many settings it is important to predict the effects of novel interventions (e.g., a newly invented drug), which these methods do not address.
Here, we consider zero-shot causal learning: predicting the personalized effects of a novel intervention. We propose CaML, a causal meta-learning framework which formulates the personalized prediction of each intervention's effect as a task. CaML trains a single meta-model across thousands of tasks, each constructed by sampling an intervention, its recipients, and its nonrecipients. By leveraging both intervention information (e.g., a drug's attributes) and individual features (e.g., a patient's history), CaML is able to predict the personalized effects of novel interventions that do not exist at the time of training. Experimental results on real world datasets in large-scale medical claims and cell-line perturbations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Most strikingly, CaML's zero-shot predictions outperform even strong baselines trained directly on data from the test interventions.
tl;dr: We propose a simple hierarchical offline goal-conditioned RL method that extracts both high- and low-level policies from a single value function.
Unsupervised pre-training has recently become the bedrock for computer vision and natural language processing. In reinforcement learning (RL), goal-conditioned RL can potentially provide an analogous self-supervised approach for making use of large quantities of unlabeled (reward-free) data. However, building effective algorithms for goal-conditioned RL that can learn directly from diverse offline data is challenging, because it is hard to accurately estimate the exact value function for faraway goals. Nonetheless, goal-reaching problems exhibit structure, such that reaching distant goals entails first passing through closer subgoals. This structure can be very useful, as assessing the quality of actions for nearby goals is typically easier than for more distant goals. Based on this idea, we propose a hierarchical algorithm for goal-conditioned RL from offline data. Using one action-free value function, we learn two policies that allow us to exploit this structure: a high-level policy that treats states as actions and predicts (a latent representation of) a subgoal and a low-level policy that predicts the action for reaching this subgoal. Through analysis and didactic examples, we show how this hierarchical decomposition makes our method robust to noise in the estimated value function. We then apply our method to offline goal-reaching benchmarks, showing that our method can solve long-horizon tasks that stymie prior methods, can scale to high-dimensional image observations, and can readily make use of action-free data. Our code is available at https://seohong.me/projects/hiql/
tl;dr: Stein thinning, an algorithm to post-treat MCMC outputs, often exhibits strong pathologies, that are carefully analyzed to propose an improved regularized algorithm.
Stein thinning is a promising algorithm proposed by (Riabiz et al., 2022) for post-processing outputs of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main principle is to greedily minimize the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), which only requires the gradient of the log-target distribution, and is thus well-suited for Bayesian inference. The main advantages of Stein thinning are the automatic remove of the burn-in period, the correction of the bias introduced by recent MCMC algorithms, and the asymptotic properties of convergence towards the target distribution. Nevertheless, Stein thinning suffers from several empirical pathologies, which may result in poor approximations, as observed in the literature. In this article, we conduct a theoretical analysis of these pathologies, to clearly identify the mechanisms at stake, and suggest improved strategies. Then, we introduce the regularized Stein thinning algorithm to alleviate the identified pathologies. Finally, theoretical guarantees and extensive experiments show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm. An implementation of regularized Stein thinning as the kernax library in python and JAX is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/kernax.
tl;dr: We propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct.
Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct.
Different from typical variational autoencoders assuming I.I.D. representations (a data point's representation is not directly affected by other data points), our VIR borrows data with similar regression labels to compute the latent representation's variational distribution; furthermore, different from deterministic regression models producing point estimates, VIR predicts the entire normal-inverse-gamma distributions and modulates the associated conjugate distributions to impose probabilistic reweighting on the imbalanced data, thereby providing better uncertainty estimation. Experiments in several real-world datasets show that our VIR can outperform state-of-the-art imbalanced regression models in terms of both accuracy and uncertainty estimation. Code will soon be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/variational-imbalanced-regression.
Motion planning, which aims to find a high-quality collision-free path in the configuration space, is a fundamental task in robotic systems. Recently, learning-based motion planners, especially the graph neural network-powered, have shown promising planning performance. However, though the state-of-the-art GNN planner can efficiently extract and learn graph information, its inherent mechanism is not well suited for graph search process, hindering its further performance improvement. To address this challenge and fully unleash the potential of GNN in motion planning, this paper proposes GraphMP, a neural motion planner for both low and high-dimensional planning tasks. With the customized model architecture and training mechanism design, GraphMP can simultaneously perform efficient graph pattern extraction and graph search processing, leading to strong planning performance. Experiments on a variety of environments, ranging from 2D Maze to 14D dual KUKA robotic arm, show that our proposed GraphMP achieves significant improvement on path quality and planning speed over the state-of-the-art learning-based and classical planners; while preserving the competitive success rate.
tl;dr: Transformers fail to robustly keep track of a single bit of memory. The glitches are surprisingly subtle and persistent. We hypothesize that this accounts for some "closed-domain hallucinations".
Why do large language models sometimes output factual inaccuracies and exhibit erroneous reasoning? The brittleness of these models, particularly when executing long chains of reasoning, currently seems to be an inevitable price to pay for their advanced capabilities of coherently synthesizing knowledge, pragmatics, and abstract thought. Towards making sense of this fundamentally unsolved problem, this work identifies and analyzes the phenomenon of _attention glitches_, in which the Transformer architecture's inductive biases intermittently fail to capture robust reasoning. To isolate the issue, we introduce _flip-flop language modeling_ (FFLM), a parametric family of synthetic benchmarks designed to probe the extrapolative behavior of neural language models. This simple generative task requires a model to copy binary symbols over long-range dependencies, ignoring the tokens in between. We find that Transformer FFLMs suffer from a long tail of sporadic reasoning errors, some of which we can eliminate using various regularization techniques. Our preliminary mechanistic analyses show why the remaining errors may be very difficult to diagnose and resolve. We hypothesize that attention glitches account for (some of) the closed-domain hallucinations in natural LLMs.
tl;dr: We introduce a new dataset of 3D interacting hands.
The two-hand interaction is one of the most challenging signals to analyze due to the self-similarity, complicated articulations, and occlusions of hands. Although several datasets have been proposed for the two-hand interaction analysis, all of them do not achieve 1) diverse and realistic image appearances and 2) diverse and large-scale groundtruth (GT) 3D poses at the same time. In this work, we propose Re:InterHand, a dataset of relighted 3D interacting hands that achieve the two goals. To this end, we employ a state-of-the-art hand relighting network with our accurately tracked two-hand 3D poses. We compare our Re:InterHand with existing 3D interacting hands datasets and show the benefit of it. Our Re:InterHand is available in https://mks0601.github.io/ReInterHand/
tl;dr: We prove that any function a transformer computes can be expressed in first-order logic with majority quantifiers.
One way to interpret the reasoning power of transformer-based language models is to describe the types of logical rules they can resolve over some input text. Recently, Chiang et al. (2023) showed that finite-precision transformer classifiers can be equivalently expressed in a generalization of first-order logic. However, finite-precision transformers are a weak transformer variant because, as we show, a single head can only attend to a constant number of tokens and, in particular, cannot represent uniform attention. Since attending broadly is a core capability for transformers, we ask whether a minimally more expressive model that can attend universally can also be characterized in logic. To this end, we analyze transformers whose forward pass is computed in $\log n$ precision on contexts of length $n$. We prove any log-precision transformer classifier can be equivalently expressed as a first-order logic sentence that, in addition to standard universal and existential quantifiers, may also contain majority-vote quantifiers. This is the tightest known upper bound and first logical characterization of log-precision transformers.
tl;dr: Critical band masking, a tool from neuroscience, reveals a large difference in the spatial frequency information used by humans and neural networks to recognize objects in natural images.
What spatial frequency information do humans and neural networks use to recognize objects? In neuroscience, critical band masking is an established tool that can reveal the frequency-selective filters used for object recognition. Critical band masking measures the sensitivity of recognition performance to noise added at each spatial frequency. Existing critical band masking studies show that humans recognize periodic patterns (gratings) and letters by means of a spatial-frequency filter (or "channel") that has a frequency bandwidth of one octave (doubling of frequency). Here, we introduce critical band masking as a task for network-human comparison and test 14 humans and 76 neural networks on 16-way ImageNet categorization in the presence of narrowband noise. We find that humans recognize objects in natural images using the same one-octave-wide channel that they use for letters and gratings, making it a canonical feature of human object recognition. Unlike humans, the neural network channel is very broad, 2-4 times wider than the human channel. This means that the network channel extends to frequencies higher and lower than those that humans are sensitive to. Thus, noise at those frequencies will impair network performance and spare human performance. Adversarial and augmented-image training are commonly used to increase network robustness and shape bias. Does this training align network and human object recognition channels? Three network channel properties (bandwidth, center frequency, peak noise sensitivity) correlate strongly with shape bias (51% variance explained) and robustness of adversarially-trained networks (66% variance explained). Adversarial training increases robustness but expands the channel bandwidth even further beyond the human bandwidth. Thus, critical band masking reveals that the network channel is more than twice as wide as the human channel, and that adversarial training only makes it worse. Networks with narrower channels might be more robust.
We revisit the classical problem of designing Budget-Feasible Mechanisms (BFMs) for submodular valuation functions, which has been extensively studied since the seminal paper of Singer [FOCS'10] due to its wide applications in crowdsourcing and social marketing. We propose TripleEagle, a novel algorithmic framework for designing BFMs, based on which we present several simple yet effective BFMs that achieve better approximation ratios than the state-of-the-art work. Moreover, our BFMs are the first in the literature to achieve linear complexities while ensuring obvious strategyproofness, making them more practical than the previous BFMs. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the empirical performance of our BFMs, and the experimental results strongly demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.
tl;dr: A new SHAP algorithm design for GPs that take into account the analytical covariance and result in explanations as Gaussian processes. A Shapley kernel is also proposed for predicting Shapley values of new observations.
We present a novel approach for explaining Gaussian processes (GPs) that can utilize the full analytical covariance structure present in GPs. Our method is based on the popular solution concept of Shapley values extended to stochastic cooperative games, resulting in explanations that are random variables. The GP explanations generated using our approach satisfy similar favorable axioms to standard Shapley values and possess a tractable covariance function across features and data observations. This covariance allows for quantifying explanation uncertainties and studying the statistical dependencies between explanations. We further extend our framework to the problem of predictive explanation, and propose a Shapley prior over the explanation function to predict Shapley values for new data based on previously computed ones. Our extensive illustrations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
We introduce M$^2$Hub, a toolkit for advancing machine learning in materials discovery. Machine learning has achieved remarkable progress in modeling molecular structures, especially biomolecules for drug discovery. However, the development of machine learning approaches for modeling materials structures lag behind, which is partly due to the lack of an integrated platform that enables access to diverse tasks for materials discovery. To bridge this gap, M$^2$Hub will enable easy access to materials discovery tasks, datasets, machine learning methods, evaluations, and benchmark results that cover the entire workflow. Specifically, the first release of M$^2$Hub focuses on three key stages in materials discovery: virtual screening, inverse design, and molecular simulation, including 9 datasets that covers 6 types of materials with 56 tasks across 8 types of material properties. We further provide 2 synthetic datasets for the purpose of generative tasks on materials. In addition to random data splits, we also provide 3 additional data partitions to reflect the real-world materials discovery scenarios. State-of-the-art machine learning methods (including those are suitable for materials structures but never compared in the literature) are benchmarked on representative tasks. Our codes and library are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/yuanqidu/M2Hub}.
Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task.
This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that avoid inadvertently inducing undesirable behaviors. Naively modifying the reward structure to offer denser and more frequent feedback can lead to unintended outcomes and promote behaviors that are not aligned with the designer's intended goal. Although potential-based reward shaping is often suggested as a remedy, we systematically investigate settings where deploying it often significantly impairs performance. To address these issues, we introduce a new framework that uses a bi-level objective to learn \emph{behavior alignment reward functions}. These functions integrate auxiliary rewards reflecting a designer's heuristics and domain knowledge with the environment's primary rewards. Our approach automatically determines the most effective way to blend these types of feedback, thereby enhancing robustness against heuristic reward misspecification. Remarkably, it can also adapt an agent's policy optimization process to mitigate suboptimalities resulting from limitations and biases inherent in the underlying RL algorithms. We evaluate our method's efficacy on a diverse set of tasks, from small-scale experiments to high-dimensional control challenges. We investigate heuristic auxiliary rewards of varying quality---some of which are beneficial and others detrimental to the learning process. Our results show that our framework offers a robust and principled way to integrate designer-specified heuristics. It not only addresses key shortcomings of existing approaches but also consistently leads to high-performing solutions, even when given misaligned or poorly-specified auxiliary reward functions.
Subseasonal forecasting of the weather two to six weeks in advance is critical for resource allocation and climate adaptation but poses many challenges for the forecasting community. At this forecast horizon, physics-based dynamical models have limited skill, and the targets for prediction depend in a complex manner on both local weather variables and global climate variables.
Recently, machine learning methods have shown promise in advancing the state of the art but only at the cost of complex data curation, integrating expert knowledge with aggregation across multiple relevant data sources, file formats, and temporal and spatial resolutions.
To streamline this process and accelerate future development, we introduce SubseasonalClimateUSA, a curated dataset for training and benchmarking subseasonal forecasting models in the United States. We use this dataset to benchmark a diverse suite of models, including operational dynamical models, classical meteorological baselines, and ten state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning-based methods from the literature. Overall, our benchmarks suggest simple and effective ways to extend the accuracy of current operational models. SubseasonalClimateUSA is regularly updated and accessible via the https://github.com/microsoft/subseasonal_data/ Python package.
tl;dr: Develops an algebra for analyzing tails and operationalizes it in a PPL compiler to automatically inform the design of density approximator with provably calibrated tails.
Despite the successes of probabilistic models based on passing noise through neural networks, recent work has identified that such methods often fail to capture tail behavior accurately---unless the tails of the base distribution are appropriately calibrated. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a systematic approach for analyzing the tails of random variables, and we illustrate how this approach can be used during the static analysis (before drawing samples) pass of a probabilistic programming language (PPL) compiler. To characterize how the tails change under various operations, we develop an algebra which acts on a three-parameter family of tail asymptotics and which is based on the generalized Gamma distribution. Our algebraic operations are closed under addition and multiplication; they are capable of distinguishing sub-Gaussians with differing scales; and they handle ratios sufficiently well to reproduce the tails of most important statistical distributions directly from their definitions. Our empirical results confirm that inference algorithms that leverage our heavy-tailed algebra attain superior performance across a number of density modeling and variational inference (VI) tasks.
tl;dr: This paper introduces a scalable and unified learning framework for efficient, large-scale neural decoding across diverse multi-lab multi-animal multi-session neural recordings.
Our ability to use deep learning approaches to decipher neural activity would likely benefit from greater scale, in terms of both the model size and the datasets. However, the integration of many neural recordings into one unified model is challenging, as each recording contains the activity of different neurons from different individual animals. In this paper, we introduce a training framework and architecture designed to model the population dynamics of neural activity across diverse, large-scale neural recordings. Our method first tokenizes individual spikes within the dataset to build an efficient representation of neural events that captures the fine temporal structure of neural activity. We then employ cross-attention and a PerceiverIO backbone to further construct a latent tokenization of neural population activities. Utilizing this architecture and training framework, we construct a large-scale multi-session model trained on large datasets from seven nonhuman primates, spanning over 158 different sessions of recording from over 27,373 neural units and over 100 hours of recordings. In a number of different tasks, we demonstrate that our pretrained model can be rapidly adapted to new, unseen sessions with unspecified neuron correspondence, enabling few-shot performance with minimal labels. This work presents a powerful new approach for building deep learning tools to analyze neural data and stakes out a clear path to training at scale for neural decoding models.
Although the mapping between sound and meaning in human language is assumed to be largely arbitrary, research in cognitive science has shown that there are non-trivial correlations between particular sounds and meanings across languages and demographic groups, a phenomenon known as sound symbolism. Among the many dimensions of meaning, sound symbolism is particularly salient and well-demonstrated with regards to cross-modal associations between language and the visual domain. In this work, we address the question of whether sound symbolism is reflected in vision-and-language models such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion. Using zero-shot knowledge probing to investigate the inherent knowledge of these models, we find strong evidence that they do show this pattern, paralleling the well-known kiki-bouba effect in psycholinguistics. Our work provides a novel method for demonstrating sound symbolism and understanding its nature using computational tools. Our code will be made publicly available.
tl;dr: TGB is a collection of challenging and diverse benchmark datasets for realistic, reproducible, and robust evaluation of machine learning models on temporal graphs
We present the Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB), a collection of challenging and diverse benchmark datasets for realistic, reproducible, and robust evaluation of machine learning models on temporal graphs. TGB datasets are of large scale, spanning years in duration, incorporate both node and edge-level prediction tasks and cover a diverse set of domains including social, trade, transaction, and transportation networks. For both tasks, we design evaluation protocols based on realistic use-cases. We extensively benchmark each dataset and find that the performance of common models can vary drastically across datasets. In addition, on dynamic node property prediction tasks, we show that simple methods often achieve superior performance compared to existing temporal graph models. We believe that these findings open up opportunities for future research on temporal graphs. Finally, TGB provides an automated machine learning pipeline for reproducible and accessible temporal graph research, including data loading, experiment setup and performance evaluation. TGB will be maintained and updated on a regular basis and welcomes community feedback. TGB datasets, data loaders, example codes, evaluation setup, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://tgb.complexdatalab.com/.
tl;dr: We develop a statistical framework to assess whether human experts add value which could not be captured by any learning algorithm for a given prediction task.
High-stakes prediction tasks (e.g., patient diagnosis) are often handled by trained human experts. A common source of concern about automation in these settings is that experts may exercise intuition that is difficult to model and/or have access to information (e.g., conversations with a patient) that is simply unavailable to a would-be algorithm. This raises a natural question whether human experts add value which could not be captured by an algorithmic predictor.
We develop a statistical framework under which we can pose this question as a natural hypothesis test. Indeed, as our framework highlights, detecting human expertise is more subtle than simply comparing the accuracy of expert predictions to those made by a particular learning algorithm. Instead, we propose a simple procedure which tests whether expert predictions are statistically independent from the outcomes of interest after conditioning on the available inputs (‘features’). A rejection of our test thus suggests that human experts may add value to any algorithm trained on the available data, and has direct implications for whether human-AI ‘complementarity’ is achievable in a given prediction task.
We highlight the utility of our procedure using admissions data collected from the emergency department of a large academic hospital system, where we show that physicians’ admit/discharge decisions for patients with acute gastrointestinal bleeding (AGIB) appear to be incorporating information that is not available to a standard algorithmic screening tool. This is despite the fact that the screening tool is arguably more accurate than physicians’ discretionary decisions, highlighting that – even absent normative concerns about accountability or interpretability – accuracy is insufficient to justify algorithmic automation.
tl;dr: Directed coupled network reconstruction based on time series generated by neuronal dynamics.
We consider the problem of reconstructing coupled networks (e.g., biological neural networks) connecting large numbers of variables (e.g.,nerve cells), of which state evolution is governed by dissipative dynamics consisting of strong self-drive (dominants the evolution) and weak coupling-drive. The core difficulty is sparseness of coupling effect that emerges (the coupling force is significant) only momentarily and otherwise remains quiescent in time series (e.g., neuronal activity sequence). Here we learn the idea from attention mechanism to guide the classifier to make inference focusing on the critical regions of time series data where coupling effect may manifest. Specifically, attention coefficients are assigned autonomously by artificial neural networks trained to maximise the Attentive Transfer Entropy (ATEn), which is a novel generalization of the iconic transfer entropy metric. Our results show that, without any prior knowledge of dynamics, ATEn explicitly identifies areas where the strength of coupling-drive is distinctly greater than zero. This innovation substantially improves reconstruction performance for both synthetic and real directed coupling networks using data generated by neuronal models widely used in neuroscience.
tl;dr: Transformers can help learn long-term memory but not long-term credit assignment in online model-free RL.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face two distinct challenges: learning effective representations of past and present observations, and determining how actions influence future returns. Both challenges involve modeling long-term dependencies. The Transformer architecture has been very successful to solve problems that involve long-term dependencies, including in the RL domain. However, the underlying reason for the strong performance of Transformer-based RL methods remains unclear: is it because they learn effective memory, or because they perform effective credit assignment? After introducing formal definitions of memory length and credit assignment length, we design simple configurable tasks to measure these distinct quantities. Our empirical results reveal that Transformers can enhance the memory capability of RL algorithms, scaling up to tasks that require memorizing observations $1500$ steps ago. However, Transformers do not improve long-term credit assignment. In summary, our results provide an explanation for the success of Transformers in RL, while also highlighting an important area for future research and benchmark design. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/twni2016/Memory-RL.
We define an optimal preconditioning for the Langevin diffusion by analytically optimizing the expected squared jumped distance. This yields as the optimal preconditioning an inverse Fisher information covariance matrix, where the covariance matrix is computed as the outer product of log target gradients averaged under the target. We apply this result to the Metropolis adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) and derive a computationally efficient adaptive MCMC scheme that learns the preconditioning from the history of gradients produced as the algorithm runs. We show in several experiments that the proposed algorithm is very robust in high dimensions and significantly outperforms other methods, including a closely related adaptive MALA scheme that learns the preconditioning with standard adaptive MCMC as well as the position-dependent Riemannian manifold MALA sampler.
Text-conditioned image generation models often generate incorrect associations between entities and their visual attributes. This reflects an impaired mapping between linguistic binding of entities and modifiers in the prompt and visual binding of the corresponding elements in the generated image. As one example, a query like ``a pink sunflower and a yellow flamingo'' may incorrectly produce an image of a yellow sunflower and a pink flamingo. To remedy this issue, we propose SynGen, an approach which first syntactically analyses the prompt to identify entities and their modifiers, and then uses a novel loss function that encourages the cross-attention maps to agree with the linguistic binding reflected by the syntax. Specifically, we encourage large overlap between attention maps of entities and their modifiers, and small overlap with other entities and modifier words. The loss is optimized during inference, without retraining or fine-tuning the model. Human evaluation on three datasets, including one new and challenging set, demonstrate significant improvements of SynGen compared with current state of the art methods. This work highlights how making use of sentence structure during inference can efficiently and substantially improve the faithfulness of text-to-image generation.
We consider alternating gradient descent (AGD) with fixed step size applied to the asymmetric matrix factorization objective.
We show that, for a rank-$r$ matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$,
$T = C ( \frac{\sigma_1(A)}{\sigma_r(A)} )^2 \log(1/\epsilon)$
iterations of alternating gradient descent suffice to reach an $\epsilon$-optimal factorization
$\| A - X_{T} Y_{T}' \|^2 \leq \epsilon \| A \|^2$ with high probability
starting from an atypical random initialization. The
factors have rank $d \geq r$ so that $X_{T}\in \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}$ and $Y_{T} \in\mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$, and mild overparameterization suffices for the constant $C$ in the iteration complexity $T$ to be an absolute constant.
Experiments suggest that our proposed initialization is not merely of theoretical benefit, but rather significantly improves the convergence rate of gradient descent in practice. Our proof is conceptually simple: a uniform Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality and uniform Lipschitz smoothness constant are guaranteed for a sufficient number of iterations, starting from our random initialization. Our proof method should be useful for extending and simplifying convergence analyses for a broader class of nonconvex low-rank factorization problems.
tl;dr: We present continuous-time analyses of anchor acceleration for minimax optimization and monotone inclusion problems.
Recently, the anchor acceleration, an acceleration mechanism distinct from Nesterov's, has been discovered for minimax optimization and fixed-point problems, but its mechanism is not understood well, much less so than Nesterov acceleration. In this work, we analyze continuous-time models of anchor acceleration. We provide tight, unified analyses for characterizing the convergence rate as a function of the anchor coefficient $\beta(t)$, thereby providing insight into the anchor acceleration mechanism and its accelerated $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$-convergence rate. Finally, we present an adaptive method inspired by the continuous-time analyses and establish its effectiveness through theoretical analyses and experiments.
This paper provides a comprehensive error analysis of learning with vector-valued random features (RF). The theory is developed for RF ridge regression in a fully general infinite-dimensional input-output setting, but nonetheless applies to and improves existing finite-dimensional analyses. In contrast to comparable work in the literature, the approach proposed here relies on a direct analysis of the underlying risk functional and completely avoids the explicit RF ridge regression solution formula in terms of random matrices. This removes the need for concentration results in random matrix theory or their generalizations to random operators. The main results established in this paper include strong consistency of vector-valued RF estimators under model misspecification and minimax optimal convergence rates in the well-specified setting. The parameter complexity (number of random features) and sample complexity (number of labeled data) required to achieve such rates are comparable with Monte Carlo intuition and free from logarithmic factors.
tl;dr: We have developed the first two single-time-scale policy-based primal-dual algorithms for solving constrained MDPs with non-asymptotic policy last-iterate convergence.
We study the problem of computing an optimal policy of an infinite-horizon discounted constrained Markov decision process (constrained MDP). Despite the popularity of Lagrangian-based policy search methods used in practice, the oscillation of policy iterates in these methods has not been fully understood, bringing out issues such as violation of constraints and sensitivity to hyper-parameters. To fill this gap, we employ the Lagrangian method to cast a constrained MDP into a constrained saddle-point problem in which max/min players correspond to primal/dual variables, respectively, and develop two single-time-scale policy-based primal-dual algorithms with non-asymptotic convergence of their policy iterates to an optimal constrained policy. Specifically, we first propose a regularized policy gradient primal-dual (RPG-PD) method that updates the policy using an entropy-regularized policy gradient, and the dual variable via a quadratic-regularized gradient ascent, simultaneously. We prove that the policy primal-dual iterates of RPG-PD converge to a regularized saddle point with a sublinear rate, while the policy iterates converge sublinearly to an optimal constrained policy. We further instantiate RPG-PD in large state or action spaces by including function approximation in policy parametrization, and establish similar sublinear last-iterate policy convergence. Second, we propose an optimistic policy gradient primal-dual (OPG-PD) method that employs the optimistic gradient method to update primal/dual variables, simultaneously. We prove that the policy primal-dual iterates of OPG-PD converge to a saddle point that contains an optimal constrained policy, with a linear rate. To the best of our knowledge, this work appears to be the first non-asymptotic policy last-iterate convergence result for single-time-scale algorithms in constrained MDPs. We further validate the merits and the effectiveness of our methods in computational experiments.
Modeling customer shopping intentions is a crucial task for e-commerce, as it directly impacts user experience and engagement. Thus, accurately understanding customer preferences is essential for providing personalized recommendations. Session-based recommendation, which utilizes customer session data to predict their next interaction, has become increasingly popular.
However, existing session datasets have limitations in terms of item attributes, user diversity, and dataset scale. As a result, they cannot comprehensively capture the spectrum of user behaviors and preferences.
To bridge this gap, we present the Amazon Multilingual Multi-locale Shopping Session Dataset, namely Amazon-M2. It is the first multilingual dataset consisting of millions of user sessions from six different locales, where the major languages of products are English, German, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish.
Remarkably, the dataset can help us enhance personalization and understanding of user preferences, which can benefit various existing tasks as well as enable new tasks. To test the potential of the dataset, we introduce three tasks in this work:
(1) next-product recommendation, (2) next-product recommendation with domain shifts, and (3) next-product title generation.
With the above tasks, we benchmark a range of algorithms on our proposed dataset, drawing new insights for further research and practice.
In addition, based on the proposed dataset and tasks, we hosted a competition in the KDD CUP 2023 https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/amazon-kdd-cup-23-multilingual-recommendation-challenge and have attracted thousands of users and submissions. The winning solutions and the associated workshop can be accessed at our website~https://kddcup23.github.io/.
tl;dr: We explore the use of LLM-as-a-judge for evaluating chat assistants and show it matches human preferences with an agreement over 80%.
Evaluating large language model (LLM) based chat assistants is challenging due to their broad capabilities and the inadequacy of existing benchmarks in measuring human preferences.
To address this, we explore using strong LLMs as judges to evaluate these models on more open-ended questions.
We examine the usage and limitations of LLM-as-a-judge, including position, verbosity, and self-enhancement biases, as well as limited reasoning ability, and propose solutions to mitigate some of them.
We then verify the agreement between LLM judges and human preferences by introducing two benchmarks: MT-bench, a multi-turn question set; and Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced battle platform.
Our results reveal that strong LLM judges like GPT-4 can match both controlled and crowdsourced human preferences well, achieving over 80\% agreement, the same level of agreement between humans.
Hence, LLM-as-a-judge is a scalable and explainable way to approximate human preferences, which are otherwise very expensive to obtain.
Additionally, we show our benchmark and traditional benchmarks complement each other by evaluating several variants of LLaMA and Vicuna.
The MT-bench questions, 3K expert votes, and 30K conversations with human preferences are publicly available at https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat/tree/main/fastchat/llm_judge.
196. Optimal Guarantees for Algorithmic Reproducibility and Gradient Complexity in Convex Optimization
Algorithmic reproducibility measures the deviation in outputs of machine learning algorithms upon minor changes in the training process. Previous work suggests that first-order methods would need to trade-off convergence rate (gradient complexity) for better reproducibility. In this work, we challenge this perception and demonstrate that both optimal reproducibility and near-optimal convergence guarantees can be achieved for smooth convex minimization and smooth convex-concave minimax problems under various error-prone oracle settings. Particularly, given the inexact initialization oracle, our regularization-based algorithms achieve the best of both worlds -- optimal reproducibility and near-optimal gradient complexity -- for minimization and minimax optimization. With the inexact gradient oracle, the near-optimal guarantees also hold for minimax optimization. Additionally, with the stochastic gradient oracle, we show that stochastic gradient descent ascent is optimal in terms of both reproducibility and gradient complexity. We believe our results contribute to an enhanced understanding of the reproducibility-convergence trade-off in the context of convex optimization.
tl;dr: We take a functional view of neural architecture search that allows us to construct highly expressive search spaces based on context-free grammars, and show that we can efficiently find well-performing architectures.
The discovery of neural architectures from simple building blocks is a long-standing goal of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Hierarchical search spaces are a promising step towards this goal but lack a unifying search space design framework and typically only search over some limited aspect of architectures. In this work, we introduce a unifying search space design framework based on context-free grammars that can naturally and compactly generate expressive hierarchical search spaces that are 100s of orders of magnitude larger than common spaces from the literature. By enhancing and using their properties, we effectively enable search over the complete architecture and can foster regularity. Further, we propose an efficient hierarchical kernel design for a Bayesian Optimization search strategy to efficiently search over such huge spaces. We demonstrate the versatility of our search space design framework and show that our search strategy can be superior to existing NAS approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/automl/hierarchical_nas_construction.
A recent line of empirical studies has demonstrated that SGD might exhibit a heavy-tailed behavior in practical settings, and the heaviness of the tails might correlate with the overall performance. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such heavy tails. Previous works on this problem only considered, up to our knowledge, online (also called single-pass) SGD, in which the emergence of heavy tails in theoretical findings is contingent upon access to an infinite amount of data. Hence, the underlying mechanism generating the reported heavy-tailed behavior in practical settings, where the amount of training data is finite, is still not well-understood. Our contribution aims to fill this gap. In particular, we show that the stationary distribution of offline (also called multi-pass) SGD exhibits ‘approximate’ power-law tails and the approximation error is controlled by how fast the empirical distribution of the training data converges to the true underlying data distribution in the Wasserstein metric. Our main takeaway is that, as the number of data points increases, offline SGD will behave increasingly ‘power-law-like’. To achieve this result, we first prove nonasymptotic Wasserstein convergence bounds for offline SGD to online SGD as the number of data points increases, which can be interesting on their own. Finally, we illustrate our theory on various experiments conducted on synthetic data and neural networks.
Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control is a fundamental control paradigm that is studied in various fields such as engineering, computer science, economics, and neuroscience. It involves controlling a system with linear dynamics and imperfect observations, subject to additive noise, with the goal of minimizing a quadratic cost function for the state and control variables. In this work, we consider a generalization of the discrete-time, finite-horizon LQG problem, where the noise distributions are unknown and belong to Wasserstein ambiguity sets centered at nominal (Gaussian) distributions. The objective is to minimize a worst-case cost across all distributions in the ambiguity set, including non-Gaussian distributions. Despite the added complexity, we prove that a control policy that is linear in the observations is optimal for this problem, as in the classic LQG problem. We propose a numerical solution method that efficiently characterizes this optimal control policy. Our method uses the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to identify the least-favorable distributions within the Wasserstein ambiguity sets and computes the controller's optimal policy using Kalman filter estimation under these distributions.
In this paper, we propose an online convex optimization approach with two different levels of adaptivity. On a higher level, our approach is agnostic to the unknown types and curvatures of the online functions, while at a lower level, it can exploit the unknown niceness of the environments and attain problem-dependent guarantees. Specifically, we obtain $\mathcal{O}(\log V_T)$, $\mathcal{O}(d \log V_T)$ and $\hat{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{V_T})$ regret bounds for strongly convex, exp-concave and convex loss functions, respectively, where $d$ is the dimension, $V_T$ denotes problem-dependent gradient variations and the $\hat{\mathcal{O}}(\cdot)$-notation omits $\log V_T$ factors. Our result not only safeguards the worst-case guarantees but also directly implies the small-loss bounds in analysis. Moreover, when applied to adversarial/stochastic convex optimization and game theory problems, our result enhances the existing universal guarantees. Our approach is based on a multi-layer online ensemble framework incorporating novel ingredients, including a carefully designed optimism for unifying diverse function types and cascaded corrections for algorithmic stability. Notably, despite its multi-layer structure, our algorithm necessitates only one gradient query per round, making it favorable when the gradient evaluation is time-consuming. This is facilitated by a novel regret decomposition equipped with carefully designed surrogate losses.
Tracking an arbitrary moving target in a video sequence is the foundation for high-level tasks like video understanding. Although existing visual-based trackers have demonstrated good tracking capabilities in short video sequences, they always perform poorly in complex environments, as represented by the recently proposed global instance tracking task, which consists of longer videos with more complicated narrative content.
Recently, several works have introduced natural language into object tracking, desiring to address the limitations of relying only on a single visual modality. However, these selected videos are still short sequences with uncomplicated spatio-temporal and causal relationships, and the provided semantic descriptions are too simple to characterize video content.
To address these issues, we (1) first propose a new multi-modal global instance tracking benchmark named MGIT. It consists of 150 long video sequences with a total of 2.03 million frames, aiming to fully represent the complex spatio-temporal and causal relationships coupled in longer narrative content.
(2) Each video sequence is annotated with three semantic grains (i.e., action, activity, and story) to model the progressive process of human cognition. We expect this multi-granular annotation strategy can provide a favorable environment for multi-modal object tracking research and long video understanding.
(3) Besides, we execute comparative experiments on existing multi-modal object tracking benchmarks, which not only explore the impact of different annotation methods, but also validate that our annotation method is a feasible solution for coupling human understanding into semantic labels.
(4) Additionally, we conduct detailed experimental analyses on MGIT, and hope the explored performance bottlenecks of existing algorithms can support further research in multi-modal object tracking.
The proposed benchmark, experimental results, and toolkit will be released gradually on http://videocube.aitestunion.com/.
tl;dr: We design a both provable sample-efficient and easy-to-implement RL framework for exploration.
In reinforcement learning (RL), balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial for achieving an optimal policy in a sample-efficient way. To this end, existing sample- efficient algorithms typically consist of three components: estimation, planning, and exploration. However, to cope with general function approximators, most of them involve impractical algorithmic components to incentivize exploration, such as data-dependent level-set constraints or complicated sampling procedures. To address this challenge, we propose an easy-to-implement RL framework called Maximize to Explore (MEX), which only needs to optimize unconstrainedly a single objective that integrates the estimation and planning components while balancing exploration and exploitation automatically. Theoretically, we prove that the MEX achieves a sublinear regret with general function approximators and is extendable to the zero-sum Markov game setting. Meanwhile, we adapt deep RL baselines to design practical versions of MEX in both the model-based and model-free settings, which outperform baselines in various MuJoCo environments with sparse reward by a stable margin. Compared with existing sample-efficient algorithms with general function approximators, MEX achieves similar sample efficiency while also enjoying a lower computational cost and is more compatible with modern deep RL methods.
tl;dr: We present MindEye, a novel state-of-the-art fMRI-to-image approach to retrieve and reconstruct viewed images from brain activity using contrastive learning and diffusion models.
We present MindEye, a novel fMRI-to-image approach to retrieve and reconstruct viewed images from brain activity. Our model comprises two parallel submodules that are specialized for retrieval (using contrastive learning) and reconstruction (using a diffusion prior). MindEye can map fMRI brain activity to any high dimensional multimodal latent space, like CLIP image space, enabling image reconstruction using generative models that accept embeddings from this latent space. We comprehensively compare our approach with other existing methods, using both qualitative side-by-side comparisons and quantitative evaluations, and show that MindEye achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction and retrieval tasks. In particular, MindEye can retrieve the exact original image even among highly similar candidates indicating that its brain embeddings retain fine-grained image-specific information. This allows us to accurately retrieve images even from large-scale databases like LAION-5B. We demonstrate through ablations that MindEye's performance improvements over previous methods result from specialized submodules for retrieval and reconstruction, improved training techniques, and training models with orders of magnitude more parameters. Furthermore, we show that MindEye can better preserve low-level image features in the reconstructions by using img2img, with outputs from a separate autoencoder. All code is available on GitHub.
Though modern neural networks have achieved impressive performance in both vision and language tasks, we know little about the functions that they implement. One possibility is that neural networks implicitly break down complex tasks into subroutines, implement modular solutions to these subroutines, and compose them into an overall solution to a task --- a property we term structural compositionality. Another possibility is that they may simply learn to match new inputs to learned templates, eliding task decomposition entirely. Here, we leverage model pruning techniques to investigate this question in both vision and language across a variety of architectures, tasks, and pretraining regimens. Our results demonstrate that models oftentimes implement solutions to subroutines via modular subnetworks, which can be ablated while maintaining the functionality of other subnetworks. This suggests that neural networks may be able to learn compositionality, obviating the need for specialized symbolic mechanisms.
tl;dr: A non-interactive protocol to share a dataset in a differentially private way that nonetheless allows joins with other datasets on sensitive identifiers
How can one publish a dataset with sensitive attributes in a way that both preserves privacy and enables joins with other datasets on those same sensitive attributes? This problem arises in many contexts, e.g., a hospital and an airline may want to jointly determine whether people who take long-haul flights are more likely to catch respiratory infections. If they join their data by a common keyed user identifier such as email address, they can determine the answer, though it breaks privacy. This paper shows how the hospital can generate a private sketch and how the airline can privately join with the hospital's sketch by email address. The proposed solution satisfies pure differential privacy and gives approximate answers to linear queries and optimization problems over those joins. Whereas prior work such as secure function evaluation requires sender/receiver interaction, a distinguishing characteristic of the proposed approach is that it is non-interactive. Consequently, the sketch can be published to a repository for any organization to join with, facilitating data discovery. The accuracy of the method is demonstrated through both theoretical analysis and extensive empirical evidence.
Large-scale pre-training has shown great potential to enhance models on downstream tasks in vision and language. Developing similar techniques for scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) is suitable since unlabelled data is plentiful. Meanwhile, various sampling channel selections and inherent structural and spatial information bring challenges and avenues to improve existing pre-training strategies further. In order to break boundaries between different EEG resources and facilitate cross-dataset EEG pre-training, we propose to map all kinds of channel selections to a unified topology. We further introduce MMM, a pre-training framework with Multi-dimensional position encoding, Multi-level channel hierarchy, and Multi-stage pre-training strategy built on the unified topology to obtain topology-agnostic representations. Experiments demonstrate that our approach yields impressive improvements over previous state-of-the-art techniques on emotional recognition benchmark datasets.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from challenges such as hallucination and weak numerical reasoning. To overcome these challenges, external tools can be used to enhance LLMs' question-answering abilities. However, current evaluation methods do not distinguish between questions that can be answered using LLMs' internal knowledge and those that require external information through tool use. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset called ToolQA, which is designed to faithfully evaluate LLMs' ability to use external tools for question answering. Our development of ToolQA involved a scalable, automated process for dataset curation, along with 13 specialized tools designed for interaction with external knowledge in order to answer questions. Importantly, we strive to minimize the overlap between our benchmark data and LLMs' pre-training data, enabling a more precise evaluation of LLMs' tool-use reasoning abilities. We conducted an in-depth diagnosis of existing tool-use LLMs to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements. Our findings set a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs and suggest new directions for future advancements. Our data and code are freely available for the broader scientific community on GitHub.
tl;dr: We propose a unified framework for score-based generative modeling in Hilbert spaces using stochastic evolution equations with time-dependent operators.
Continuous-time score-based generative models consist of a pair of stochastic differential equations (SDEs)—a forward SDE that smoothly transitions data into a noise space and a reverse SDE that incrementally eliminates noise from a Gaussian prior distribution to generate data distribution samples—are intrinsically connected by the time-reversal theory on diffusion processes. In this paper, we investigate the use of stochastic evolution equations in Hilbert spaces, which expand the applicability of SDEs in two aspects: sample space and evolution operator, so they enable encompassing recent variations of diffusion models, such as generating functional data or replacing drift coefficients with image transformation. To this end, we derive a generalized time-reversal formula to build a bridge between probabilistic diffusion models and stochastic evolution equations and propose a score-based generative model called Hilbert Diffusion Model (HDM). Combining with Fourier neural operator, we verify the superiority of HDM for sampling functions from functional datasets with a power of kernel two-sample test of 4.2 on Quadratic, 0.2 on Melbourne, and 3.6 on Gridwatch, which outperforms existing diffusion models formulated in function spaces. Furthermore, the proposed method shows its strength in motion synthesis tasks by utilizing the Wiener process with values in Hilbert space. Finally, our empirical results on image datasets also validate a connection between HDM and diffusion models using heat dissipation, revealing the potential for exploring evolution operators and sample spaces.
tl;dr: We rigorously establish that oversmoothing happens exponentially as model depth increases for attention-based graph neural networks.
Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose expressive power, it remains controversial whether the graph attention mechanism can mitigate oversmoothing. In this work, we provide a definitive answer to this question through a rigorous mathematical analysis, by viewing attention-based GNNs as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems and incorporating tools and techniques from the theory of products of inhomogeneous matrices and the joint spectral radius. We establish that, contrary to popular belief, the graph attention mechanism cannot prevent oversmoothing and loses expressive power exponentially. The proposed framework extends the existing results on oversmoothing for symmetric GCNs to a significantly broader class of GNN models, including random walk GCNs, Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and (graph) transformers. In particular, our analysis accounts for asymmetric, state-dependent and time-varying aggregation operators and a wide range of common nonlinear activation functions, such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, GELU and SiLU.
In response to recent data regulation requirements, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical process to remove the influence of specific examples from a given model. Although exact unlearning can be achieved through complete model retraining using the remaining dataset, the associated computational costs have driven the development of efficient, approximate unlearning techniques. Moving beyond data-centric MU approaches, our study introduces a novel model-based perspective: model sparsification via weight pruning, which is capable of reducing the gap between exact unlearning and approximate unlearning. We show in both theory and practice that model sparsity can boost the multi-criteria unlearning performance of an approximate unlearner, closing the approximation gap, while continuing to be efficient. This leads to a new MU paradigm, termed prune first, then unlearn, which infuses a sparse prior to the unlearning process. Building on this insight, we also develop a sparsity-aware unlearning method that utilizes sparsity regularization to enhance the training process of approximate unlearning. Extensive experiments show that our proposals consistently benefit MU in various unlearning scenarios. A notable highlight is the 77% unlearning efficacy gain of fine-tuning (one of the simplest approximate unlearning methods) when using our proposed sparsity-aware unlearning method. Furthermore, we showcase the practical impact of our proposed MU methods through two specific use cases: defending against backdoor attacks, and enhancing transfer learning through source class removal. These applications demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our approaches in addressing a variety of machine learning challenges beyond unlearning for data privacy. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-Sparse.
tl;dr: We introduce an extensive Australian Sign Language (Auslan) dataset for advancing various sign language-related tasks.
Sign language translation (SLT) aims to convert a continuous sign language video clip into a spoken language. Considering different geographic regions generally have their own native sign languages, it is valuable to establish corresponding SLT datasets to support related communication and research. Auslan, as a sign language specific to Australia, still lacks a dedicated large-scale dataset for SLT.
To fill this gap, we curate an Australian Sign Language translation dataset, dubbed Auslan-Daily, which is collected from the Auslan educational TV series and Auslan TV programs. The former involves daily communications among multiple signers in the wild, while the latter comprises sign language videos for up-to-date news, weather forecasts, and documentaries. In particular, Auslan-Daily has two main features: (1) the topics are diverse and signed by multiple signers, and (2) the scenes in our dataset are more complex, e.g., captured in various environments, gesture interference during multi-signers' interactions and various camera positions. With a collection of more than 45 hours of high-quality Auslan video materials, we invite Auslan experts to align different fine-grained visual and language pairs, including video $\leftrightarrow$ fingerspelling, video $\leftrightarrow$ gloss, and video $\leftrightarrow$ sentence. As a result, Auslan-Daily contains multi-grained annotations that can be utilized to accomplish various fundamental sign language tasks, such as signer detection, sign spotting, fingerspelling detection, isolated sign language recognition, sign language translation and alignment. Moreover, we benchmark results with state-of-the-art models for each task in Auslan-Daily. Experiments indicate that Auslan-Daily is a highly challenging SLT dataset, and we hope this dataset will contribute to the development of Auslan and the advancement of sign languages worldwide in a broader context. All datasets and benchmarks are available at Auslan-Daily.
tl;dr: We introduce M3Exam, a new benchmark sourced from human exam questions, for evaluating LLMs in a multilingual, multimodal, and multilevel context.
Despite the existence of various benchmarks for evaluating natural language processing models, we argue that human exams are a more suitable means of evaluating general intelligence for large language models (LLMs), as they inherently demand a much wider range of abilities such as language understanding, domain knowledge, and problem-solving skills. To this end, we introduce M3Exam, a novel benchmark sourced from real and official human exam questions for evaluating LLMs in a multilingual, multimodal, and multilevel context. M3Exam exhibits three unique characteristics: (1) multilingualism, encompassing questions from multiple countries that require strong multilingual proficiency and cultural knowledge; (2) multimodality, accounting for the multimodal nature of many exam questions to test the model's multimodal understanding capability; and (3) multilevel structure, featuring exams from three critical educational periods to comprehensively assess a model's proficiency at different levels. In total, M3Exam contains 12,317 questions in 9 diverse languages with three educational levels, where about 23\% of the questions require processing images for successful solving. We assess the performance of top-performing LLMs on M3Exam and find that current models, including GPT-4, still struggle with multilingual text, particularly in low-resource and non-Latin script languages. Multimodal LLMs also perform poorly with complex multimodal questions. We believe that M3Exam can be a valuable resource for comprehensively evaluating LLMs by examining their multilingual and multimodal abilities and tracking their development. Data and evaluation code is available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/M3Exam}.
213. M$^{2}$SODAI: Multi-Modal Maritime Object Detection Dataset With RGB and Hyperspectral Image Sensors
tl;dr: We propose a new multi-modal dataset of aerial RGB and HSI sensor data for maritime object detection.
Object detection in aerial images is a growing area of research, with maritime object detection being a particularly important task for reliable surveillance, monitoring, and active rescuing. Notwithstanding astonishing advances of computer vision
technologies, detecting ships and floating matters in these images are challenging due to factors such as object distance. What makes it worse is pervasive sea surface effects such as sunlight reflection, wind, and waves.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) sensors, providing more than 100 channels in wavelengths of visible and near-infrared, can extract intrinsic information of materials from a few pixels of HSIs.
The advent of HSI sensors motivates us to leverage HSIs to circumvent false positives due to the sea surface effects.
Unfortunately, there are few public HSI datasets due to the high cost and labor involved in collecting them, hindering object detection research based on HSIs.
We have collected and annotated a new dataset called ``Multi-Modal Ship and flOating matter Detection in Aerial Images (M$^{2}$SODAI),'', which includes synchronized image pairs of RGB and HSI data, along with bounding box labels for nearly 6,000 instances per category.
We also propose a new multi-modal extension of the feature pyramid network called DoubleFPN.
Extensive experiments on our benchmark demonstrate that fusion of RGB and HSI data can enhance mAP, especially in the presence of the sea surface effects.
tl;dr: We introduce PLASTIC, a simple-to-use algorithm which address the loss of plasticity phenomenon and enhance sample efficiency in Reinforcement Learning.
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), enhancing sample efficiency is crucial, particularly in scenarios when data acquisition is costly and risky. In principle, off-policy RL algorithms can improve sample efficiency by allowing multiple updates per environment interaction. However, these multiple updates often lead the model to overfit to earlier interactions, which is referred to as the loss of plasticity. Our study investigates the underlying causes of this phenomenon by dividing plasticity into two aspects. Input plasticity, which denotes the model's adaptability to changing input data, and label plasticity, which denotes the model's adaptability to evolving input-output relationships. Synthetic experiments on the CIFAR-10 dataset reveal that finding smoother minima of loss landscape enhances input plasticity, whereas refined gradient propagation improves label plasticity. Leveraging these findings, we introduce the **PLASTIC** algorithm, which harmoniously combines techniques to address both concerns. With minimal architectural modifications, PLASTIC achieves competitive performance on benchmarks including Atari-100k and Deepmind Control Suite. This result emphasizes the importance of preserving the model's plasticity to elevate the sample efficiency in RL. The code is available at https://github.com/dojeon-ai/plastic.
Real-world datasets are typically imbalanced in the sense that only a few classes have numerous samples, while many classes are associated with only a few samples. As a result, a naive ERM learning process will be biased towards the majority classes, making it difficult to generalize to the minority classes. To address this issue, one simple but effective approach is to modify the loss function to emphasize the learning on minority classes, such as re-weighting the losses or adjusting the logits via class-dependent terms. However, existing generalization analysis of such losses is still coarse-grained and fragmented, failing to explain some empirical results. To bridge this gap between theory and practice, we propose a novel technique named data-dependent contraction to capture how these modified losses handle different classes. On top of this technique, a fine-grained generalization bound is established for imbalanced learning, which helps reveal the mystery of re-weighting and logit-adjustment in a unified manner. Furthermore, a principled learning algorithm is developed based on the theoretical insights. Finally, the empirical results on benchmark datasets not only validate the theoretical results but also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
tl;dr: This paper designed a novel optimal transport-guided conditional score-based diffusion model, trained in unpaired and partially paired settings. We presented theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on this model.
Conditional score-based diffusion model (SBDM) is for conditional generation of target data with paired data as condition, and has achieved great success in image translation. However, it requires the paired data as condition, and there would be insufficient paired data provided in real-world applications. To tackle the applications with partially paired or even unpaired dataset, we propose a novel Optimal Transport-guided Conditional Score-based diffusion model (OTCS) in this paper. We build the coupling relationship for the unpaired or partially paired dataset based on $L_2$-regularized unsupervised or semi-supervised optimal transport, respectively. Based on the coupling relationship, we develop the objective for training the conditional score-based model for unpaired or partially paired settings, which is based on a reformulation and generalization of the conditional SBDM for paired setting. With the estimated coupling relationship, we effectively train the conditional score-based model by designing a ``resampling-by-compatibility'' strategy to choose the sampled data with high compatibility as guidance. Extensive experiments on unpaired super-resolution and semi-paired image-to-image translation demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed OTCS model. From the viewpoint of optimal transport, OTCS provides an approach to transport data across distributions, which is a challenge for OT on large-scale datasets. We theoretically prove that OTCS realizes the data transport in OT with a theoretical bound.
Given a Lipschitz or smooth convex function $f:K \to \mathbb{R}^d$ for a bounded polytope $K:=${ $\theta \in \mathbb{R}^d: A\theta \leq b$}, where $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times d}$ and $b \in \mathbb{R}^m$, we consider the problem of sampling from the log-concave distribution $\pi(\theta) \propto e^{-f(\theta)}$ constrained to $K$. Interest in this problem derives from its applications to Bayesian inference and differential privacy. We present a generalization of the Dikin walk to this setting that requires at most $O((md + d L^2 R^2) \times md^{\omega-1} \log(\frac{w}{\delta}))$ arithmetic operations to sample from $\pi$ within error $\delta>0$ in the total variation distance from a $w$-warm start. Here $L$ is the Lipschitz constant of $f$, $K$ is contained in a ball of radius $R$ and contains a ball of smaller radius $r$, and $\omega \approx 2.37$ is the matrix-multiplication constant. This improves on the running time of prior works for a range of structured settings important for the aforementioned inference and privacy applications. Technically, we depart from previous Dikin walks by adding a soft-threshold regularizer derived from the Lipschitz or smoothness properties of $f$ to a barrier function for $K$ that allows our version of the Dikin walk to propose updates that have a high Metropolis acceptance ratio for $f$, while at the same time remaining inside the polytope $K$.
218. Mean-field Langevin dynamics: Time-space discretization, stochastic gradient, and variance reduction
The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) is a nonlinear generalization of the Langevin dynamics that incorporates a distribution-dependent drift, and it naturally arises from the optimization of two-layer neural networks via (noisy) gradient descent. Recent works have shown that MFLD globally minimizes an entropy-regularized convex functional in the space of measures. However, all prior analyses assumed the infinite-particle or continuous-time limit, and cannot handle stochastic gradient updates. We provide a general framework to prove a uniform-in-time propagation of chaos for MFLD that takes into account the errors due to finite-particle approximation, time-discretization, and stochastic gradient. To demonstrate the wide applicability of our framework, we establish quantitative convergence rate guarantees to the regularized global optimal solution for $(i)$ a wide range of learning problems such as mean-field neural network and MMD minimization, and $(ii)$ different gradient estimators including SGD and SVRG. Despite the generality of our results, we achieve an improved convergence rate in both the SGD and SVRG settings when specialized to the standard Langevin dynamics.
tl;dr: A causal inference framework for learning unit-specific counterfactuals for combinations of interventions.
We consider a setting where there are $N$ heterogeneous units and $p$ interventions. Our goal is to learn unit-specific potential outcomes for any combination of these $p$ interventions, i.e., $N \times 2^p$ causal parameters. Choosing a combination of interventions is a problem that naturally arises in a variety of applications such as factorial design experiments and recommendation engines (e.g., showing a set of movies that maximizes engagement for a given user). Running $N \times 2^p$ experiments to estimate the various parameters is likely expensive and/or infeasible as $N$ and $p$ grow. Further, with observational data there is likely confounding, i.e., whether or not a unit is seen under a combination is correlated with its potential outcome under that combination. We study this problem under a novel model that imposes latent structure across both units and combinations of interventions. Specifically, we assume latent similarity in potential outcomes across units (i.e., the matrix of potential outcomes is approximately rank $r$) and regularity in how combinations of interventions interact (i.e., the coefficients in the Fourier expansion of the potential outcomes is approximately $s$ sparse). We establish identification for all $N \times 2^p$ parameters despite unobserved confounding. We propose an estimation procedure, Synthetic Combinations, and establish finite-sample consistency under precise conditions on the observation pattern. We show that Synthetic Combinations is able to consistently estimate unit-specific potential outcomes given a total of $\text{poly}(r) \times \left( N + s^2p\right)$ observations. In comparison, previous methods that do not exploit structure across both units and combinations have poorer sample complexity scaling as $\min(N \times s^2p, \ \ r \times (N + 2^p))$.
Fictitious Play (FP) is a simple and natural dynamic for repeated play with many applications in game theory and multi-agent reinforcement learning. It was introduced by Brown and its convergence properties for two-player zero-sum games was established later by Robinson. Potential games [Monderer and Shapley 1996] is another class of games which exhibit the FP property [Monderer and Shapley 1996], i.e., FP dynamics converges to a Nash equilibrium if all agents follows it. Nevertheless, except for two-player zero-sum games and for specific instances of payoff matrices [Abernethy et. al. 2021] or for adversarial tie-breaking rules [Daskalakis and Pan, 2014], the \textit{convergence rate} of FP is unknown. In this work, we focus on the rate of convergence of FP when applied to potential games and more specifically identical payoff games. We prove that FP can take exponential time (in the number of strategies) to reach a Nash equilibrium, even if the game is restricted to \textit{two agents}. To prove this, we recursively construct a two-player coordination game with a unique Nash equilibrium. Moreover, every approximate Nash equilibrium in the constructed game must be close to the pure Nash equilibrium in $\ell_1$-distance.
tl;dr: Language models can solve algorithmic reasoning tasks by decomposing them, solving subparts, and composing them.
Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning tasks like generating complex programs. For these tasks, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs. With Parsel, we automatically decompose algorithmic tasks into hierarchical natural language function descriptions and then search over combinations of possible function implementations using tests. We show that Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, including program synthesis and robotic planning. We find that, using Parsel, LLMs solve more competition-level problems in the APPS dataset, resulting in pass rates over 75\% higher than prior results from directly sampling AlphaCode and Codex, while often using a smaller sample budget. Moreover, with automatically generated tests, we find that Parsel can improve the state-of-the-art pass@1 performance on HumanEval from 67\% to 85\%. We also find that LLM-generated robotic plans using Parsel are more than twice as likely to be considered accurate than directly generated plans. Lastly, we explore how Parsel addresses LLM limitations and discuss how Parsel may be useful for human programmers. We release our code at https://github.com/ezelikman/parsel.
One of the remarkable properties of robust computer vision models is that their input-gradients are often aligned with human perception, referred to in the literature as perceptually-aligned gradients (PAGs). Despite only being trained for classification, PAGs cause robust models to have rudimentary generative capabilities, including image generation, denoising, and in-painting. However, the underlying mechanisms behind these phenomena remain unknown. In this work, we provide a first explanation of PAGs via \emph{off-manifold robustness}, which states that models must be more robust off- the data manifold than they are on-manifold. We first demonstrate theoretically that off-manifold robustness leads input gradients to lie approximately on the data manifold, explaining their perceptual alignment. We then show that Bayes optimal models satisfy off-manifold robustness, and confirm the same empirically for robust models trained via gradient norm regularization, randomized smoothing, and adversarial training with projected gradient descent. Quantifying the perceptual alignment of model gradients via their similarity with the gradients of generative models, we show that off-manifold robustness correlates well with perceptual alignment. Finally, based on the levels of on- and off-manifold robustness, we identify three different regimes of robustness that affect both perceptual alignment and model accuracy: weak robustness, bayes-aligned robustness, and excessive robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/tml-tuebingen/pags.
tl;dr: We give improved learning-augmented algorithms for frequency estimation.
Estimating frequencies of elements appearing in a data stream is a key task in large-scale data analysis. Popular sketching approaches to this problem (e.g., CountMin and CountSketch) come with worst-case guarantees that probabilistically bound the error of the estimated frequencies for any possible input. The work of Hsu et al.~(2019) introduced the idea of using machine learning to tailor sketching algorithms to the specific data distribution they are being run on. In particular, their learning-augmented frequency estimation algorithm uses a learned heavy-hitter oracle which predicts which elements will appear many times in the stream. We give a novel algorithm, which in some parameter regimes, already theoretically outperforms the learning based algorithm of Hsu et al. *without* the use of any predictions. Augmenting our algorithm with heavy-hitter predictions further reduces the error and improves upon the state of the art. Empirically, our algorithms achieve superior performance in all experiments compared to prior approaches.
tl;dr: Compiling human-readable programs into weights of a transformer model to accelerate interpretability research.
We show how to "compile" human-readable programs into standard decoder-only transformer models. Our compiler, Tracr, generates models with known structure. This structure can be used to design experiments. For example, we use it to study "superposition" in transformers that execute multi-step algorithms. Additionally, the known structure of Tracr-compiled models can serve as _ground-truth_ for evaluating interpretability methods. Commonly, because the "programs" learned by transformers are unknown it is unclear whether an interpretation succeeded. We demonstrate our approach by implementing and examining programs including computing token frequencies, sorting, and parenthesis checking. We provide an open-source implementation of Tracr at https://github.com/google-deepmind/tracr.
tl;dr: Adequately filtered and deduplicated web data alone can train models outperforming others trained on curated corpora such as The Pile
Large language models are commonly trained on a mixture of filtered web data and curated ``high-quality'' corpora, such as social media conversations, books, or technical papers. This curation process is believed to be necessary to produce performant models with broad zero-shot generalization abilities. However, as larger models requiring pretraining on trillions of tokens are considered, it is unclear how scalable is curation, and whether we will run out of unique high-quality data soon. At variance with previous beliefs, we show that properly filtered and deduplicated web data alone can lead to powerful models; even significantly outperforming models trained on The Pile. Despite extensive filtering, the high-quality data we extract from the web is still plentiful, and we are able to obtain five trillion tokens from CommonCrawl. We publicly release an extract of 500 billion tokens from our RefinedWeb dataset, and 1.3/7.5B parameters language models trained on it.
Data assimilation, in its most comprehensive form, addresses the Bayesian inverse problem of identifying plausible state trajectories that explain noisy or incomplete observations of stochastic dynamical systems. Various approaches have been proposed to solve this problem, including particle-based and variational methods. However, most algorithms depend on the transition dynamics for inference, which becomes intractable for long time horizons or for high-dimensional systems with complex dynamics, such as oceans or atmospheres. In this work, we introduce score-based data assimilation for trajectory inference. We learn a score-based generative model of state trajectories based on the key insight that the score of an arbitrarily long trajectory can be decomposed into a series of scores over short segments. After training, inference is carried out using the score model, in a non-autoregressive manner by generating all states simultaneously. Quite distinctively, we decouple the observation model from the training procedure and use it only at inference to guide the generative process, which enables a wide range of zero-shot observation scenarios. We present theoretical and empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of our method.
tl;dr: A Dataset and Benchmark for Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection
Object anomaly detection is an important problem in the field of machine vision and has seen remarkable progress recently. However, two significant challenges hinder its research and application. First, existing datasets lack comprehensive visual information from various pose angles. They usually have an unrealistic assumption that the anomaly-free training dataset is pose-aligned, and the testing samples have the same pose as the training data. However, in practice, anomaly may exist in any regions on a object, the training and query samples may have different poses, calling for the study on pose-agnostic anomaly detection. Second, the absence of a consensus on experimental protocols for pose-agnostic anomaly detection leads to unfair comparisons of different methods, hindering the research on pose-agnostic anomaly detection. To address these issues, we develop Multi-pose Anomaly Detection (MAD) dataset and Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection (PAD) benchmark, which takes the first step to address the pose-agnostic anomaly detection problem. Specifically, we build MAD using 20 complex-shaped LEGO toys including 4K views with various poses, and high-quality and diverse 3D anomalies in both simulated and real environments. Additionally, we propose a novel method OmniposeAD, trained using MAD, specifically designed for pose-agnostic anomaly detection. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the relevance of our dataset and method. Furthermore, we provide an open-source benchmark library, including dataset and baseline methods that cover 8 anomaly detection paradigms, to facilitate future research and application in this domain. Code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/EricLee0224/PAD.
tl;dr: A method for neural audio compression that outperforms competing approaches in terms of audio quality, at much higher compression rates.
Language models have been successfully used to model natural signals, such as images, speech, and music. A key component of these models is a high quality neural compression model that can compress high-dimensional natural signals into lower dimensional discrete tokens. To that end, we introduce a high-fidelity universal neural audio compression algorithm that achieves ~90x compression of 44.1 KHz audio into tokens at just 8kbps bandwidth. We achieve this by combining advances in high-fidelity audio generation with better vector quantization techniques from the image domain, along with improved adversarial and reconstruction losses. We compress all domains (speech, environment, music, etc.) with a single universal model, making it widely applicable to generative modeling of all audio. We compare with competing audio compression algorithms, and find our method outperforms them significantly. We provide thorough ablations for every design choice, as well as open-source code and trained model weights. We hope our work can lay the foundation for the next generation of high-fidelity audio modeling.
tl;dr: We introduce the IVRE environment, simulating complex uncertainty scenarios to assess artificial agents' interactive reasoning skills, suggesting a need for advanced research towards achieving human-like intelligence in uncertainty resolution.
One of the fundamental cognitive abilities of humans is to quickly resolve uncertainty by generating hypotheses and testing them via active trials. Encountering a novel phenomenon accompanied by ambiguous cause-effect relationships, humans make hypotheses against data, conduct inferences from observation, test their theory via experimentation, and correct the proposition if inconsistency arises. These iterative processes persist until the underlying mechanism becomes clear. In this work, we devise the **IVRE** (pronounced as *"ivory"*) environment for evaluating artificial agents' reasoning ability under uncertainty. **IVRE** is an interactive environment featuring rich scenarios centered around *Blicket* detection. Agents in **IVRE** are placed into environments with various ambiguous action-effect pairs and asked to determine each object's role. They are encouraged to propose effective and efficient experiments to validate their hypotheses based on observations and actively gather new information. The game ends when all uncertainties are resolved or the maximum number of trials is consumed. By evaluating modern artificial agents in **IVRE**, we notice a clear failure of today's learning methods compared to humans. Such inefficacy in interactive reasoning ability under uncertainty calls for future research in building human-like intelligence.
tl;dr: We compare the mechanistic interpretability of vision models differing scale, architecture, training paradigm and dataset size and find that none of these design choices have any significant effect on the interpretability of individual units.
In light of the recent widespread adoption of AI systems, understanding the internal information processing of neural networks has become increasingly critical. Most recently, machine vision has seen remarkable progress by scaling neural networks to unprecedented levels in dataset and model size. We here ask whether this extraordinary increase in scale also positively impacts the field of mechanistic interpretability. In other words, has our understanding of the inner workings of scaled neural networks improved as well? We use a psychophysical paradigm to quantify one form of mechanistic interpretability for a diverse suite of nine models and find no scaling effect for interpretability - neither for model nor dataset size. Specifically, none of the investigated state-of-the-art models are easier to interpret than the GoogLeNet model from almost a decade ago. Latest-generation vision models appear even less interpretable than older architectures, hinting at a regression rather than improvement, with modern models sacrificing interpretability for accuracy. These results highlight the need for models explicitly designed to be mechanistically interpretable and the need for more helpful interpretability methods to increase our understanding of networks at an atomic level. We release a dataset containing more than 130'000 human responses from our psychophysical evaluation of 767 units across nine models. This dataset facilitates research on automated instead of human-based interpretability evaluations, which can ultimately be leveraged to directly optimize the mechanistic interpretability of models.
We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and fully characterize the interplays among three desired properties for policy design: worst-case optimality, instance-dependent consistency, and light-tailed risk. We show how the order of expected regret exactly affects the decaying rate of the regret tail probability for both the worst-case and instance-dependent scenario. A novel policy is proposed to achieve the optimal regret tail risk for any regret threshold. Concretely, for any given $\alpha\in[1/2, 1)$ and $\beta\in[0, 1)$, our policy achieves a worst-case expected regret of $\tilde O(T^\alpha)$ and instance-dependent expected regret of $\tilde O(T^\beta)$, while enjoys a probability of incurring an $\Omega(T^\delta)$ regret that decays exponentially with a polynomial $T$ term. Such decaying rate is proved to be best achievable. We also generalize our analysis to the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with non-stationary baseline rewards, where in each time period $t$, the decision maker pulls one of $K$ arms and collects a reward which is the sum of three terms: the mean of the pulled arm, an independent noise, and a non-stationary baseline reward as a function of $t$. Our results reveal insights on the trade-off between expected regret and tail risk for both worst-case and instance-dependent scenario, indicating that more sub-optimality and inconsistency leaves space for more light-tailed risk of incurring a large regret.
tl;dr: A league training method with goal-conditioned exploiters and opponent modeling that aims to improve the robustness of StarCarft II AI.
It is extremely difficult to train a superhuman Artificial Intelligence (AI) for games of similar size to StarCraft II. AlphaStar is the first AI that beat human professionals in the full game of StarCraft II, using a league training framework that is inspired by a game-theoretic approach. In this paper, we improve AlphaStar's league training in two significant aspects. We train goal-conditioned exploiters, whose abilities of spotting weaknesses in the main agent and the entire league are greatly improved compared to the unconditioned exploiters in AlphaStar. In addition, we endow the agents in the league with the new ability of opponent modeling, which makes the agent more responsive to the opponent's real-time strategy. Based on these improvements, we train a better and superhuman AI with orders of magnitude less resources than AlphaStar (see Table 1 for a full comparison). Considering the iconic role of StarCraft II in game AI research, we believe our method and results on StarCraft II provide valuable design principles on how one would utilize the general league training framework for obtaining a least-exploitable strategy in various, large-scale, real-world games.
tl;dr: We present an efficient algorithm to over-approximate the preimage of a neural network.
Most work on the formal verification of neural networks has focused on bounding the set of outputs that correspond to a given set of inputs (for example, bounded perturbations of a nominal input). However, many use cases of neural network verification require solving the inverse problem, or over-approximating the set of inputs that lead to certain outputs. We present the INVPROP algorithm for verifying properties over the preimage of a linearly constrained output set, which can be combined with branch-and-bound to increase precision. Contrary to other approaches, our efficient algorithm is GPU-accelerated and does not require a linear programming solver. We demonstrate our algorithm for identifying safe control regions for a dynamical system via backward reachability analysis, verifying adversarial robustness, and detecting out-of-distribution inputs to a neural network. Our results show that in certain settings, we find over-approximations over $2500\times$ tighter than prior work while being $2.5\times$ faster. By strengthening robustness verification with output constraints, we consistently verify more properties than the previous state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks, including a large model with 167k neurons in VNN-COMP 2023. Our algorithm has been incorporated into the $\alpha,\beta$-CROWN verifier, available at https://abcrown.org.
tl;dr: We introduce AbdomenAtlas-8K, a substantial multi-organ dataset with the spleen, liver, kidneys, stomach, gallbladder, pancreas, aorta, and IVC annotated in 8,448 CT volumes, totaling 3.2 million CT slices.
Annotating medical images, particularly for organ segmentation, is laborious and time-consuming. For example, annotating an abdominal organ requires an estimated rate of 30-60 minutes per CT volume based on the expertise of an annotator and the size, visibility, and complexity of the organ. Therefore, publicly available datasets for multi-organ segmentation are often limited in data size and organ diversity. This paper proposes an active learning procedure to expedite the annotation process for organ segmentation and creates the largest multi-organ dataset (by far) with the spleen, liver, kidneys, stomach, gallbladder, pancreas, aorta, and IVC annotated in 8,448 CT volumes, equating to 3.2 million slices. The conventional annotation methods would take an experienced annotator up to 1,600 weeks (or roughly 30.8 years) to complete this task. In contrast, our annotation procedure has accomplished this task in three weeks (based on an 8-hour workday, five days a week) while maintaining a similar or even better annotation quality. This achievement is attributed to three unique properties of our method: (1) label bias reduction using multiple pre-trained segmentation models, (2) effective error detection in the model predictions, and (3) attention guidance for annotators to make corrections on the most salient errors. Furthermore, we summarize the taxonomy of common errors made by AI algorithms and annotators. This allows for continuous improvement of AI and annotations, significantly reducing the annotation costs required to create large-scale datasets for a wider variety of medical imaging tasks. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MrGiovanni/AbdomenAtlas
tl;dr: Characteristic circuit is a deep probabilistic model over characteristic functions that enables a unified view for discrete and continuous random variables and allows to learn distributions that do not have closed form expressions for their density.
In many real-world scenarios it is crucial to be able to reliably and efficiently reason under uncertainty while capturing complex relationships in data.
Probabilistic circuits (PCs), a prominent family of tractable probabilistic models, offer a remedy to this challenge by composing simple, tractable distributions into a high-dimensional probability distribution.
However, learning PCs on heterogeneous data is challenging and densities of some parametric distributions are not available in closed form, limiting their potential use.
We introduce characteristic circuits (CCs), a family of tractable probabilistic models providing a unified formalization of distributions over heterogeneous data in the spectral domain.
The one-to-one relationship between characteristic functions and probability measures enables us to learn high-dimensional distributions on heterogeneous data domains and facilitates efficient probabilistic inference even when no closed-form density function is available.
We show that the structure and parameters of CCs can be learned efficiently from the data and find that CCs outperform state-of-the-art density estimators for heterogeneous data domains on common benchmark data sets.
tl;dr: We find that bias is inherent to neural network architectures and hyperparameters, yet we can mitigate it by searching for fair ones
Face recognition systems are widely deployed in safety-critical applications, including law enforcement, yet they exhibit bias across a range of socio-demographic dimensions, such as gender and race. Conventional wisdom dictates that model biases arise from biased training data. As a consequence, previous works on bias mitigation largely focused on pre-processing the training data, adding penalties to prevent bias from effecting the model during training, or post-processing predictions to debias them, yet these approaches have shown limited success on hard problems such as face recognition. In our work, we discover that biases are actually inherent to neural network architectures themselves. Following this reframing, we conduct the first neural architecture search for fairness, jointly with a search for hyperparameters. Our search outputs a suite of models which Pareto-dominate all other high-performance architectures and existing bias mitigation methods in terms of accuracy and fairness, often by large margins, on the two most widely used datasets for face identification, CelebA and VGGFace2. Furthermore, these models generalize to other datasets and sensitive attributes. We release our code, models and raw data files at https://github.com/dooleys/FR-NAS.
Constraint-based causal discovery methods leverage conditional independence tests to infer causal relationships in a wide variety of applications. Just as the majority of machine learning methods, existing work focuses on studying $\textit{independent and identically distributed}$ data. However, it is known that even with infinite $i.i.d.\$ data, constraint-based methods can only identify causal structures up to broad Markov equivalence classes, posing a fundamental limitation for causal discovery. In this work, we observe that exchangeable data contains richer conditional independence structure than $i.i.d.\$ data, and show how the richer structure can be leveraged for causal discovery. We first present causal de Finetti theorems, which state that exchangeable distributions with certain non-trivial conditional independences can always be represented as $\textit{independent causal mechanism (ICM)}$ generative processes. We then present our main identifiability theorem, which shows that given data from an ICM generative process, its unique causal structure can be identified through performing conditional independence tests. We finally develop a causal discovery algorithm and demonstrate its applicability to inferring causal relationships from multi-environment data.
tl;dr: We introduce Toolformer, a language model trained in a self-supervised way to know when and how to use external tools, achieving substantially improved zero-shot performance across a variety of downstream tasks.
Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller specialized models excel. In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to *use external tools* via simple APIs and achieve the best of both worlds. We introduce *Toolformer*, a model trained to decide which APIs to call, when to call them, what arguments to pass, and how to best incorporate the results into future token prediction. This is done in a self-supervised way, requiring nothing more than a handful of demonstrations for each API. We incorporate a range of tools, including a calculator, a Q&A system, a search engine, a translation system, and a calendar. Toolformer achieves substantially improved zero-shot performance across a variety of downstream tasks, often competitive with much larger models, without sacrificing its core language modeling abilities.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, understanding their ability to comprehend human mental states becomes critical for ensuring effective interactions. However, despite the recent attempts to assess the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the degree to which these models can align with human ToM remains a nuanced topic of exploration. This is primarily due to two distinct challenges: (1) the presence of inconsistent results from previous evaluations, and (2) concerns surrounding the validity of existing evaluation methodologies. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework for procedurally generating evaluations with LLMs by populating causal templates. Using our framework, we create a new social reasoning benchmark (BigToM) for LLMs which consists of 25 controls and 5,000 model-written evaluations. We find that human participants rate the quality of our benchmark higher than previous crowd-sourced evaluations and comparable to expert-written evaluations. Using BigToM, we evaluate the social reasoning capabilities of a variety of LLMs and compare model performances with human performance. Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle.
tl;dr: This paper provides the first convergence proof for black-box variational inference as-is, from which practical insights are obtained
We provide the first convergence guarantee for black-box variational inference (BBVI) with the reparameterization gradient.
While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain, bounded support, only optimizing for the scale, and such), our setup does not need any such algorithmic modifications.
Our results hold for log-smooth posterior densities with and without strong log-concavity and the location-scale variational family.
Notably, our analysis reveals that certain algorithm design choices commonly employed in practice, such as nonlinear parameterizations of the scale matrix, can result in suboptimal convergence rates.
Fortunately, running BBVI with proximal stochastic gradient descent fixes these limitations and thus achieves the strongest known convergence guarantees.
We evaluate this theoretical insight by comparing proximal SGD against other standard implementations of BBVI on large-scale Bayesian inference problems.
Quantifying dependence between high-dimensional random variables is central to statistical learning and inference. Two classical methods are canonical correlation analysis (CCA), which identifies maximally correlated projected versions of the original variables, and Shannon's mutual information, which is a universal dependence measure that also captures high-order dependencies. However, CCA only accounts for linear dependence, which may be insufficient for certain applications, while mutual information is often infeasible to compute/estimate in high dimensions. This work proposes a middle ground in the form of a scalable information-theoretic generalization of CCA, termed max-sliced mutual information (mSMI). mSMI equals the maximal mutual information between low-dimensional projections of the high-dimensional variables, which reduces back to CCA in the Gaussian case. It enjoys the best of both worlds: capturing intricate dependencies in the data while being amenable to fast computation and scalable estimation from samples. We show that mSMI retains favorable structural properties of Shannon's mutual information, like variational forms and identification of independence. We then study statistical estimation of mSMI, propose an efficiently computable neural estimator, and couple it with formal non-asymptotic error bounds. We present experiments that demonstrate the utility of mSMI for several tasks, encompassing independence testing, multi-view representation learning, algorithmic fairness, and generative modeling. We observe that mSMI consistently outperforms competing methods with little-to-no computational overhead.
tl;dr: We introduce new algorithms for sampling on constrained domains which are learning rate free.
We introduce a suite of new particle-based algorithms for sampling on constrained domains which are entirely learning rate free. Our approach leverages coin betting ideas from convex optimisation, and the viewpoint of constrained sampling as a mirrored optimisation problem on the space of probability measures. Based on this viewpoint, we also introduce a unifying framework for several existing constrained sampling algorithms, including mirrored Langevin dynamics and mirrored Stein variational gradient descent. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms on a range of numerical examples, including sampling from targets on the simplex, sampling with fairness constraints, and constrained sampling problems in post-selection inference. Our results indicate that our algorithms achieve competitive performance with existing constrained sampling methods, without the need to tune any hyperparameters.
tl;dr: Open-source offline and offline-to-online reinforcement learning library
CORL is an open-source library that provides thoroughly benchmarked single-file implementations of both deep offline and offline-to-online reinforcement learning algorithms. It emphasizes a simple developing experience with a straightforward codebase and a modern analysis tracking tool. In CORL, we isolate methods implementation into separate single files, making performance-relevant details easier to recognize. Additionally, an experiment tracking feature is available to help log metrics, hyperparameters, dependencies, and more to the cloud. Finally, we have ensured the reliability of the implementations by benchmarking commonly employed D4RL datasets providing a transparent source of results that can be reused for robust evaluation tools such as performance profiles, probability of improvement, or expected online performance.
tl;dr: Interpretable mechanistic model explaining emergent behavior and in-context learning in large language models.
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the most powerful and most unexpected capabilities to emerge in recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Yet the mechanisms that underlie it are poorly understood. In this paper, we demonstrate that comparable ICL capabilities can be acquired by an alternative sequence prediction learning method using clone-structured causal graphs (CSCGs). Moreover, a key property of CSCGs is that, unlike transformer-based LLMs, they are {\em interpretable}, which considerably simplifies the task of explaining how ICL works. Specifically, we show that it uses a combination of (a) learning template (schema) circuits for pattern completion, (b) retrieving relevant templates in a context-sensitive manner, and (c) rebinding of novel tokens to appropriate slots in the templates. We go on to marshall evidence for the hypothesis that similar mechanisms underlie ICL in LLMs. For example, we find that, with CSCGs as with LLMs, different capabilities emerge at different levels of overparameterization, suggesting that overparameterization helps in learning more complex template (schema) circuits. By showing how ICL can be achieved with small models and datasets, we open up a path to novel architectures, and take a vital step towards a more general understanding of the mechanics behind this important capability.
tl;dr: We connect public-private distribution learning to sample compression and list learning, which yields flexible ways to prove new upper and lower bounds on sample complexity.
We study the problem of private distribution learning with access to public data. In this setup, which we refer to as *public-private learning*, the learner is given public and private samples drawn from an unknown distribution $p$ belonging to a class $\mathcal Q$, with the goal of outputting an estimate of $p$ while adhering to privacy constraints (here, pure differential privacy) only with respect to the private samples.
We show that the public-private learnability of a class $\mathcal Q$ is connected to the existence of a sample compression scheme for $\mathcal Q$, as well as to an intermediate notion we refer to as \emph{list learning}. Leveraging this connection: (1) approximately recovers previous results on Gaussians over $\mathbb R^d$; and (2) leads to new ones, including sample complexity upper bounds for arbitrary $k$-mixtures of Gaussians over $\mathbb R^d$, results for agnostic and distribution-shift resistant learners, as well as closure properties for public-private learnability under taking mixtures and products of distributions. Finally, via the connection to list learning, we show that for Gaussians in $\mathbb R^d$, at least $d$ public samples are necessary for private learnability, which is close to the known upper bound of $d+1$ public samples.
tl;dr: We give a constant-factor approximation algorithm for individual preference (IP) stability clustering.
Individual preference (IP) stability, introduced by Ahmadi et al. (ICML 2022), is a natural clustering objective inspired by stability and fairness constraints. A clustering is $\alpha$-IP stable if the average distance of every data point to its own cluster is at most $\alpha$ times the average distance to any other cluster. Unfortunately, determining if a dataset admits a $1$-IP stable clustering is NP-Hard. Moreover, before this work, it was unknown if an $o(n)$-IP stable clustering always exists, as the prior state of the art only guaranteed an $O(n)$-IP stable clustering. We close this gap in understanding and show that an $O(1)$-IP stable clustering always exists for general metrics, and we give an efficient algorithm which outputs such a clustering. We also introduce generalizations of IP stability beyond average distance and give efficient near optimal algorithms in the cases where we consider the maximum and minimum distances within and between clusters.
tl;dr: We prove near-optimal rate of convergence of Oja's Streaming PCA algorithm for data sampled from a Markov chain and show that it is better than discarding data to reduce dependence at finding the leading eigenvector.
Since its inception in 1982, Oja's algorithm has become an established method for streaming principle component analysis (PCA). We study the problem of streaming PCA, where the data-points are sampled from an irreducible, aperiodic, and reversible Markov chain starting in stationarity. Our goal is to estimate the top eigenvector of the unknown covariance matrix of the stationary distribution. This setting has implications in scenarios where data can solely be sampled from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) type algorithm, and the objective is to perform inference on parameters of the stationary distribution. Most convergence guarantees for Oja's algorithm in the literature assume that the data-points are sampled IID. For data streams with Markovian dependence, one typically downsamples the data to get a "nearly" independent data stream. In this paper, we obtain the first near-optimal rate for Oja's algorithm on the entire data, where we remove the logarithmic dependence on the sample size, $n$, resulting from throwing data away in downsampling strategies.
Clustering is an important technique for identifying structural information in large-scale data analysis, where the underlying dataset may be too large to store. In many applications, recent data can provide more accurate information and thus older data past a certain time is expired. The sliding window model captures these desired properties and thus there has been substantial interest in clustering in the sliding window model. In this paper, we give the first algorithm that achieves near-optimal $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation to $(k,z)$-clustering in the sliding window model. Our algorithm uses $\frac{k}{\min(\varepsilon^4,\varepsilon^{2+z})}\,\text{polylog}\frac{n\Delta}{\varepsilon}$ words of space when the points are from $[\Delta]^d$, thus significantly improving on works by Braverman et. al. (SODA 2016), Borassi et. al. (NeurIPS 2021), and Epasto et. al. (SODA 2022).
Along the way, we develop a data structure for clustering called an online coreset, which outputs a coreset not only for the end of a stream, but also for all prefixes of the stream. Our online coreset samples $\frac{k}{\min(\varepsilon^4,\varepsilon^{2+z})}\,\text{polylog}\frac{n\Delta}{\varepsilon}$ points from the stream. We then show that any online coreset requires $\Omega\left(\frac{k}{\varepsilon^2}\log n\right)$ samples, which shows a separation between the problem of constructing an offline coreset, i.e., constructing online coresets is strictly harder. Our results also extend to general metrics on $[\Delta]^d$ and are near-optimal in light of a $\Omega\left(\frac{k}{\varepsilon^{2+z}}\right)$ lower bound for the size of an offline coreset.
tl;dr: We propose a sample efficient RL method that accelerates learning in mixed systems.
This paper considers a class of reinforcement learning problems, which involve systems with two types of states: stochastic and pseudo-stochastic. In such systems, stochastic states follow a stochastic transition kernel while the transitions of pseudo-stochastic states are deterministic {\em given} the stochastic states/transitions. We refer to such systems as mixed systems, which are widely used in various applications, including Manufacturing systems, communication networks, and queueing networks. We propose a sample-efficient RL method that accelerates learning by generating augmented data samples. The proposed algorithm is data-driven (model-free), but it learns the policy from data samples from both real and augmented samples. This method significantly improves learning by reducing the sample complexity such that the dataset only needs to have sufficient coverage of the stochastic states. We analyze the sample complexity of the proposed method under Fitted Q Iteration (FQI) and demonstrate that the optimality gap decreases as $O\left(\sqrt{\frac{1}{n}}+\sqrt{\frac{1}{m}}\right),$ where $n$ represents the number of real samples, and $m$ is the number of augmented samples per real sample. It is important to note that without augmented samples, the optimality gap is $O(1)$ due to the insufficient data coverage of the pseudo-stochastic states. Our experimental results on multiple queueing network applications confirm that the proposed method indeed significantly accelerates both deep Q-learning and deep policy gradient.
tl;dr: SSL learning representations of space yields multi-modular grid cells
To solve the spatial problems of mapping, localization and navigation, the mammalian lineage has developed striking spatial representations. One important spatial representation is the Nobel-prize winning grid cells: neurons that represent self-location, a local and aperiodic quantity, with seemingly bizarre non-local and spatially periodic activity patterns of a few discrete periods. Why has the mammalian lineage learnt this peculiar grid representation? Mathematical analysis suggests that this multi-periodic representation has excellent properties as an algebraic code with high capacity and intrinsic error-correction, but to date, synthesis of multi-modular grid cells in deep recurrent neural networks remains absent. In this work, we begin by identifying key insights from four families of approaches to answering the grid cell question: dynamical systems, coding theory, function optimization and supervised deep learning. We then leverage our insights to propose a new approach that elegantly combines the strengths of all four approaches. Our approach is a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework - including data, data augmentations, loss functions and a network architecture - motivated from a normative perspective, with no access to supervised position information. Without making assumptions about internal or readout representations, we show that multiple grid cell modules can emerge in networks trained on our SSL framework and that the networks generalize significantly beyond their training distribution. This work contains insights for neuroscientists interested in the origins of grid cells as well as machine learning researchers interested in novel SSL frameworks.
tl;dr: We provide sharp asymptotics for the test error of non-linear denoising auto-encoders in high dimensions.
We address the problem of denoising data from a Gaussian mixture using a two-layer non-linear autoencoder with tied weights and a skip connection. We consider the high-dimensional limit where the number of training samples and the input dimension jointly tend to infinity while the number of hidden units remains bounded. We provide closed-form expressions for the denoising mean-squared test error. Building on this result, we quantitatively characterize the advantage of the considered architecture over the autoencoder without the skip connection that relates closely to principal component analysis. We further show that our results capture accurately the learning curves on a range of real datasets.
tl;dr: a work on large-scale medical pre-trained models
Obtaining large pre-trained models that can be fine-tuned to new tasks with limited annotated samples has remained an open challenge for medical imaging data. While pre-trained networks on ImageNet and vision-language foundation models trained on web-scale data are the prevailing approaches, their effectiveness on medical tasks is limited due to the significant domain shift between natural and medical images. To bridge this gap, we introduce LVM-Med, the first family of deep networks trained on large-scale medical datasets. We have collected approximately 1.3 million medical images from 55 publicly available datasets, covering a large number of organs and modalities such as CT, MRI, X-ray, and Ultrasound. We benchmark several state-of-the-art self-supervised algorithms on this dataset and propose a novel self-supervised contrastive learning algorithm using a graph-matching formulation. The proposed approach makes three contributions: (i) it integrates prior pair-wise image similarity metrics based on local and global information; (ii) it captures the structural constraints of feature embeddings through a loss function constructed through a combinatorial graph-matching objective, and (iii) it can be trained efficiently end-to-end using modern gradient-estimation techniques for black-box solvers. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed LVM-Med on 15 downstream medical tasks ranging from segmentation and classification to object detection, and both for the in and out-of-distribution settings. LVM-Med empirically outperforms a number of state-of-the-art supervised, self-supervised, and foundation models. For challenging tasks such as Brain Tumor Classification or Diabetic Retinopathy Grading, LVM-Med improves previous vision-language models trained on 1 billion masks by 6-7% while using only a ResNet-50.
tl;dr: We introduce RL-ViGen: a novel Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Visual Generalization, which contains diverse tasks and a wide spectrum of generalization types.
Visual Reinforcement Learning (Visual RL), coupled with high-dimensional observations, has consistently confronted the long-standing challenge of out-of-distribution generalization. Despite the focus on algorithms aimed at resolving visual generalization problems, we argue that the devil is in the existing benchmarks as they are restricted to isolated tasks and generalization categories, undermining a comprehensive evaluation of agents' visual generalization capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce RL-ViGen: a novel **R**einforcement **L**earning Benchmark for **Vi**sual **Gen**eralization, which contains diverse tasks and a wide spectrum of generalization types, thereby facilitating the derivation of more reliable conclusions. Furthermore, RL-ViGen incorporates the latest generalization visual RL algorithms into a unified framework, under which the experiment results indicate that no single existing algorithm has prevailed universally across tasks. Our aspiration is that Rl-ViGen will serve as a catalyst in this area, and lay a foundation for the future creation of universal visual generalization RL agents suitable for real-world scenarios. Access to our code and implemented algorithms is provided at https://gemcollector.github.io/RL-ViGen/.
tl;dr: We provably generalize Lasso to tolerate a small number of approximate dependencies, via a broad algorithmic framework of feature adaptation.
Sparse linear regression is a central problem in high-dimensional statistics. We study the correlated random design setting, where the covariates are drawn from a multivariate Gaussian $N(0,\Sigma)$, and we seek an estimator with small excess risk.
If the true signal is $t$-sparse, information-theoretically, it is possible to achieve strong recovery guarantees with only $O(t\log n)$ samples. However, computationally efficient algorithms have sample complexity linear in (some variant of) the *condition number* of $\Sigma$. Classical algorithms such as the Lasso can require significantly more samples than necessary even if there is only a single sparse approximate dependency among the covariates.
We provide a polynomial-time algorithm that, given $\Sigma$, automatically adapts the Lasso to tolerate a small number of approximate dependencies. In particular, we achieve near-optimal sample complexity for constant sparsity and if $\Sigma$ has few ``outlier'' eigenvalues.
Our algorithm fits into a broader framework of *feature adaptation* for sparse linear regression with ill-conditioned covariates. With this framework, we additionally provide the first polynomial-factor improvement over brute-force search for constant sparsity $t$ and arbitrary covariance $\Sigma$.
The theory underlying robust distributed learning algorithms, designed to resist adversarial machines, matches empirical observations when data is homogeneous. Under data heterogeneity however, which is the norm in practical scenarios, established lower bounds on the learning error are essentially vacuous and greatly mismatch empirical observations. This is because the heterogeneity model considered is too restrictive and does not cover basic learning tasks such as least-squares regression. We consider in this paper a more realistic heterogeneity model, namely $(G,B)$-gradient dissimilarity, and show that it covers a larger class of learning problems than existing theory. Notably, we show that the breakdown point under heterogeneity is lower than the classical fraction $\frac{1}{2}$. We also prove a new lower bound on the learning error of any distributed learning algorithm. We derive a matching upper bound for a robust variant of distributed gradient descent, and empirically show that our analysis reduces the gap between theory and practice.
tl;dr: We introduce a new class of expressive stochastic process models which are constructed by stacking sequences of neural parameterised Markov transition operators in function space.
We introduce Markov Neural Processes (MNPs), a new class of Stochastic Processes (SPs) which are constructed by stacking sequences of neural parameterised Markov transition operators in function space. We prove that these Markov transition operators can preserve the exchangeability and consistency of SPs. Therefore, the proposed iterative construction adds substantial flexibility and expressivity to the original framework of Neural Processes (NPs) without compromising consistency or adding restrictions. Our experiments demonstrate clear advantages of MNPs over baseline models on a variety of tasks.
tl;dr: Riemannian stochastic optimization methods avoid strict saddle points
Many modern machine learning applications - from online principal component analysis to covariance matrix identification and dictionary learning - can be formulated as minimization problems on Riemannian manifolds, typically solved with a Riemannian stochastic gradient method (or some variant thereof). However, in many cases of interest, the resulting minimization problem is _not_ geodesically convex, so the convergence of the chosen solver to a desirable solution - i.e., a local minimizer - is by no means guaranteed. In this paper, we study precisely this question, that is, whether stochastic Riemannian optimization algorithms are guaranteed to avoid saddle points with probability $1$. For generality, we study a family of retraction-based methods which, in addition to having a potentially much lower per-iteration cost relative to Riemannian gradient descent, include other widely used algorithms, such as natural policy gradient methods and mirror descent in ordinary convex spaces. In this general setting, we show that, under mild assumptions for the ambient manifold and the oracle providing gradient information, the policies under study avoid strict saddle points / submanifolds with probability $1$, from any initial condition. This result provides an important sanity check for the use of gradient methods on manifolds as it shows that, almost always, the end state of a stochastic Riemannian algorithm can only be a local minimizer.
The focus of our work is on diagnostic tasks in personalized learning, such as cognitive diagnosis and knowledge tracing. The goal of these tasks is to assess students' latent proficiency on knowledge concepts through analyzing their historical learning records. However, existing research has been limited to single-course scenarios; cross-course studies have not been explored due to a lack of dataset. We address this issue by constructing PTADisc, a Diverse, Immense, Student-centered dataset that emphasizes its sufficient Cross-course information for personalized learning. PTADisc includes 74 courses, 1,530,100 students, 4,054 concepts, 225,615 problems, and over 680 million student response logs. Based on PTADisc, we developed a model-agnostic Cross-Course Learner Modeling Framework (CCLMF) which utilizes relationships between students' proficiency across courses to alleviate the difficulty of diagnosing student knowledge state in cold-start scenarios. CCLMF uses a meta network to generate personalized mapping functions between courses. The experimental results on PTADisc verify the effectiveness of CCLMF with an average improvement of 4.2% on AUC. We also report the performance of baseline models for cognitive diagnosis and knowledge tracing over PTADisc, demonstrating that our dataset supports a wide scope of research in personalized learning. Additionally, PTADisc contains valuable programming logs and student-group information that are worth exploring in the future.
The ResNet architecture has been widely adopted in deep learning due to its significant boost to performance through the use of simple skip connections, yet the underlying mechanisms leading to its success remain largely unknown. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study of the ResNet architecture in classification tasks by linearizing its constituent residual blocks using Residual Jacobians and measuring their singular value decompositions. Our measurements ([code](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1yKjEg2yF616tnZFAfuN0aQ-E9v3JmyjN?usp=sharing)) reveal a process called Residual Alignment (RA) characterized by four properties:
- **(RA1):** intermediate representations of a given input are *equispaced* on a *line*, embedded in high dimensional space, as observed by Gai and Zhang [2021];
- **(RA2):** top left and right singular vectors of Residual Jacobians align with each other and across different depths;
- **(RA3):** Residual Jacobians are at most rank $C$ for fully-connected ResNets, where $C$ is the number of classes; and
- **(RA4):** top singular values of Residual Jacobians scale inversely with depth.
RA consistently occurs in models that generalize well, in both fully-connected and convolutional architectures, across various depths and widths, for varying numbers of classes, on all tested benchmark datasets, but ceases to occur once the skip connections are removed. It also provably occurs in a novel mathematical model we propose. This phenomenon reveals a strong alignment between residual branches of a ResNet (RA2+4), imparting a highly rigid geometric structure to the intermediate representations as they progress *linearly* through the network (RA1) up to the final layer, where they undergo Neural Collapse.
tl;dr: Megabyte enables sub-quadratic self-attention, much larger feedforward layers and improved parallelism during decoding. It can effectively model text, image, and audio directly from bytes.
Autoregressive transformers are spectacular models for short sequences but scale poorly to long sequences such as high-resolution images, podcasts, code, or books. We proposed Megabyte, a multi-scale decoder architecture that enables end-to-end differentiable modeling of sequences of over one million bytes. Megabyte segments sequences into patches and uses a local submodel within patches and a global model between patches. This enables sub-quadratic self-attention, much larger feedforward layers for the same compute, and improved parallelism during decoding---unlocking better performance at reduced cost for both training and generation. Extensive experiments show that Megabyte allows byte-level models to perform competitively with subword models on long context language modeling, achieve state-of-the-art density estimation on ImageNet, and model audio from raw files. Together, these results establish the viability of tokenization-free autoregressive sequence modeling at scale.
tl;dr: Dataset of human-human handover with 136 objects by 20 subject pairs with multiview RGBD images, 3D point clouds, hand/object 2D/3D segmentation, and ratings, for handover parameter study, hand-object pose estimation, and human-robot handover.
We present the HOH (Human-Object-Human) Handover Dataset, a large object count dataset with 136 objects, to accelerate data-driven research on handover studies, human-robot handover implementation, and artificial intelligence (AI) on handover parameter estimation from 2D and 3D data of two-person interactions. HOH contains multi-view RGB and depth data, skeletons, fused point clouds, grasp type and handedness labels, object, giver hand, and receiver hand 2D and 3D segmentations, giver and receiver comfort ratings, and paired object metadata and aligned 3D models for 2,720 handover interactions spanning 136 objects and 20 giver-receiver pairs—40 with role-reversal—organized from 40 participants. We also show experimental results of neural networks trained using HOH to perform grasp, orientation, and trajectory prediction. As the only fully markerless handover capture dataset, HOH represents natural human-human handover interactions, overcoming challenges with markered datasets that require specific suiting for body tracking, and lack high-resolution hand tracking. To date, HOH is the largest handover dataset in terms of object count, participant count, pairs with role reversal accounted for, and total interactions captured.
tl;dr: We theoretically analyze the features learned by gradient descent on three-layer neural networks, and show that there exist classes of functions efficiently learnable by three-layer networks but not by two-layer networks.
One of the central questions in the theory of deep learning is to understand how neural networks learn hierarchical features. The ability of deep networks to extract salient features is crucial to both their outstanding generalization ability and the modern deep learning paradigm of pretraining and finetuneing. However, this feature learning process remains poorly understood from a theoretical perspective, with existing analyses largely restricted to two-layer networks. In this work we show that three-layer neural networks have provably richer feature learning capabilities than two-layer networks. We analyze the features learned by a three-layer network trained with layer-wise gradient descent, and present a general purpose theorem which upper bounds the sample complexity and width needed to achieve low test error when the target has specific hierarchical structure. We instantiate our framework in specific statistical learning settings -- single-index models and functions of quadratic features -- and show that in the latter setting three-layer networks obtain a sample complexity improvement over all existing guarantees for two-layer networks. Crucially, this sample complexity improvement relies on the ability of three-layer networks to efficiently learn *nonlinear* features. We then establish a concrete optimization-based depth separation by constructing a function which is efficiently learnable via gradient descent on a three-layer network, yet cannot be learned efficiently by a two-layer network. Our work makes progress towards understanding the provable benefit of three-layer neural networks over two-layer networks in the feature learning regime.
tl;dr: We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a light-weight technique that enhances the truthfulness of large language models (LLMs).
We introduce Inference-Time Intervention (ITI), a technique designed to enhance the "truthfulness" of large language models (LLMs). ITI operates by shifting model activations during inference, following a learned set of directions across a limited number of attention heads. This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark. On an instruction-finetuned LLaMA called Alpaca, ITI improves its truthfulness from $32.5\%$ to $65.1\%$. We identify a tradeoff between truthfulness and helpfulness and demonstrate how to balance it by tuning the intervention strength. ITI is minimally invasive and computationally inexpensive. Moreover, the technique is data efficient: while approaches like RLHF require extensive annotations, ITI locates truthful directions using only few hundred examples. Our findings suggest that LLMs may have an internal representation of the likelihood of something being true, even as they produce falsehoods on the surface.
We consider the adversarial linear contextual bandit problem,
where the loss vectors are selected fully adversarially and the per-round action set (i.e. the context) is drawn from a fixed distribution. Existing methods for this problem either require access to a simulator to generate free i.i.d. contexts, achieve a sub-optimal regret no better than $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{\frac{5}{6}})$, or are computationally inefficient.
We greatly improve these results by achieving a regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ without a simulator, while maintaining computational efficiency when the action set in each round is small.
In the special case of sleeping bandits with adversarial loss and stochastic arm availability, our result answers affirmatively the open question by [SGV20] on whether there exists a polynomial-time algorithm with $poly(d)\sqrt{T}$ regret. Our approach naturally handles the case where the loss is linear up to an additive misspecification error, and our regret shows near-optimal dependence on the magnitude of the error.
tl;dr: A theoretical analysis of finite width effects in strongly feature learning neural networks from dynamical mean field theory.
We analyze the dynamics of finite width effects in wide but finite feature learning neural networks. Starting from a dynamical mean field theory description of infinite width deep neural network kernel and prediction dynamics, we provide a characterization of the $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\text{width}})$ fluctuations of the DMFT order parameters over random initializations of the network weights. Our results, while perturbative in width, unlike prior analyses, are non-perturbative in the strength of feature learning. In the lazy limit of network training, all kernels are random but static in time and the prediction variance has a universal form. However, in the rich, feature learning regime, the fluctuations of the kernels and predictions are dynamically coupled with a variance that can be computed self-consistently. In two layer networks, we show how feature learning can dynamically reduce the variance of the final tangent kernel and final network predictions. We also show how initialization variance can slow down online learning in wide but finite networks. In deeper networks, kernel variance can dramatically accumulate through subsequent layers at large feature learning strengths, but feature learning continues to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the feature kernels. In discrete time, we demonstrate that large learning rate phenomena such as edge of stability effects can be well captured by infinite width dynamics and that initialization variance can decrease dynamically. For CNNs trained on CIFAR-10, we empirically find significant corrections to both the bias and variance of network dynamics due to finite width.
tl;dr: We derive approximations for the testing errors of three regression-based conditional independence (CI) tests depending on misspecification. We introduce the Rao-Blackwellized Predictor Test (RBPT), a CI regression-based misspecification-robust test.
Conditional independence (CI) testing is a fundamental and challenging task in modern statistics and machine learning. Many modern methods for CI testing rely on powerful supervised learning methods to learn regression functions or Bayes predictors as an intermediate step; we refer to this class of tests as regression-based tests. Although these methods are guaranteed to control Type-I error when the supervised learning methods accurately estimate the regression functions or Bayes predictors of interest, their behavior is less understood when they fail due to misspecified inductive biases; in other words, when the employed models are not flexible enough or when the training algorithm does not induce the desired predictors. Then, we study the performance of regression-based CI tests under misspecified inductive biases. Namely, we propose new approximations or upper bounds for the testing errors of three regression-based tests that depend on misspecification errors. Moreover, we introduce the Rao-Blackwellized Predictor Test (RBPT), a regression-based CI test robust against misspecified inductive biases. Finally, we conduct experiments with artificial and real data, showcasing the usefulness of our theory and methods.
tl;dr: An autonomous driving simulator for behavior problems with hardware acceleration and intelligent out-of-the-box agents.
Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of multi-agent interactive behaviors to be trustworthy, behaviors which can be highly nuanced and complex. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.
tl;dr: This paper explores the reliability of current evaluation methods for Qpen-QA, introduces a new task, QA-Eval, and presents a dataset that aids in developing better automatic evaluators.
This study focuses on the evaluation of the Open Question Answering (Open-QA) task, which can directly estimate the factuality of large language models (LLMs). Current automatic evaluation methods have shown limitations, indicating that human evaluation still remains the most reliable approach. We introduce a new task, QA Evaluation (QA-Eval) and the corresponding dataset EVOUNA, designed to assess the accuracy of AI-generated answers in relation to standard answers within Open-QA. Our evaluation of these methods utilizes human-annotated results to measure their performance. Specifically, the work investigates methods that show high correlation with human evaluations, deeming them more reliable. We also discuss the pitfalls of current methods and methods to improve LLM-based evaluators. We believe this new QA-Eval task and corresponding dataset EVOUNA will facilitate the development of more effective automatic evaluation tools and prove valuable for future research in this area. All resources are available at https://github.com/wangcunxiang/QA-Eval and it is under the Apache-2.0 License.
tl;dr: A benchmark simulating bad actors trying to circumvent image content filters by heavily obfuscating the images.
Automated content filtering and moderation is an important tool that allows online platforms to build striving user communities that facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Unfortunately, resourceful actors try to bypass automated filters in a bid to post content that violate platform policies and codes of conduct. To reach this goal, these malicious actors may obfuscate policy violating images (e.g., overlay harmful images by carefully selected benign images or visual patterns) to prevent machine learning models from reaching the correct decision. In this paper, we invite researchers to tackle this specific issue and present a new image benchmark. This benchmark, based on ImageNet, simulates the type of obfuscations created by malicious actors. It goes beyond Image-Net-C and ImageNet-C-bar by proposing general, drastic, adversarial modifications that preserve the original content intent. It aims to tackle a more common adversarial threat than the one considered by lp-norm bounded adversaries. We evaluate 33 pretrained models on the benchmark and train models with different augmentations, architectures and training methods on subsets of the obfuscations to measure generalization. Our hope is that this benchmark will encourage researchers to test their models and methods and try to find new approaches that are more robust to these obfuscations.
As the use of machine learning models in real world high-stakes decision settings continues to grow, it is highly important that we are able to audit and control for any potential fairness violations these models may exhibit towards certain groups. To do so, one naturally requires access to sensitive attributes, such as demographics, biological sex, or other potentially sensitive features that determine group membership. Unfortunately, in many settings, this information is often unavailable. In this work we study the well known equalized odds (EOD) definition of fairness. In a setting without sensitive attributes, we first provide tight and computable upper bounds for the EOD violation of a predictor. These bounds precisely reflect the worst possible EOD violation. Second, we demonstrate how one can provably control the worst-case EOD by a new post-processing correction method. Our results characterize when directly controlling for EOD with respect to the predicted sensitive attributes is -- and when is not -- optimal when it comes to controlling worst-case EOD. Our results hold under assumptions that are milder than previous works, and we illustrate these results with experiments on synthetic and real datasets.
tl;dr: A new framework, which allows flexible sampling distribution, improves stability and local fidelity of LIME both theoretically and empirically.
As black-box machine learning models become more complex and are applied in high-stakes settings, the need for providing explanations for their predictions becomes crucial. Although Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) \cite{ribeiro2016should} is a widely adopted method for understanding model behavior, it suffers from instability with respect to random seeds \cite{zafar2019dlime, shankaranarayana2019alime, bansal2020sam} and exhibits low local fidelity (i.e., how the explanation explains model's local behaviors) \cite{rahnama2019study, laugel2018defining}. Our study demonstrates that this instability is caused by small sample weights, resulting in the dominance of regularization and slow convergence. Additionally, LIME's sampling approach is non-local and biased towards the reference, leading to diminished local fidelity and instability to references. To address these challenges, we propose \textsc{Glime}, an enhanced framework that extends LIME and unifies several previous methods. Within the \textsc{Glime} framework, we derive an equivalent formulation of LIME that achieves significantly faster convergence and improved stability. By employing a local and unbiased sampling distribution, \textsc{Glime} generates explanations with higher local fidelity compared to LIME, while being independent of the reference choice. Moreover, \textsc{Glime} offers users the flexibility to choose sampling distribution based on their specific scenarios.
Federated bilevel optimization (FBO) has shown great potential recently in machine learning and edge computing due to the emerging nested optimization structure in meta-learning, fine-tuning, hyperparameter tuning, etc. However, existing FBO algorithms often involve complicated computations and require multiple sub-loops per iteration, each of which contains a number of communication rounds. In this paper, we propose a simple and flexible FBO framework named SimFBO, which is easy to implement without sub-loops, and includes a generalized server-side aggregation and update for improving communication efficiency. We further propose System-level heterogeneity robust FBO (ShroFBO) as a variant of SimFBO with stronger resilience to heterogeneous local computation. We show that SimFBO and ShroFBO provably achieve a linear convergence speedup with partial client participation and client sampling without replacement, as well as improved sample and communication complexities. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods over existing FBO algorithms.
273. Training shallow ReLU networks on noisy data using hinge loss: when do we overfit and is it benign?
We study benign overfitting in two-layer ReLU networks trained using gradient descent and hinge loss on noisy data for binary classification. In particular, we consider linearly separable data for which a relatively small proportion of labels are corrupted or flipped. We identify conditions on the margin of the clean data that give rise to three distinct training outcomes: benign overfitting, in which zero loss is achieved and with high probability test data is classified correctly; overfitting, in which zero loss is achieved but test data is misclassified with probability lower bounded by a constant; and non-overfitting, in which clean points, but not corrupt points, achieve zero loss and again with high probability test data is classified correctly. Our analysis provides a fine-grained description of the dynamics of neurons throughout training and reveals two distinct phases: in the first phase clean points achieve close to zero loss, in the second phase clean points oscillate on the boundary of zero loss while corrupt points either converge towards zero loss or are eventually zeroed by the network. We prove these results using a combinatorial approach that involves bounding the number of clean versus corrupt updates during these phases of training.
tl;dr: Comprehensive evaluation benchmark for multimodal video models focused on skills (memory, abstraction, physics, semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual)
We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, BEiT-3, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a significant gap in performance (91.4% vs 45.8%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding.
Dataset, baselines code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test
275. The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation
tl;dr: Advances in denoising diffusion to handle limited, noisy, incomplete labels of dense vision tasks, specifically monocular depth estimation and optical flow, achieving sota results
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have transformed image generation with their impressive fidelity and diversity.
We show that they also excel in estimating optical flow and monocular depth, surprisingly without task-specific architectures and loss functions that are predominant for these tasks.
Compared to the point estimates of conventional regression-based methods, diffusion models also enable Monte Carlo inference, e.g., capturing uncertainty and ambiguity in flow and depth.
With self-supervised pre-training, the combined use of synthetic and real data for supervised training, and technical innovations (infilling and step-unrolled denoising diffusion training) to handle noisy-incomplete training data, one can train state-of-the-art diffusion models for depth and optical flow estimation, with additional zero-shot coarse-to-fine refinement for high resolution estimates.
Extensive experiments focus on quantitative performance against benchmarks, ablations, and the model's ability to capture uncertainty and multimodality, and impute missing values. Our model obtains a state-of-the-art relative depth error of 0.074 on the indoor NYU benchmark and an Fl-all score of 3.26\% on the KITTI optical flow benchmark, about 25\% better than the best published method.
tl;dr: In this work, we present an approach that utilizes both neural network unit and edge pruning techniques, as well as a network analysis tool, to reveal the previously unknown hierarchical modularity underlying a given task.
Natural target functions and tasks typically exhibit hierarchical modularity -- they can be broken down into simpler sub-functions that are organized in a hierarchy. Such sub-functions have two important features: they have a distinct set of inputs (input-separability) and they are reused as inputs higher in the hierarchy (reusability). Previous studies have established that hierarchically modular neural networks, which are inherently sparse, offer benefits such as learning efficiency, generalization, multi-task learning, and transfer. However, identifying the underlying sub-functions and their hierarchical structure for a given task can be challenging. The high-level question in this work is: if we learn a task using a sufficiently deep neural network, how can we uncover the underlying hierarchy of sub-functions in that task? As a starting point, we examine the domain of Boolean functions, where it is easier to determine whether a task is hierarchically modular. We propose an approach based on iterative unit and edge pruning (during training), combined with network analysis for module detection and hierarchy inference. Finally, we demonstrate that this method can uncover the hierarchical modularity of a wide range of Boolean functions and two vision tasks based on the MNIST digits dataset.
tl;dr: A novel QMC mechanism that induces correlations between the terminations of random walkers on a graph to improve kernel estimator variance.
We present a novel mechanism to improve the accuracy of the recently-introduced class of graph random features (GRFs). Our method induces negative correlations between the lengths of the algorithm's random walks by imposing antithetic termination: a procedure to sample more diverse random walks which may be of independent interest. It has a trivial drop-in implementation. We derive strong theoretical guarantees on the properties of these quasi-Monte Carlo GRFs (q-GRFs), proving that they yield lower-variance estimators of the $2$-regularised Laplacian kernel under mild conditions. Remarkably, our results hold for any graph topology. We demonstrate empirical accuracy improvements on a variety of tasks including a new practical application: time-efficient approximation of the graph diffusion process. To our knowledge, q-GRFs constitute the first rigorously studied quasi-Monte Carlo scheme for kernels defined on combinatorial objects, inviting new research on correlations between graph random walks.
tl;dr: We propose a method to learn the posterior distribution in infinite-dimensional Bayesian linear inverse problems using amortized conditional score-based generative models.
Since their initial introduction, score-based diffusion models (SDMs) have been successfully applied to solve a variety of linear inverse problems in finite-dimensional vector spaces due to their ability to efficiently approximate the posterior distribution. However, using SDMs for inverse problems in infinite-dimensional function spaces has only been addressed recently, primarily through methods that learn the unconditional score. While this approach is advantageous for some inverse problems, it is mostly heuristic and involves numerous computationally costly forward operator evaluations during posterior sampling. To address these limitations, we propose a theoretically grounded method for sampling from the posterior of infinite-dimensional Bayesian linear inverse problems based on amortized conditional SDMs. In particular, we prove that one of the most successful approaches for estimating the conditional score in finite dimensions—the conditional denoising estimator—can also be applied in infinite dimensions. A significant part of our analysis is dedicated to demonstrating that extending infinite-dimensional SDMs to the conditional setting requires careful consideration, as the conditional score typically blows up for small times, contrarily to the unconditional score. We conclude by presenting stylized and large-scale numerical examples that validate our approach, offer additional insights, and demonstrate that our method enables large-scale, discretization-invariant Bayesian inference.
tl;dr: Hierarchical integrate generative model (Diffusion Model) and regression-based model (Transformer) for realistic image deblurring
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently been introduced in image deblurring and exhibited promising performance, particularly in terms of details reconstruction. However, the diffusion model requires a large number of inference iterations to recover the clean image from pure Gaussian noise, which consumes massive computational resources. Moreover, the distribution synthesized by the diffusion model is often misaligned with the target results, leading to restrictions in distortion-based metrics. To address the above issues, we propose the Hierarchical Integration Diffusion Model (HI-Diff), for realistic image deblurring. Specifically, we perform the DM in a highly compacted latent space to generate the prior feature for the deblurring process. The deblurring process is implemented by a regression-based method to obtain better distortion accuracy. Meanwhile, the highly compact latent space ensures the efficiency of the DM. Furthermore, we design the hierarchical integration module to fuse the prior into the regression-based model from multiple scales, enabling better generalization in complex blurry scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world blur datasets demonstrate that our HI-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/zhengchen1999/HI-Diff.
tl;dr: We propose Neural Galerkin schemes that update randomized sparse subsets of parameters. We are up to two orders of magnitude more accurate at a fixed budget and up to two orders of magnitude faster at a fixed accuracy than dense updates.
Training neural networks sequentially in time to approximate solution fields of time-dependent partial differential equations can be beneficial for preserving causality and other physics properties; however, the sequential-in-time training is numerically challenging because training errors quickly accumulate and amplify over time. This work introduces Neural Galerkin schemes that update randomized sparse subsets of network parameters at each time step. The randomization avoids overfitting locally in time and so helps prevent the error from accumulating quickly over the sequential-in-time training, which is motivated by dropout that addresses a similar issue of overfitting due to neuron co-adaptation. The sparsity of the update reduces the computational costs of training without losing expressiveness because many of the network parameters are redundant locally at each time step. In numerical experiments with a wide range of evolution equations, the proposed scheme with randomized sparse updates is up to two orders of magnitude more accurate at a fixed computational budget and up to two orders of magnitude faster at a fixed accuracy than schemes with dense updates.
tl;dr: We study the theoretical condition for conformal validity in graph-structured data to produce guaranteed uncertainty estimates and design a topology-aware method to reduce inefficiency by up to 74%.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful machine learning prediction models on graph-structured data. However, GNNs lack rigorous uncertainty estimates, limiting their reliable deployment in settings where the cost of errors is significant. We propose conformalized GNN (CF-GNN), extending conformal prediction (CP) to graph-based models for guaranteed uncertainty estimates. Given an entity in the graph, CF-GNN produces a prediction set/interval that provably contains the true label with pre-defined coverage probability (e.g. 90%). We establish a permutation invariance condition that enables the validity of CP on graph data and provide an exact characterization of the test-time coverage. Moreover, besides valid coverage, it is crucial to reduce the prediction set size/interval length for practical use. We observe a key connection between non-conformity scores and network structures, which motivates us to develop a topology-aware output correction model that learns to update the prediction and produces more efficient prediction sets/intervals. Extensive experiments show that CF-GNN achieves any pre-defined target marginal coverage while significantly reducing the prediction set/interval size by up to 74% over the baselines. It also empirically achieves satisfactory conditional coverage over various raw and network features.
Regret Matching$^+$ (RM$^+$) and its variants are important algorithms for solving large-scale games.
However, a theoretical understanding of their success in practice is still a mystery.
Moreover, recent advances on fast convergence in games are limited to no-regret algorithms such as online mirror descent, which satisfy stability.
In this paper, we first give counterexamples showing that RM+ and its predictive version can be unstable, which might cause other players to suffer large regret.
We then provide two fixes: restarting and chopping off the positive orthant that RM$^+$ works in.
We show that these fixes are sufficient to get $O(T^{1/4})$ individual regret and $O(1)$ social regret in normal-form games via RM$^+$ with predictions.
We also apply our stabilizing techniques to clairvoyant updates in the uncoupled learning setting for RM$^+$ and prove desirable results akin to recent works for Clairvoyant online mirror descent.
Our experiments show the advantages of our algorithms over vanilla RM$^+$-based algorithms in matrix and extensive-form games.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel set of tools that allow for decomposition of spurious (confounded) variations between variables $X$ and $Y$ in general Semi-Markovian models.
One of the fundamental challenges found throughout the data sciences is to explain why things happen in specific ways, or through which mechanisms a certain variable $X$ exerts influences over another variable $Y$. In statistics and machine learning, significant efforts have been put into developing machinery to estimate correlations across variables efficiently. In causal inference, a large body of literature is concerned with the decomposition of causal effects under the rubric of mediation analysis. However, many variations are spurious in nature, including different phenomena throughout the applied sciences. Despite the statistical power to estimate correlations and the identification power to decompose causal effects, there is still little understanding of the properties of spurious associations and how they can be decomposed in terms of the underlying causal mechanisms. In this manuscript, we develop formal tools for decomposing spurious variations in both Markovian and Semi-Markovian models. We prove the first results that allow a non-parametric decomposition of spurious effects and provide sufficient conditions for the identification of such decompositions. The described approach has several applications, ranging from explainable and fair AI to questions in epidemiology and medicine, and we empirically demonstrate its use on a real-world dataset.
Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) have shown promise for restoring rapid communication to people with neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
However, to maintain high performance over time, iBCIs typically need frequent recalibration to combat changes in the neural recordings that accrue over days.
This requires iBCI users to stop using the iBCI and engage in supervised data collection, making the iBCI system hard to use.
In this paper, we propose a method that enables self-recalibration of communication iBCIs without interrupting the user.
Our method leverages large language models (LMs) to automatically correct errors in iBCI outputs.
The self-recalibration process uses these corrected outputs ("pseudo-labels") to continually update the iBCI decoder online.
Over a period of more than one year (403 days), we evaluated our Continual Online Recalibration with Pseudo-labels (CORP) framework with one clinical trial participant.
CORP achieved a stable decoding accuracy of 93.84% in an online handwriting iBCI task, significantly outperforming other baseline methods.
Notably, this is the longest-running iBCI stability demonstration involving a human participant.
Our results provide the first evidence for long-term stabilization of a plug-and-play, high-performance communication iBCI, addressing a major barrier for the clinical translation of iBCIs.
tl;dr: RETVec is a new multilingual, typo-resilient text vectorizer which achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks
This paper describes RETVec, an efficient, resilient, and multilingual text vectorizer designed for neural-based text processing. RETVec combines a novel character encoding with an optional small embedding model to embed words into a 256-dimensional vector space. The RETVec embedding model is pre-trained using pair-wise metric learning to be robust against typos and character-level adversarial attacks. In this paper, we evaluate and compare RETVec to state-of-the-art vectorizers and word embeddings on popular model architectures and datasets. These comparisons demonstrate that RETVec leads to competitive, multilingual models that are significantly more resilient to typos and adversarial text attacks. RETVec is available under the Apache 2 license at https://github.com/google-research/retvec.
tl;dr: High dimensional expressive variational approximations that perform better than existing methods.
In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex multimodal and correlated posteriors in high-dimensional spaces. Our approach introduces novel bounds for approximate inference using implicit distributions by locally linearising the neural sampler. This is distinct from existing methods that rely on additional discriminator networks and unstable adversarial objectives. Furthermore, we present a new sampler architecture that, for the first time, enables implicit distributions over tens of millions of latent variables, addressing computational concerns by using differentiable numerical approximations. We empirically show that our method is capable of recovering correlations across layers in large Bayesian neural networks, a property that is crucial for a network's performance but notoriously challenging to achieve. To the best of our knowledge, no other method has been shown to accomplish this task for such large models. Through experiments in downstream tasks, we demonstrate that our expressive posteriors outperform state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification methods, validating the effectiveness of our training algorithm and the quality of the learned implicit approximation.
tl;dr: Dual Sparsity Pursuit
In this paper, we contribute to solving a threefold problem: outlier rejection, true model reasoning and parameter estimation with a unified optimization modeling. To this end, we first pose this task as a sparse subspace recovering problem, to search a maximum of independent bases under an over-embedded data space. Then we convert the objective into a continuous optimization paradigm that estimates sparse solutions for both bases and errors. Wherein a fast and robust solver is proposed to accurately estimate the sparse subspace parameters and error entries, which is implemented by a proximal approximation method under the alternating optimization framework with the ``optimal'' sub-gradient descent. Extensive experiments regarding known and unknown model fitting on synthetic and challenging real datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our method against the state-of-the-art. We also apply our method to multi-class multi-model fitting and loop closure detection, and achieve promising results both in accuracy and efficiency. Code is released at: https://github.com/StaRainJ/DSP.
Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong abilities in natural language processing tasks have emerged and have been applied in various kinds of areas such as science, finance and software engineering. However, the capability of LLMs to advance the field of chemistry remains unclear. In this paper, rather than pursuing state-of-the-art performance, we aim to evaluate capabilities of LLMs in a wide range of tasks across the chemistry domain. We identify three key chemistry-related capabilities including understanding, reasoning and explaining to explore in LLMs and establish a benchmark containing eight chemistry tasks. Our analysis draws on widely recognized datasets facilitating a broad exploration of the capacities of LLMs within the context of practical chemistry. Five LLMs (GPT-4,GPT-3.5, Davinci-003, Llama and Galactica) are evaluated for each chemistry task in zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning settings with carefully selected demonstration examples and specially crafted prompts. Our investigation found that GPT-4 outperformed other models and LLMs exhibit different competitive levels in eight chemistry tasks. In addition to the key findings from the comprehensive benchmark analysis, our work provides insights into the limitation of current LLMs and the impact of in-context learning settings on LLMs’ performance across various chemistry tasks. The code and datasets used in this study are available at https://github.com/ChemFoundationModels/ChemLLMBench.
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on training reward-maximizing agents subject to pre-defined safety constraints. Yet, learning versatile safe policies that can adapt to varying safety constraint requirements during deployment without retraining remains a largely unexplored and challenging area. In this work, we formulate the versatile safe RL problem and consider two primary requirements: training efficiency and zero-shot adaptation capability. To address them, we introduce the Conditioned Constrained Policy Optimization (CCPO) framework, consisting of two key modules: (1) Versatile Value Estimation (VVE) for approximating value functions under unseen threshold conditions, and (2) Conditioned Variational Inference (CVI) for encoding arbitrary constraint thresholds during policy optimization. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CCPO outperforms the baselines in terms of safety and task performance while preserving zero-shot adaptation capabilities to different constraint thresholds data-efficiently. This makes our approach suitable for real-world dynamic applications.
In various engineering and applied science applications, repetitive numerical simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs) for varying input parameters are often required (e.g., aircraft shape optimization over many design parameters) and solvers are required to perform rapid execution. In this study, we suggest a path that potentially opens up a possibility for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), emerging deep-learning-based solvers, to be considered as one such solver. Although PINNs have pioneered a proper integration of deep-learning and scientific computing, they require repetitive time-consuming training of neural networks, which is not suitable for many-query scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight low-rank PINNs containing only hundreds of model parameters and an associated hypernetwork-based meta-learning algorithm, which allows efficient approximation of solutions of PDEs for varying ranges of PDE input parameters. Moreover, we show that the proposed method is effective in overcoming a challenging issue, known as "failure modes" of PINNs.
tl;dr: DataPerf is an open-source, extensible benchmark suite for data-centric AI
Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and fragility in real-world applications, and research is hindered by saturation across existing dataset benchmarks. In response, we present DataPerf, a community-led benchmark suite for evaluating ML datasets and data-centric algorithms. We aim to foster innovation in data-centric AI through competition, comparability, and reproducibility. We enable the ML community to iterate on datasets, instead of just architectures, and we provide an open, online platform with multiple rounds of challenges to support this iterative development. The first iteration of DataPerf contains five benchmarks covering a wide spectrum of data-centric techniques, tasks, and modalities in vision, speech, acquisition, debugging, and diffusion prompting, and we support hosting new contributed benchmarks from the community. The benchmarks, online evaluation platform, and baseline implementations are open source, and the MLCommons Association will maintain DataPerf to ensure long-term benefits to academia and industry.
tl;dr: Continuous attractor network dynamics and excitation-inhibition balanced dynamics can coexist in one circuit with synergistic computation benefits.
Attractor networks require neuronal connections to be highly structured in order to maintain attractor states that represent information, while excitation and inhibition balanced networks (E-INNs) require neuronal connections to be random and sparse to generate irregular neuronal firings. Despite being regarded as canonical models of neural circuits, both types of networks are usually studied in isolation, and it remains unclear how they coexist in the brain, given their very different structural demands. In this study, we investigate the compatibility of continuous attractor neural networks (CANNs) and E-INNs. In line with recent experimental data, we find that a neural circuit can exhibit both the traits of CANNs and E-INNs if the neuronal synapses consist of two sets: one set is strong and fast for irregular firing, and the other set is weak and slow for attractor dynamics. Our results from simulations and theoretical analysis reveal that the network also exhibits enhanced performance compared to the case of using only one set of synapses, with accelerated convergence of attractor states and retained E-I balanced condition for localized input. We also apply the network model to solve a real-world tracking problem and demonstrate that it can track fast-moving objects well. We hope that this study provides insight into how structured neural computations are realized by irregular firings of neurons.
293. Lung250M-4B: A Combined 3D Dataset for CT- and Point Cloud-Based Intra-Patient Lung Registration
A popular benchmark for intra-patient lung registration is provided by the DIR-LAB COPDgene dataset consisting of large-motion in- and expiratory breath-hold CT pairs. This dataset alone, however, does not provide enough samples to properly train state-of-the-art deep learning methods. Other public datasets often also provide only small sample sizes or include primarily small motions between scans that do not translate well to larger deformations. For point-based geometric registration, the PVT1010 dataset provides a large number of vessel point clouds without any correspondences and a labeled test set corresponding to the COPDgene cases. However, the absence of correspondences for supervision complicates training, and a fair comparison with image-based algorithms is infeasible, since CT scans for the training data are not publicly available.
We here provide a combined benchmark for image- and point-based registration approaches. We curated a total of 248 public multi-centric in- and expiratory lung CT scans from 124 patients, which show large motion between scans, processed them to ensure sufficient homogeneity between the data and generated vessel point clouds that are well distributed even deeper inside the lungs. For supervised training, we provide vein and artery segmentations of the vessels and multiple thousand image-derived keypoint correspondences for each pair. For validation, we provide multiple scan pairs with manual landmark annotations. Finally, as first baselines on our new benchmark, we evaluate several image and point cloud registration methods on the dataset.
tl;dr: We propose an unsupervised learning framework to find human labeling by searching for consistent labelings between different representation spaces.
We present HUME, a simple model-agnostic framework for inferring human labeling of a given dataset without any external supervision. The key insight behind our approach is that classes defined by many human labelings are linearly separable regardless of the representation space used to represent a dataset. HUME utilizes this insight to guide the search over all possible labelings of a dataset to discover an underlying human labeling. We show that the proposed optimization objective is strikingly well-correlated with the ground truth labeling of the dataset. In effect, we only train linear classifiers on top of pretrained representations that remain fixed during training, making our framework compatible with any large pretrained and self-supervised model. Despite its simplicity, HUME outperforms a supervised linear classifier on top of self-supervised representations on the STL-10 dataset by a large margin and achieves comparable performance on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Compared to the existing unsupervised baselines, HUME achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark image classification datasets including the large-scale ImageNet-1000 dataset. Altogether, our work provides a fundamentally new view to tackle unsupervised learning by searching for consistent labelings between different representation spaces.
295. Balancing memorization and generalization in RNNs for high performance brain-machine Interfaces
tl;dr: Using an intracortical brain-machine interface, we show how RNNs outperform other neural networks for closed-loop neural decoding, and can act both like a classifier and a continuous decoder for decoding movement.
Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can restore motor function to people with paralysis but are currently limited by the accuracy of real-time decoding algorithms. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) using modern training techniques have shown promise in accurately predicting movements from neural signals but have yet to be rigorously evaluated against other decoding algorithms in a closed-loop setting. Here we compared RNNs to other neural network architectures in real-time, continuous decoding of finger movements using intracortical signals from nonhuman primates. Across one and two finger online tasks, LSTMs (a type of RNN) outperformed convolutional and transformer-based neural networks, averaging 18% higher throughput than the convolution network. On simplified tasks with a reduced movement set, RNN decoders were allowed to memorize movement patterns and matched able-bodied control. Performance gradually dropped as the number of distinct movements increased but did not go below fully continuous decoder performance. Finally, in a two-finger task where one degree-of-freedom had poor input signals, we recovered functional control using RNNs trained to act both like a movement classifier and continuous decoder. Our results suggest that RNNs can enable functional real-time BMI control by learning and generating accurate movement patterns.
tl;dr: This work draws inspiration from the notion of adversarial robustness and introduces a novel evaluation metric, termed OOD-resistant Adversarial Robustness (OAR).
This work studies the evaluation of explaining graph neural networks (GNNs), which is crucial to the credibility of post-hoc explainability in practical usage. Conventional evaluation metrics, and even explanation methods -- which mainly follow the paradigm of feeding the explanatory subgraph and measuring output difference -- always suffer from the notorious out-of-distribution (OOD) issue. In this work, we endeavor to confront the issue by introducing a novel evaluation metric, termed **O**OD-resistant **A**dversarial **R**obustness (OAR). Specifically, we draw inspiration from the notion of adversarial robustness and evaluate post-hoc explanation subgraphs by calculating their robustness under attack. On top of that, an elaborate OOD reweighting block is inserted into the pipeline to confine the evaluation process to the original data distribution. For applications involving large datasets, we further devise a **Sim**plified version of **OAR** (SimOAR), which achieves a significant improvement in computational efficiency at the cost of a small amount of performance. Extensive empirical studies validate the effectiveness of our OAR and SimOAR.
tl;dr: Tradeoffs between reward and regret for learning in 2-player games: deviating to higher regret is often better for reward
We consider a number of questions related to tradeoffs between reward and regret in repeated gameplay between two agents. To facilitate this, we introduce a notion of generalized equilibrium which allows for asymmetric regret constraints, and yields polytopes of feasible values for each agent and pair of regret constraints, where we show that any such equilibrium is reachable by a pair of algorithms which maintain their regret guarantees against arbitrary opponents. As a central example, we highlight the case one agent is no-swap and the other's regret is unconstrained. We show that this captures an extension of Stackelberg equilibria with a matching optimal value, and that there exists a wide class of games where a player can significantly increase their utility by deviating from a no-swap-regret algorithm against a no-swap learner (in fact, almost any game without pure Nash equilibria is of this form). Additionally, we make use of generalized equilibria to consider tradeoffs in terms of the opponent's algorithm choice. We give a tight characterization for the maximal reward obtainable against some no-regret learner, yet we also show a class of games in which this is bounded away from the value obtainable against the class of common "mean-based" no-regret algorithms. Finally, we consider the question of learning reward-optimal strategies via repeated play with a no-regret agent when the game is initially unknown. Again we show tradeoffs depending on the opponent's learning algorithm: the Stackelberg strategy is learnable in exponential time with any no-regret agent (and in polynomial time with any no-adaptive-regret agent) for any game where it is learnable via queries, and there are games where it is learnable in polynomial time against any no-swap-regret agent but requires exponential time against a mean-based no-regret agent.
tl;dr: A novel deep autoregressive model for phylogenetic inference
Designing flexible probabilistic models over tree topologies is important for developing efficient phylogenetic inference methods. To do that, previous works often leverage the similarity of tree topologies via hand-engineered heuristic features which would require domain expertise and may suffer from limited approximation capability. In this paper, we propose a deep autoregressive model for phylogenetic inference based on graph neural networks (GNNs), called ARTree. By decomposing a tree topology into a sequence of leaf node addition operations and modeling the involved conditional distributions based on learnable topological features via GNNs, ARTree can provide a rich family of distributions over tree topologies that have simple sampling algorithms, without using heuristic features. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method on a benchmark of challenging real data tree topology density estimation and variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference problems.
Despite the rapid advance of 3D-aware image synthesis, existing studies usually adopt a mixture of techniques and tricks, leaving it unclear how each part contributes to the final performance in terms of generality. Following the most popular and effective paradigm in this field, which incorporates a neural radiance field (NeRF) into the generator of a generative adversarial network (GAN), we build
a well-structured codebase through modularizing the generation process. Such a design allows researchers to develop and replace each module independently, and hence offers an opportunity to fairly compare various approaches and recognize their contributions from the module perspective. The reproduction of a range of cutting-edge algorithms demonstrates the availability of our modularized codebase. We also perform a variety of in-depth analyses, such as the comparison across different types of point feature, the necessity of the tailing upsampler in the generator, the reliance on the camera pose prior, etc., which deepen our understanding of existing methods and point out some further directions of the research work. Code and models will be made publicly available to facilitate the development and evaluation of this field.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are crucial for machine learning applications with graph-structured data, but their success depends on sufficient labeled data. We present a novel active learning (AL) method for GNNs, extending the Expected Model Change Maximization (EMCM) principle to improve prediction performance on unlabeled data. By presenting a Bayesian interpretation for the node embeddings generated by GNNs under the semi-supervised setting, we efficiently compute the closed-form EMCM acquisition function as the selection criterion for AL without re-training. Our method establishes a direct connection with expected prediction error minimization, offering theoretical guarantees for AL performance. Experiments demonstrate our method's effectiveness compared to existing approaches, in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Understanding comprehensive assembly knowledge from videos is critical for futuristic ultra-intelligent industry. To enable technological breakthrough, we present HA-ViD – the first human assembly video dataset that features representative industrial assembly scenarios, natural procedural knowledge acquisition process, and consistent human-robot shared annotations. Specifically, HA-ViD captures diverse collaboration patterns of real-world assembly, natural human behaviors and learning progression during assembly, and granulate action annotations to subject, action verb, manipulated object, target object, and tool. We provide 3222 multi-view and multi-modality videos), 1.5M frames, 96K temporal labels and 2M spatial labels. We benchmark four foundational video understanding tasks: action recognition, action segmentation, object detection and multi-object tracking. Importantly, we analyze their performance and the further reasoning steps for comprehending knowledge in assembly progress, process efficiency, task collaboration, skill parameters and human intention. Details of HA-ViD is available at: https://iai-hrc.github.io/ha-vid.
tl;dr: We introduce a toolkit for reproducible research in Multi-Objective RL: (i) a set of environments under a standardized API; (ii) a set of algorithms implementations compatible with our API; and (iii) a benchmark of the implemented algorithms.
Multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithms (MORL) extend standard reinforcement learning (RL) to scenarios where agents must optimize multiple---potentially conflicting---objectives, each represented by a distinct reward function. To facilitate and accelerate research and benchmarking in multi-objective RL problems, we introduce a comprehensive collection of software libraries that includes:
(i) MO-Gymnasium, an easy-to-use and flexible API enabling the rapid construction of novel MORL environments. It also includes more than 20 environments under this API. This allows researchers to effortlessly evaluate any algorithms on any existing domains; (ii) MORL-Baselines, a collection of reliable and efficient implementations of state-of-the-art MORL algorithms, designed to provide a solid foundation for advancing research. Notably, all algorithms are inherently compatible with MO-Gymnasium; and
(iii) a thorough and robust set of benchmark results and comparisons of MORL-Baselines algorithms, tested across various challenging MO-Gymnasium environments. These benchmarks were constructed to serve as guidelines for the research community, underscoring the properties, advantages, and limitations of each particular state-of-the-art method.
tl;dr: We propose a privacy analysis method that significantly generalizes the applicability of the Sparse Vector Technique (SVT)
We propose the \emph{Target Charging Technique} (TCT), a unified privacy analysis framework for interactive settings where a sensitive dataset is accessed multiple times using differentially private algorithms. Unlike traditional composition, where privacy guarantees deteriorate quickly with the number of accesses, TCT allows computations that don't hit a specified \emph{target}, often the vast majority, to be essentially free (while incurring instead a small overhead on those that do hit their targets). TCT generalizes tools such as the sparse vector technique and top-k selection from private candidates and extends their remarkable privacy enhancement benefits from noisy Lipschitz functions to general private algorithms.
Generative models capable of precisely capturing nuanced clinical features in medical images hold great promise for facilitating clinical data sharing, enhancing rare disease datasets, and efficiently synthesizing (annotated) medical images at scale. Despite their potential, assessing the quality of synthetic medical images remains a challenge. While modern generative models can synthesize visually-realistic medical images, the clinical plausibility of these images may be called into question. Domain-agnostic scores, such as FID score, precision, and recall, cannot incorporate clinical knowledge and are, therefore, not suitable for assessing clinical sensibility. Additionally, there are numerous unpredictable ways in which generative models may fail to synthesize clinically plausible images, making it challenging to anticipate potential failures and design automated scores for their detection. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a pathologist-in-the-loop framework for generating clinically-plausible synthetic medical images. Our framework comprises three steps: (1) pretraining a conditional diffusion model to generate medical images conditioned on a clinical concept, (2) expert pathologist evaluation of the generated images to assess whether they satisfy clinical desiderata, and (3) training a reward model that predicts human feedback on new samples, which we use to incorporate expert knowledge into the finetuning objective of the diffusion model. Our results show that human feedback significantly improves the quality of synthetic images in terms of fidelity, diversity, utility in downstream applications, and plausibility as evaluated by experts. We also demonstrate that human feedback can teach the model new clinical concepts not annotated in the original training data. Our results demonstrate the value of incorporating human feedback in clinical applications where generative models may struggle to capture extensive domain knowledge from raw data alone.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is indispensable for learning models in the wild, where testing distribution typically unknown and different from the training. Recent methods derived from causality have shown great potential in achieving OOD generalization.
However, existing methods mainly focus on the invariance property of causes, while largely overlooking the property of sufficiency and necessity conditions. Namely, a necessary but insufficient cause (feature) is invariant to distribution shift, yet it may not have required accuracy. By contrast, a sufficient yet unnecessary cause (feature) tends to fit specific data well but may have a risk of adapting to a new domain.
To capture the information of sufficient and necessary causes, we employ a classical concept, the probability of sufficiency and necessary causes (PNS), which indicates the probability of whether one is the necessary and sufficient cause.
To associate PNS with OOD generalization, we propose PNS risk and formulate an algorithm to learn representation with a high PNS value. We theoretically analyze and prove the generalizability of the PNS risk. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The detailed implementation can be found at the GitHub repository: https://github.com/ymy4323460/CaSN.
tl;dr: We provide computational guarantees for computing doubly regularized entropic Wasserstein barycenters.
We study the computation of doubly regularized Wasserstein barycenters, a recently introduced family of entropic barycenters governed by inner and outer regularization strengths. Previous research has demonstrated that various regularization parameter choices unify several notions of entropy-penalized barycenters while also revealing new ones, including a special case of debiased barycenters. In this paper, we propose and analyze an algorithm for computing doubly regularized Wasserstein barycenters. Our procedure builds on damped Sinkhorn iterations followed by exact maximization/minimization steps and guarantees convergence for any choice of regularization parameters. An inexact variant of our algorithm, implementable using approximate Monte Carlo sampling, offers the first non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for approximating Wasserstein barycenters between discrete point clouds in the free-support/grid-free setting.
Human perception of the empirical world involves recognizing the diverse appearances, or 'modalities', of underlying objects. Despite the longstanding consideration of this perspective in philosophy and cognitive science, the study of multimodality remains relatively under-explored within the field of machine learning. Nevertheless, current studies of multimodal machine learning are limited to empirical practices, lacking theoretical foundations beyond heuristic arguments.
An intriguing finding from the practice of multimodal learning is that a model trained on multiple modalities can outperform a finely-tuned unimodal model, even on unimodal tasks. This paper provides a theoretical framework that explains this phenomenon, by studying generalization properties of multimodal learning algorithms. We demonstrate that multimodal learning allows for a superior generalization bound compared to unimodal learning, up to a factor of $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ represents the sample size. Such advantage occurs when both connection and heterogeneity exist between the modalities.
tl;dr: We propose a novel quantized image SR network, called QuantSR, which achieves accurate and efficient SR processing under low-bit quantization.
Low-bit quantization in image super-resolution (SR) has attracted copious attention in recent research due to its ability to reduce parameters and operations significantly. However, many quantized SR models suffer from accuracy degradation compared to their full-precision counterparts, especially at ultra-low bit widths (2-4 bits), limiting their practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel quantized image SR network, called QuantSR, which achieves accurate and efficient SR processing under low-bit quantization. To overcome the representation homogeneity caused by quantization in the network, we introduce the Redistribution-driven Learnable Quantizer (RLQ). This is accomplished through an inference-agnostic efficient redistribution design, which adds additional information in both forward and backward passes to improve the representation ability of quantized networks. Furthermore, to achieve flexible inference and break the upper limit of accuracy, we propose the Depth-dynamic Quantized Architecture (DQA). Our DQA allows for the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy during inference through weight sharing. Our comprehensive experiments show that QuantSR outperforms existing state-of-the-art quantized SR networks in terms of accuracy while also providing more competitive computational efficiency. In addition, we demonstrate the scheme's satisfactory architecture generality by providing QuantSR-C and QuantSR-T for both convolution and Transformer versions, respectively. Our code and models are released at https://github.com/htqin/QuantSR .
tl;dr: We propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) learning scheme that is secure against malicious servers and robust to malicious clients.
Collaborative machine learning (ML) is widely used to enable institutions to learn better models from distributed data. While collaborative approaches to learning intuitively protect user data, they remain vulnerable to either the server, the clients, or both, deviating from the protocol. Indeed, because the protocol is asymmetric, a malicious server can abuse its power to reconstruct client data points. Conversely, malicious clients can corrupt learning with malicious updates. Thus, both clients and servers require a guarantee when the other cannot be trusted to fully cooperate. In this work, we propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) learning scheme that is secure against malicious servers and robust to malicious clients. Our core contribution is a generic framework that transforms any (compatible) algorithm for robust aggregation of model updates to the setting where servers and clients can act maliciously. Finally, we demonstrate the computational efficiency of our approach even with 1-million parameter models trained by 100s of peers on standard datasets.
tl;dr: We provide a series of state-of-the-art implicit bias rates for generic optimization algorithms.
First-order optimization methods tend to inherently favor certain solutions over others when minimizing a given training objective with multiple local optima. This phenomenon, known as \emph{implicit bias}, plays a critical role in understanding the generalization capabilities of optimization algorithms. Recent research has revealed that gradient-descent-based methods exhibit an implicit bias for the $\ell_2$-maximal margin classifier in the context of separable binary classification. In contrast, generic optimization methods, such as mirror descent and steepest descent, have been shown to converge to maximal margin classifiers defined by alternative geometries. However, while gradient-descent-based algorithms demonstrate fast implicit bias rates, the implicit bias rates of generic optimization methods have been relatively slow. To address this limitation, in this paper, we present a series of state-of-the-art implicit bias rates for mirror descent and steepest descent algorithms. Our primary technique involves transforming a generic optimization algorithm into an online learning dynamic that solves a regularized bilinear game, providing a unified framework for analyzing the implicit bias of various optimization methods. The accelerated rates are derived leveraging the regret bounds of online learning algorithms within this game framework.
tl;dr: Retrieval-augmented self-supervised models display fast and data-efficient adaptation to a range of scene understanding tasks.
In-context learning––the ability to configure a model's behavior with different prompts––has revolutionized the field of natural language processing, alleviating the need for task-specific models and paving the way for generalist models capable of assisting with any query. Computer vision, in contrast, has largely stayed in the former regime: specialized decoders and finetuning protocols are generally required to perform dense tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation. In this work we explore a simple mechanism for in-context learning of such scene understanding tasks: nearest neighbor retrieval from a prompt of annotated features. We propose a new pretraining protocol––leveraging attention within and across images––which yields representations particularly useful in this regime. The resulting Hummingbird model, suitably prompted, performs various scene understanding tasks without modification while approaching the performance of specialists that have been finetuned for each task. Moreover, Hummingbird can be configured to perform new tasks much more efficiently than finetuned models, raising the possibility of scene understanding in the interactive assistant regime.
tl;dr: A two-stage approach that combines trainable motion energy sensing with a recurrent self-attention network for motion integration is proposed to bridge the gap between human and computer vision models of visual motion perception.
Visual motion processing is essential for humans to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Despite extensive research in cognitive neuroscience, image-computable models that can extract informative motion flow from natural scenes in a manner consistent with human visual processing have yet to be established. Meanwhile, recent advancements in computer vision (CV), propelled by deep learning, have led to significant progress in optical flow estimation, a task closely related to motion perception. Here we propose an image-computable model of human motion perception by bridging the gap between biological and CV models. Specifically, we introduce a novel two-stages approach that combines trainable motion energy sensing with a recurrent self-attention network for adaptive motion integration and segregation. This model architecture aims to capture the computations in V1-MT, the core structure for motion perception in the biological visual system, while providing the ability to derive informative motion flow for a wide range of stimuli, including complex natural scenes. In silico neurophysiology reveals that our model's unit responses are similar to mammalian neural recordings regarding motion pooling and speed tuning. The proposed model can also replicate human responses to a range of stimuli examined in past psychophysical studies. The experimental results on the Sintel benchmark demonstrate that our model predicts human responses better than the ground truth, whereas the state-of-the-art CV models show the opposite. Our study provides a computational architecture consistent with human visual motion processing, although the physiological correspondence may not be exact.
We introduce VisoGender, a novel dataset for benchmarking gender bias in vision-language models. We focus on occupation-related biases within a hegemonic system of binary gender, inspired by Winograd and Winogender schemas, where each image is associated with a caption containing a pronoun relationship of subjects and objects in the scene. VisoGender is balanced by gender representation in professional roles, supporting bias evaluation in two ways: i) resolution bias, where we evaluate the difference between pronoun resolution accuracies for image subjects with gender presentations perceived as masculine versus feminine by human annotators and ii) retrieval bias, where we compare ratios of professionals perceived to have masculine and feminine gender presentations retrieved for a gender-neutral search query. We benchmark several state-of-the-art vision-language models and find that they demonstrate bias in resolving binary gender in complex scenes. While the direction and magnitude of gender bias depends on the task and the model being evaluated, captioning models are generally less biased than Vision-Language Encoders.
tl;dr: In this paper, we introduce the concept of Live Graph Lab for temporal graphs, which enables open, dynamic and real transaction graphs from blockchains
Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the properties of large-scale temporal graphs. Despite the ubiquity of these graphs in real-world scenarios, it's usually impractical for us to obtain the whole real-time graphs due to privacy concerns and technical limitations. In this paper, we introduce the concept of {\it Live Graph Lab} for temporal graphs, which enables open, dynamic and real transaction graphs from blockchains. Among them, Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become one of the most prominent parts of blockchain over the past several years. With more than \$40 billion market capitalization, this decentralized ecosystem produces massive, anonymous and real transaction activities, which naturally forms a complicated transaction network. However, there is limited understanding about the characteristics of this emerging NFT ecosystem from a temporal graph analysis perspective. To mitigate this gap, we instantiate a live graph with NFT transaction network and investigate its dynamics to provide new observations and insights. Specifically, through downloading and parsing the NFT transaction activities, we obtain a temporal graph with more than 4.5 million nodes and 124 million edges. Then, a series of measurements are presented to understand the properties of the NFT ecosystem. Through comparisons with social, citation, and web networks, our analyses give intriguing findings and point out potential directions for future exploration. Finally, we also study machine learning models in this live graph to enrich the current datasets and provide new opportunities for the graph community. The source codes and dataset are available at https://livegraphlab.github.io.
tl;dr: We summarized the main findings of 24 cognitive science papers around human intuitions on causal and moral judgments, and collect a dataset to evaluate large language models.
Human commonsense understanding of the physical and social world is organized around intuitive theories. These theories support making causal and moral judgments. When something bad happens, we naturally ask: who did what, and why? A rich literature in cognitive science has studied people's causal and moral intuitions. This work has revealed a number of factors that systematically influence people's judgments, such as the violation of norms and whether the harm is avoidable or inevitable. We collected a dataset of stories from 24 cognitive science papers and developed a system to annotate each story with the factors they investigated. Using this dataset, we test whether large language models (LLMs) make causal and moral judgments about text-based scenarios that align with those of human participants. On the aggregate level, alignment has improved with more recent LLMs. However, using statistical analyses, we find that LLMs weigh the different factors quite differently from human participants. These results show how curated, challenge datasets combined with insights from cognitive science can help us go beyond comparisons based merely on aggregate metrics: we uncover LLMs implicit tendencies and show to what extent these align with human intuitions.
Ensembling has a long history in statistical data analysis, with many impactful applications.
However, in many modern machine learning settings, the benefits of ensembling are less ubiquitous and less obvious.
We study, both theoretically and empirically, the fundamental question of when ensembling yields significant performance improvements in classification tasks.
Theoretically, we prove new results relating the \emph{ensemble improvement rate} (a measure of how much ensembling decreases the error rate versus a single model, on a relative scale) to the \emph{disagreement-error ratio}.
We show that ensembling improves performance significantly whenever the disagreement rate is large relative to the average error rate; and that, conversely, one classifier is often enough whenever the disagreement rate is low relative to the average error rate.
On the way to proving these results, we derive, under a mild condition called \emph{competence}, improved upper and lower bounds on the average test error rate of the majority vote classifier.
To complement this theory, we study ensembling empirically in a variety of settings, verifying the predictions made by our theory, and identifying practical scenarios where ensembling does and does not result in large performance improvements.
Perhaps most notably, we demonstrate a distinct difference in behavior between interpolating models (popular in current practice) and non-interpolating models (such as tree-based methods, where ensembling is popular), demonstrating that ensembling helps considerably more in the latter case than in the former.
tl;dr: We study projection-free online optimization on Riemannian manifolds and get several sublinear regret guarantees.
The projection operation is a critical component in a wide range of optimization algorithms, such as online gradient descent (OGD),
for enforcing constraints and achieving optimal regret bounds. However, it suffers from computational complexity limitations in high-dimensional settings or
when dealing with ill-conditioned constraint sets. Projection-free algorithms address this issue by replacing the projection oracle with more efficient optimization
subroutines. But to date, these methods have been developed primarily in the Euclidean setting, and while there has been growing interest in optimization on
Riemannian manifolds, there has been essentially no work in trying to utilize projection-free tools here. An apparent issue is that non-trivial affine functions
are generally non-convex in such domains. In this paper, we present methods for obtaining sub-linear regret guarantees in online geodesically convex optimization
on curved spaces for two scenarios: when we have access to (a) a separation oracle or (b) a linear optimization oracle. For geodesically convex losses, and
when a separation oracle is available, our algorithms achieve $O(T^{\frac{1}{2}})$, $O(T^{\frac{3}{4}})$ and $O(T^{\frac{1}{2}})$ adaptive regret guarantees in the full
information setting, the bandit setting with one-point feedback and the bandit setting with two-point feedback, respectively. When a linear optimization oracle is
available, we obtain regret rates of $O(T^{\frac{3}{4}})$ for geodesically convex losses
and $O(T^{\frac{2}{3}}\log T)$ for strongly geodesically convex losses.
tl;dr: We improve sampling speed of diffusion models by 2-4x using parallel computation
Diffusion models are powerful generative models but suffer from slow sampling, often taking 1000 sequential denoising steps for one sample. As a result, considerable efforts have been directed toward reducing the number of denoising steps, but these methods hurt sample quality. Instead of reducing the number of denoising steps (trading quality for speed), in this paper we explore an orthogonal approach: can we run the denoising steps in parallel (trading compute for speed)? In spite of the sequential nature of the denoising steps, we show that surprisingly it is possible to parallelize sampling via Picard iterations, by guessing the solution of future denoising steps and iteratively refining until convergence. With this insight, we present ParaDiGMS, a novel method to accelerate the sampling of pretrained diffusion models by denoising multiple steps in parallel. ParaDiGMS is the first diffusion sampling method that enables trading compute for speed and is even compatible with existing fast sampling techniques such as DDIM and DPMSolver. Using ParaDiGMS, we improve sampling speed by 2-4x across a range of robotics and image generation models, giving state-of-the-art sampling speeds of 0.2s on 100-step DiffusionPolicy and 14.6s on 1000-step StableDiffusion-v2 with no measurable degradation of task reward, FID score, or CLIP score.
tl;dr: We introduce a library for creating large-scale datasets with group-level structure, and use this to simulate federated learning at foundation model scales.
We introduce Dataset Grouper, a library to create large-scale group-structured (e.g., federated) datasets, enabling federated learning simulation at the scale of foundation models. This library facilitates the creation of group-structured versions of existing datasets based on user-specified partitions, and directly leads to a variety of useful heterogeneous datasets that can be plugged into existing software frameworks. Dataset Grouper offers three key advantages. First, it scales to settings where even a single group's dataset is too large to fit in memory. Second, it provides flexibility, both in choosing the base (non-partitioned) dataset and in defining partitions. Finally, it is framework-agnostic. We empirically demonstrate that Dataset Grouper enables large-scale federated language modeling simulations on datasets that are orders of magnitude larger than in previous work, allowing for federated training of language models with hundreds of millions, and even billions, of parameters. Our experimental results show that algorithms like FedAvg operate more as meta-learning methods than as empirical risk minimization methods at this scale, suggesting their utility in downstream personalization and task-specific adaptation. Dataset Grouper is available at https://github.com/google-research/dataset_grouper.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient representation for permutation matrices that is well-suited for optimization in learning frameworks.
Permutation matrices play a key role in matching and assignment problems across the fields, especially in computer vision and robotics. However, memory for explicitly representing permutation matrices grows quadratically with the size of the problem, prohibiting large problem instances. In this work, we propose to tackle the curse of dimensionality of large permutation matrices by approximating them using low-rank matrix factorization, followed by a nonlinearity. To this end, we rely on the Kissing number theory to infer the minimal rank required for representing a permutation matrix of a given size, which is significantly smaller than the problem size. This leads to a drastic reduction in computation and memory costs, e.g., up to $3$ orders of magnitude less memory for a problem of size $n=20000$, represented using $8.4\times10^5$ elements in two small matrices instead of using a single huge matrix with $4\times 10^8$ elements. The proposed representation allows for accurate representations of large permutation matrices, which in turn enables handling large problems that would have been infeasible otherwise. We demonstrate the applicability and merits of the proposed approach through a series of experiments on a range of problems that involve predicting permutation matrices, from linear and quadratic assignment to shape matching problems.
tl;dr: We prove that a novel type of equivariance to eigenvector symmetries is useful in several applications, and develop provably expressive networks with this equivariance.
Recent work has shown the utility of developing machine learning models that respect the structure and symmetries of eigenvectors. These works promote sign invariance, since for any eigenvector v the negation -v is also an eigenvector. However, we show that sign invariance is theoretically limited for tasks such as building orthogonally equivariant models and learning node positional encodings for link prediction in graphs. In this work, we demonstrate the benefits of sign equivariance for these tasks. To obtain these benefits, we develop novel sign equivariant neural network architectures. Our models are based on a new analytic characterization of sign equivariant polynomials and thus inherit provable expressiveness properties. Controlled synthetic experiments show that our networks can achieve the theoretically predicted benefits of sign equivariant models.
tl;dr: We provide an information-theory-guided principle and its two instantiations for robust link prediction under bilateral edge noise.
Although link prediction on graphs has achieved great success with the development of graph neural networks (GNNs), the potential robustness under the edge noise is still less investigated. To close this gap, we first conduct an empirical study to disclose that the edge noise bilaterally perturbs both input topology and target label, yielding severe performance degradation and representation collapse. To address this dilemma, we propose an information-theory-guided principle, Robust Graph Information Bottleneck (RGIB), to extract reliable supervision signals and avoid representation collapse. Different from the basic information bottleneck, RGIB further decouples and balances the mutual dependence among graph topology, target labels, and representation, building new learning objectives for robust representation against the bilateral noise. Two instantiations, RGIB-SSL and RGIB-REP, are explored to leverage the merits of different methodologies, i.e., self-supervised learning and data reparameterization, for implicit and explicit data denoising, respectively. Extensive experiments on six datasets and three GNNs with diverse noisy scenarios verify the effectiveness of our RGIB instantiations. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/RGIB.
tl;dr: We provide a new analysis of Adam and prove its convergence without assuming boundedness of gradients, under a generalized smoothness condition. We also propose a variance-reduced version of Adam with convergence guarantees.
In this paper, we provide a rigorous proof of convergence of the Adaptive Moment Estimate (Adam) algorithm for a wide class of optimization objectives. Despite the popularity and efficiency of the Adam algorithm in training deep neural networks, its theoretical properties are not yet fully understood, and existing convergence proofs require unrealistically strong assumptions, such as globally bounded gradients, to show the convergence to stationary points. In this paper, we show that Adam provably converges to $\epsilon$-stationary points with $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ gradient complexity under far more realistic conditions. The key to our analysis is a new proof of boundedness of gradients along the optimization trajectory of Adam, under a generalized smoothness assumption according to which the local smoothness (i.e., Hessian norm when it exists) is bounded by a sub-quadratic function of the gradient norm. Moreover, we propose a variance-reduced version of Adam with an accelerated gradient complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$.
tl;dr: We conduct the largest analysis of tabular data algorithms to date, and we release a suite of the hardest tabular datasets.
Tabular data is one of the most commonly used types of data in machine learning. Despite recent advances in neural nets (NNs) for tabular data, there is still an active discussion on whether or not NNs generally outperform gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) on tabular data, with several recent works arguing either that GBDTs consistently outperform NNs on tabular data, or vice versa. In this work, we take a step back and question the importance of this debate. To this end, we conduct the largest tabular data analysis to date, comparing 19 algorithms across 176 datasets, and we find that the 'NN vs. GBDT' debate is overemphasized: for a surprisingly high number of datasets, either the performance difference between GBDTs and NNs is negligible, or light hyperparameter tuning on a GBDT is more important than choosing between NNs and GBDTs. Next, we analyze dozens of metafeatures to determine what \emph{properties} of a dataset make NNs or GBDTs better-suited to perform well. For example, we find that GBDTs are much better than NNs at handling skewed or heavy-tailed feature distributions and other forms of dataset irregularities. Our insights act as a guide for practitioners to determine which techniques may work best on their dataset. Finally, with the goal of accelerating tabular data research, we release the TabZilla Benchmark Suite: a collection of the 36 'hardest' of the datasets we study. Our benchmark suite, codebase, and all raw results are available at https://github.com/naszilla/tabzilla.
Deep Gradient Leakage (DGL) is a highly effective attack that recovers private training images from gradient vectors. This attack casts significant privacy challenges on distributed learning from clients with sensitive data, where clients are required to share gradients. Defending against such attacks requires but lacks an understanding of when and how privacy leakage happens, mostly because of the black-box nature of deep networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Inversion Influence Function (I$^2$F) that establishes a closed-form connection between the recovered images and the private gradients by implicitly solving the DGL problem. Compared to directly solving DGL, I$^2$F is scalable for analyzing deep networks, requiring only oracle access to gradients and Jacobian-vector products. We empirically demonstrate that I$^2$F effectively approximated the DGL generally on different model architectures, datasets, attack implementations, and noise-based defenses. With this novel tool, we provide insights into effective gradient perturbation directions, the unfairness of privacy protection, and privacy-preferred model initialization. Our codes are provided in https://github.com/illidanlab/inversion-influence-function.
tl;dr: We propose Siamese Mased Autoencoders to learn visual correspondence from videos.
Establishing correspondence between images or scenes is a significant challenge in computer vision, especially given occlusions, viewpoint changes, and varying object appearances. In this paper, we present Siamese Masked Autoencoders (SiamMAE), a simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) for learning visual correspondence from videos. SiamMAE operates on pairs of randomly sampled video frames and asymmetrically masks them. These frames are processed independently by an encoder network, and a decoder composed of a sequence of cross-attention layers is tasked with predicting the missing patches in the future frame. By masking a large fraction (95%) of patches in the future frame while leaving the past frame unchanged, SiamMAE encourages the network to focus on object motion and learn object-centric representations. Despite its conceptual simplicity, features learned via SiamMAE outperform state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on video object segmentation, pose keypoint propagation, and semantic part propagation tasks. SiamMAE achieves competitive results without relying on data augmentation, handcrafted tracking-based pretext tasks, or other techniques to prevent representational collapse.
327. StableRep: Synthetic Images from Text-to-Image Models Make Strong Visual Representation Learners
tl;dr: We present that learning representations by synthetic data from text-to-image models can be very effective at large scale, even outperforming CLIP
We investigate the potential of learning visual representations using synthetic images generated by text-to-image models. This is a natural question in the light of the excellent performance of such models in generating high-quality images. We consider specifically the Stable Diffusion, one of the leading open source text-to-image models. We show that (1) when the generative model is properly configured, training self-supervised methods on synthetic images can match or beat the real image counterpart;
(2) by treating the multiple images generated from the same text prompt as positives for each other, we develop a multi-positive contrastive learning method, which we call StableRep.
With solely synthetic images, the representations learned by StableRep surpass the performance of representations learned by SimCLR and CLIP using the same set of text prompts and corresponding real images, on large scale datasets.
When we further add language supervision, \name~trained with 20M synthetic images (10M captions) achieves better accuracy than CLIP trained with 50M real images (50M captions).
Diffusion-based planning has shown promising results in long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks by training trajectory diffusion models and conditioning the sampled trajectories using auxiliary guidance functions. However, due to their nature as generative models, diffusion models are not guaranteed to generate feasible plans, resulting in failed execution and precluding planners from being useful in safety-critical applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach to refine unreliable plans generated by diffusion models by providing refining guidance to error-prone plans. To this end, we suggest a new metric named restoration gap for evaluating the quality of individual plans generated by the diffusion model. A restoration gap is estimated by a gap predictor which produces restoration gap guidance to refine a diffusion planner. We additionally present an attribution map regularizer to prevent adversarial refining guidance that could be generated from the sub-optimal gap predictor, which enables further refinement of infeasible plans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three different benchmarks in offline control settings that require long-horizon planning. We also illustrate that our approach presents explainability by presenting the attribution maps of the gap predictor and highlighting error-prone transitions, allowing for a deeper understanding of the generated plans.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) have been a promising framework in pursuing near-term quantum advantage in various fields, where many applications can be viewed as learning a quantum state that encodes useful data. As a quantum analog of probability distribution learning, quantum state learning is theoretically and practically essential in quantum machine learning. In this paper, we develop a no-go theorem for learning an unknown quantum state with QNNs even starting from a high-fidelity initial state. We prove that when the loss value is lower than a critical threshold, the probability of avoiding local minima vanishes exponentially with the qubit count, while only grows polynomially with the circuit depth. The curvature of local minima is concentrated to the quantum Fisher information times a loss-dependent constant, which characterizes the sensibility of the output state with respect to parameters in QNNs. These results hold for any circuit structures, initialization strategies, and work for both fixed ansatzes and adaptive methods. Extensive numerical simulations are performed to validate our theoretical results. Our findings place generic limits on good initial guesses and adaptive methods for improving the learnability and scalability of QNNs, and deepen the understanding of prior information's role in QNNs.
tl;dr: We propose a universal segmentation refinement framework based on the discrete diffusion models.
In this paper, we explore a principal way to enhance the quality of object masks produced by different segmentation models. We propose a model-agnostic solution called SegRefiner, which offers a novel perspective on this problem by interpreting segmentation refinement as a data generation process. As a result, the refinement process can be smoothly implemented through a series of denoising diffusion steps. Specifically, SegRefiner takes coarse masks as inputs and refines them using a discrete diffusion process. By predicting the label and corresponding states-transition probabilities for each pixel, SegRefiner progressively refines the noisy masks in a conditional denoising manner. To assess the effectiveness of SegRefiner, we conduct comprehensive experiments on various segmentation tasks, including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and dichotomous image segmentation. The results demonstrate the superiority of our SegRefiner from multiple aspects. Firstly, it consistently improves both the segmentation metrics and boundary metrics across different types of coarse masks. Secondly, it outperforms previous model-agnostic refinement methods by a significant margin. Lastly, it exhibits a strong capability to capture extremely fine details when refining high-resolution images. The source code and trained models are available at [SegRefiner.git](https://github.com/MengyuWang826/SegRefiner)
tl;dr: This work proposes VoxDet, a novel instance detector based on geometry-invariant voxel learning.
Detecting unseen instances based on multi-view templates is a challenging problem due to its open-world nature. Traditional methodologies, which primarily rely on $2 \mathrm{D}$ representations and matching techniques, are often inadequate in handling pose variations and occlusions. To solve this, we introduce VoxDet, a pioneer 3D geometry-aware framework that fully utilizes the strong 3D voxel representation and reliable voxel matching mechanism. VoxDet first ingeniously proposes template voxel aggregation (TVA) module, effectively transforming multi-view 2D images into 3D voxel features. By leveraging associated camera poses, these features are aggregated into a compact 3D template voxel. In novel instance detection, this voxel representation demonstrates heightened resilience to occlusion and pose variations. We also discover that a $3 \mathrm{D}$ reconstruction objective helps to pre-train the 2D-3D mapping in TVA. Second, to quickly align with the template voxel, VoxDet incorporates a Query Voxel Matching (QVM) module. The 2D queries are first converted into their voxel representation with the learned 2D-3D mapping. We find that since the 3D voxel representations encode the geometry, we can first estimate the relative rotation and then compare the aligned voxels, leading to improved accuracy and efficiency. In addition to method, we also introduce the first instance detection benchmark, RoboTools, where 20 unique instances are video-recorded with camera extrinsic. RoboTools also provides 24 challenging cluttered scenarios with more than $9 \mathrm{k}$ box annotations. Exhaustive experiments are conducted on the demanding LineMod-Occlusion, YCB-video, and RoboTools benchmarks, where VoxDet outperforms various $2 \mathrm{D}$ baselines remarkably with faster speed. To the best of our knowledge, VoxDet is the first to incorporate implicit 3D knowledge for 2D novel instance detection tasks.
Recognizing and organizing text in correct reading order plays a crucial role in historical document analysis and preservation. While existing methods have shown promising performance, they often struggle with challenges such as diverse layouts, low image quality, style variations, and distortions. This is primarily due to the lack of consideration for these issues in the current benchmarks, which hinders the development and evaluation of historical document analysis and recognition (HDAR) methods in complex real-world scenarios. To address this gap, this paper introduces a complex multi-style Chinese historical document analysis benchmark, named M5HisDoc. The M5 indicates five properties of style, ie., Multiple layouts, Multiple document types, Multiple calligraphy styles, Multiple backgrounds, and Multiple challenges. The M5HisDoc dataset consists of two subsets, M5HisDoc-R (Regular) and M5HisDoc-H (Hard). The M5HisDoc-R subset comprises 4,000 historical document images. To ensure high-quality annotations, we meticulously perform manual annotation and triple-checking. To replicate real-world conditions for historical document analysis applications, we incorporate image rotation, distortion, and resolution reduction into M5HisDoc-R subset to form a new challenging subset named M5HisDoc-H, which contains the same number of images as M5HisDoc-R. The dataset exhibits diverse styles, significant scale variations, dense texts, and an extensive character set. We conduct benchmarking experiments on five tasks: text line detection, text line recognition, character detection, character recognition, and reading order prediction. We also conduct cross-validation with other benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that the M5HisDoc dataset can offer new challenges and great opportunities for future research in this field, thereby providing deep insights into the solution for HDAR. The dataset is available at https://github.com/HCIILAB/M5HisDoc.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a novel evaluation protocol, Object Reprojection Error (ORE) and a large-scale diverse dataset EgoStatic to benchmark camera trajectories with only lightweight object tracklet annotations.
3D spatial understanding is highly valuable in the context of semantic modeling of environments, agents, and their relationships. Semantic modeling approaches employed on monocular video often ingest outputs from off-the-shelf SLAM/SfM pipelines, which are anecdotally observed to perform poorly or fail completely on some fraction of the videos of interest. These target videos may vary widely in complexity of scenes, activities, camera trajectory, etc. Unfortunately, such semantically-rich video data often comes with no ground-truth 3D information, and in practice it is prohibitively costly or impossible to obtain ground truth reconstructions or camera pose post-hoc.
This paper proposes a novel evaluation protocol, Object Reprojection Error (ORE) to benchmark camera trajectories; ORE computes reprojection error for static objects within the video and requires only lightweight object tracklet annotations. These annotations are easy to gather on new or existing video, enabling ORE to be calculated on essentially arbitrary datasets. We show that ORE maintains high rank correlation with standard metrics based on groundtruth. Leveraging ORE, we source videos and annotations from Ego4D-EgoTracks, resulting in EgoStatic, a large-scale diverse dataset for evaluating camera trajectories in-the-wild.
tl;dr: RoboDepth is a systematically designed robustness evaluation suite for monocular depth estimation under OoD corruptions.
Depth estimation from monocular images is pivotal for real-world visual perception systems. While current learning-based depth estimation models train and test on meticulously curated data, they often overlook out-of-distribution (OoD) situations. Yet, in practical settings -- especially safety-critical ones like autonomous driving -- common corruptions can arise. Addressing this oversight, we introduce a comprehensive robustness test suite, RoboDepth, encompassing 18 corruptions spanning three categories: i) weather and lighting conditions; ii) sensor failures and movement; and iii) data processing anomalies. We subsequently benchmark 42 depth estimation models across indoor and outdoor scenes to assess their resilience to these corruptions. Our findings underscore that, in the absence of a dedicated robustness evaluation framework, many leading depth estimation models may be susceptible to typical corruptions. We delve into design considerations for crafting more robust depth estimation models, touching upon pre-training, augmentation, modality, model capacity, and learning paradigms. We anticipate our benchmark will establish a foundational platform for advancing robust OoD depth estimation.
tl;dr: We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for supervised anomalous node detection on static attributed graphs, covering 29 distinct models and 10 real-world datasets.
With a long history of traditional Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) algorithms and recently popular Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it is still not clear (1) how they perform under a standard comprehensive setting, (2) whether GNNs can outperform traditional algorithms such as tree ensembles, and (3) how about their efficiency on large-scale graphs. In response, we introduce GADBench---a benchmark tool dedicated to supervised anomalous node detection in static graphs. GADBench facilitates a detailed comparison across 29 distinct models on ten real-world GAD datasets, encompassing thousands to millions (~6M) nodes. Our main finding is that tree ensembles with simple neighborhood aggregation can outperform the latest GNNs tailored for the GAD task. We shed light on the current progress of GAD, setting a robust groundwork for subsequent investigations in this domain. GADBench is open-sourced at https://github.com/squareRoot3/GADBench.
tl;dr: For multi-agent reinforcement learning, we prove that meta-learning can help achieve sharper convergence rates than individual learning when the learning tasks are similar according to natural similarity metrics.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has primarily focused on solving a single task in isolation, while in practice the environment is often evolving, leaving many related tasks to be solved. In this paper, we investigate the benefits of meta-learning in solving multiple MARL tasks collectively. We establish the first line of theoretical results for meta-learning in a wide range of fundamental MARL settings, including learning Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum Markov games and Markov potential games, as well as learning coarse correlated equilibria in general-sum Markov games. Under natural notions of task similarity, we show that meta-learning achieves provable sharper convergence to various game-theoretical solution concepts than learning each task separately. As an important intermediate step, we develop multiple MARL algorithms with initialization-dependent convergence guarantees. Such algorithms integrate optimistic policy mirror descents with stage-based value updates, and their refined convergence guarantees (nearly) recover the best known results even when a good initialization is unknown. To our best knowledge, such results are also new and might be of independent interest. We further provide numerical simulations to corroborate our theoretical findings.
337. Imagine That! Abstract-to-Intricate Text-to-Image Synthesis with Scene Graph Hallucination Diffusion
tl;dr: We solve the text-to-image synthesis under the abstract-to-intricate setting with a novel scene-graph hallucination mechanism with diffusion models.
In this work, we investigate the task of text-to-image (T2I) synthesis under the abstract-to-intricate setting, i.e., generating intricate visual content from simple abstract text prompts. Inspired by human imagination intuition, we propose a novel scene-graph hallucination (SGH) mechanism for effective abstract-to-intricate T2I synthesis. SGH carries out scene hallucination by expanding the initial scene graph (SG) of the input prompt with more feasible specific scene structures, in which the structured semantic representation of SG ensures high controllability of the intrinsic scene imagination. To approach the T2I synthesis, we deliberately build an SG-based hallucination diffusion system. First, we implement the SGH module based on the discrete diffusion technique, which evolves the SG structure by iteratively adding new scene elements. Then, we utilize another continuous-state diffusion model as the T2I synthesizer, where the overt image-generating process is navigated by the underlying semantic scene structure induced from the SGH module. On the benchmark COCO dataset, our system outperforms the existing best-performing T2I model by a significant margin, especially improving on the abstract-to-intricate T2I generation. Further in-depth analyses reveal how our methods advance.
tl;dr: We propose a Bayesian optimization algorithm for combinatorial, mixed, and continuous spaces that is robust and gives state-of-the-art performance on a wide set of benchmarks.
Impactful applications such as materials discovery, hardware design, neural architecture search, or portfolio optimization require optimizing high-dimensional black-box functions with mixed and combinatorial input spaces.
While Bayesian optimization has recently made significant progress in solving such problems, an in-depth analysis reveals that the current state-of-the-art methods are not reliable.
Their performances degrade substantially when the unknown optima of the function do not have a certain structure.
To fill the need for a reliable algorithm for combinatorial and mixed spaces, this paper proposes Bounce that relies on a novel map of various variable types into nested embeddings of increasing dimensionality.
Comprehensive experiments show that Bounce reliably achieves and often even improves upon state-of-the-art performance on a variety of high-dimensional problems.
tl;dr: We establish a set of new identifiability results of nonlinear ICA in the general settings of undercompleteness, partial sparsity and source dependence, and flexible grouping structures.
Nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) aims to uncover the true latent sources from their observable nonlinear mixtures. Despite its significance, the identifiability of nonlinear ICA is known to be impossible without additional assumptions. Recent advances have proposed conditions on the connective structure from sources to observed variables, known as Structural Sparsity, to achieve identifiability in an unsupervised manner. However, the sparsity constraint may not hold universally for all sources in practice. Furthermore, the assumptions of bijectivity of the mixing process and independence among all sources, which arise from the setting of ICA, may also be violated in many real-world scenarios. To address these limitations and generalize nonlinear ICA, we propose a set of new identifiability results in the general settings of undercompleteness, partial sparsity and source dependence, and flexible grouping structures. Specifically, we prove identifiability when there are more observed variables than sources (undercomplete), and when certain sparsity and/or source independence assumptions are not met for some changing sources. Moreover, we show that even in cases with flexible grouping structures (e.g., part of the sources can be divided into irreducible independent groups with various sizes), appropriate identifiability results can also be established. Theoretical claims are supported empirically on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
tl;dr: This paper presents a new benchmark for evaluating different image embeddings on image retrieval task and reveals intriguing properties of different designs.
Image retrieval is a fundamental task in computer vision. Despite recent advances in this field, many techniques have been evaluated on a limited number of domains, with a small number of instance categories. Notably, most existing works only consider domains like 3D landmarks, making it difficult to generalize the conclusions made by these works to other domains, e.g., logo and other 2D flat objects. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset for benchmarking visual search methods on flat images with diverse patterns. Our flat object retrieval benchmark (FORB) supplements the commonly adopted 3D object domain, and more importantly, it serves as a testbed for assessing the image embedding quality on out-of-distribution domains. In this benchmark we investigate the retrieval accuracy of representative methods in terms of candidate ranks, as well as matching score margin, a viewpoint which is largely ignored by many works. Our experiments not only highlight the challenges and rich heterogeneity of FORB, but also reveal the hidden properties of different retrieval strategies. The proposed benchmark is a growing project and we expect to expand in both quantity and variety of objects. The dataset and supporting codes are available at https://github.com/pxiangwu/FORB/.
tl;dr: Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data through Holistic Predictive Trends
Learning binary classifiers from positive and unlabeled data (PUL) is vital in many real-world applications, especially when verifying negative examples is difficult. Despite the impressive empirical performance of recent PUL methods, challenges like accumulated errors and increased estimation bias persist due to the absence of negative labels. In this paper, we unveil an intriguing yet long-overlooked observation in PUL: \textit{resampling the positive data in each training iteration to ensure a balanced distribution between positive and unlabeled examples results in strong early-stage performance. Furthermore, predictive trends for positive and negative classes display distinctly different patterns.} Specifically, the scores (output probability) of unlabeled negative examples consistently decrease, while those of unlabeled positive examples show largely chaotic trends. Instead of focusing on classification within individual time frames, we innovatively adopt a holistic approach, interpreting the scores of each example as a temporal point process (TPP). This reformulates the core problem of PUL as recognizing trends in these scores. We then propose a novel TPP-inspired measure for trend detection and prove its asymptotic unbiasedness in predicting changes. Notably, our method accomplishes PUL without requiring additional parameter tuning or prior assumptions, offering an alternative perspective for tackling this problem. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our method, particularly in a highly imbalanced real-world setting, where it achieves improvements of up to $11.3\%$ in key metrics.
tl;dr: We provide a data analysis framework for data in datathons
The rise of datathons, also known as data or data science hackathons, has provided a platform to collaborate, learn, and innovate quickly. Despite their significant potential benefits, organizations often struggle to effectively work with data due to a lack of clear guidelines and best practices for potential issues that might arise. Drawing on our own experiences and insights from organizing +80 datathon challenges with +60 partnership organizations since 2016, we provide a guide that serves as a resource for organizers to navigate the data-related complexities of datathons. We apply our proposed framework to 10 case studies.
tl;dr: We demonstrate the effectiveness of generated captions in increasing the utility of web-scraped image-text pairs with nondescript text, in the context of CLIP pre-training
Massive web datasets play a key role in the success of large vision-language models like CLIP and Flamingo. However, the raw web data is noisy, and existing filtering methods to reduce noise often come at the expense of data diversity. Our work focuses on caption quality as one major source of noise, and studies how generated captions can increase the utility of web-scraped datapoints with nondescript text. Through exploring different mixing strategies for raw and generated captions, we outperform the best filtering method proposed by the DataComp benchmark by 2% on ImageNet and 4% on average across 38 tasks, given a candidate pool of 128M image-text pairs. Our best approach is also 2x better at Flickr and MS-COCO retrieval. We then analyze what makes synthetic captions an effective source of text supervision. In experimenting with different image captioning models, we also demonstrate that the performance of a model on standard image captioning benchmarks (e.g., NoCaps CIDEr) is not a reliable indicator of the utility of the captions it generates for multimodal training. Finally, our experiments with using generated captions at DataComp's large scale (1.28B image-text pairs) offer insights into the limitations of synthetic text, as well as the importance of image curation with increasing training data quantity. The synthetic captions used in our experiments are now available on HuggingFace.
tl;dr: We define cumulants for random variables in RKHSs and demonstrate their properties and usefulness.
In $\mathbb{R}^d$, it is well-known that cumulants provide an alternative to moments that can achieve the same goals with numerous benefits such as lower variance estimators. In this paper we extend cumulants to reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) using tools from tensor algebras and show that they are computationally tractable by a kernel trick. These kernelized cumulants provide a new set of all-purpose statistics; the classical maximum mean discrepancy and Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion arise as the degree one objects in our general construction. We argue both theoretically and empirically (on synthetic, environmental, and traffic data analysis) that going beyond degree one has several advantages and can be achieved with the same computational complexity and minimal overhead in our experiments.
We reconsider the challenge of non-convex optimization under differential privacy constraint. Building upon the previous variance-reduced algorithm SpiderBoost, we propose a novel framework that employs two types of gradient oracles: one that estimates the gradient at a single point and a more cost-effective option that calculates the gradient difference between two points. Our framework can ensure continuous accuracy of gradient estimations and subsequently enhances the rates of identifying second-order stationary points.
Additionally, we consider a more challenging task by attempting to locate the global minima of a non-convex objective via the exponential mechanism without almost any assumptions. Our preliminary results suggest that the regularized exponential mechanism can effectively emulate previous empirical and population risk bounds, negating the need for smoothness assumptions for algorithms with polynomial running time. Furthermore, with running time factors excluded, the exponential mechanism demonstrates promising population risk bound performance, and we provide a nearly matching lower bound.
Equivariance has gained strong interest as a desirable network property that inherently ensures robust generalization. However, when dealing with complex systems such as articulated objects or multi-object scenes, effectively capturing inter-part transformations poses a challenge, as it becomes entangled with the overall structure and local transformations. The interdependence of part assignment and per-part group action necessitates a novel equivariance formulation that allows for their co-evolution. In this paper, we present Banana, a Banach fixed-point network for equivariant segmentation with inter-part equivariance by construction. Our key insight is to iteratively solve a fixed-point problem, where point-part assignment labels and per-part SE(3)-equivariance co-evolve simultaneously. We provide theoretical derivations of both per-step equivariance and global convergence, which induces an equivariant final convergent state. Our formulation naturally provides a strict definition of inter-part equivariance that generalizes to unseen inter-part configurations. Through experiments conducted on both articulated objects and multi-object scans, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in achieving strong generalization under inter-part transformations, even when confronted with substantial changes in pointcloud geometry and topology.
The rapid advancement and widespread use of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant concerns regarding the potential leakage of personally identifiable information (PII). These models are often trained on vast quantities of web-collected data, which may inadvertently include sensitive personal data. This paper presents ProPILE, a novel probing tool designed to empower data subjects, or the owners of the PII, with awareness of potential PII leakage in LLM-based services. ProPILE lets data subjects formulate prompts based on their own PII to evaluate the level of privacy intrusion in LLMs. We demonstrate its application on the OPT-1.3B model trained on the publicly available Pile dataset. We show how hypothetical data subjects may assess the likelihood of their PII being included in the Pile dataset being revealed. ProPILE can also be leveraged by LLM service providers to effectively evaluate their own levels of PII leakage with more powerful prompts specifically tuned for their in-house models. This tool represents a pioneering step towards empowering the data subjects for their awareness and control over their own data on the web.
tl;dr: A novel metric learning approach to improve monocular 3D object detection without increasing model complexity.
Monocular 3D object detection poses a significant challenge due to the lack of depth information in RGB images. Many existing methods strive to enhance the object depth estimation performance by allocating additional parameters for object depth estimation, utilizing extra modules or data. In contrast, we introduce a novel metric learning scheme that encourages the model to extract depth-discriminative features regardless of the visual attributes without increasing inference time and model size. Our method employs the distance-preserving function to organize the feature space manifold in relation to ground-truth object depth. The proposed $(K,B,\epsilon)$-quasi-isometric loss leverages predetermined pairwise distance restriction as guidance for adjusting the distance among object descriptors without disrupting the non-linearity of the natural feature manifold. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary head for object-wise depth estimation, which enhances depth quality while maintaining the inference time. The broad applicability of our method is demonstrated through experiments that show improvements in overall performance when integrated into various baselines. The results show that our method consistently improves the performance of various baselines by 23.51\% and 5.78\% on average across KITTI and Waymo, respectively.
349. LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models
tl;dr: We work with the legal community to develop a benchmark of 160+ tasks to evaluate legal reasoning in large language models
The advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers find interesting. To enable cross-disciplinary conversations about LLMs in the law, we additionally show how popular legal frameworks for describing legal reasoning—which distinguish between its many forms—correspond to LegalBench tasks, thus giving lawyers and LLM developers a common vocabulary. This paper describes LegalBench, presents an empirical evaluation of 20 open-source and commercial LLMs, and illustrates the types of research explorations LegalBench enables.
tl;dr: We evaluate a suite of state-of-the-art vision models in their ability to understand human sketches at varying levels of abstraction
Sketching is a powerful tool for creating abstract images that are sparse but meaningful. Sketch understanding poses fundamental challenges for general-purpose vision algorithms because it requires robustness to the sparsity of sketches relative to natural visual inputs and because it demands tolerance for semantic ambiguity, as sketches can reliably evoke multiple meanings. While current vision algorithms have achieved high performance on a variety of visual tasks, it remains unclear to what extent they understand sketches in a human-like way. Here we introduce $\texttt{SEVA}$, a new benchmark dataset containing approximately 90K human-generated sketches of 128 object concepts produced under different time constraints, and thus systematically varying in sparsity. We evaluated a suite of state-of-the-art vision algorithms on their ability to correctly identify the target concept depicted in these sketches and to generate responses that are strongly aligned with human response patterns on the same sketch recognition task. We found that vision algorithms that better predicted human sketch recognition performance also better approximated human uncertainty about sketch meaning, but there remains a sizable gap between model and human response patterns. To explore the potential of models that emulate human visual abstraction in generative tasks, we conducted further evaluations of a recently developed sketch generation algorithm (Vinker et al., 2022) capable of generating sketches that vary in sparsity. We hope that public release of this dataset and evaluation protocol will catalyze progress towards algorithms with enhanced capacities for human-like visual abstraction.
tl;dr: We developed the first diffusion model-based solver on graphs for combinatorial optimization problems.
Neural network-based Combinatorial Optimization (CO) methods have shown promising results in solving various NP-complete (NPC) problems without relying on hand-crafted domain knowledge. This paper broadens the current scope of neural solvers for NPC problems by introducing a new graph-based diffusion framework, namely DIFUSCO. It formulates NPC problems into a discrete {0, 1}-vector space and uses graph-based denoising diffusion models to generate high-quality solutions. Specifically, we explore diffusion models with Gaussian and Bernoulli noise, respectively, and also introduce an effective inference schedule to improve the generation quality. We evaluate our methods on two well-studied combinatorial optimization problems: Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Maximal Independent Set (MIS). Experimental results show that DIFUSCO strongly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural solvers, improving the performance gap between ground-truth and neural solvers from 1.76% to 0.46% on TSP-500, from 2.46% to 1.17% on TSP-1000, and from 3.19% to 2.58% on TSP-10000. For the MIS problem, DIFUSCO outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural solver on the challenging SATLIB benchmark. Our code is available at [this url](https://github.com/Edward-Sun/DIFUSCO).
tl;dr: We develop a new lower bound framework for statistical estimation under measurement or information constraints, letting us easily derive new and known minimax rates,
We consider distributed parameter estimation using interactive protocols subject to local information constraints such as bandwidth limitations, local differential privacy, and restricted measurements. We provide a unified framework enabling us to derive a variety of (tight) minimax lower bounds for different parametric families of distributions, both continuous and discrete, under any $\ell_p$ loss. Our lower bound framework is versatile and yields “plug-and-play” bounds that are widely applicable to a large range of estimation problems, and, for the prototypical case of the Gaussian family, circumvents limitations of previous techniques. In particular, our approach recovers bounds obtained using data processing inequalities and Cramér–Rao bounds, two other alternative approaches for proving lower bounds in our setting of interest. Further, for the families considered, we complement our lower bounds with matching upper bounds.
We consider the parallel complexity of submodular function minimization (SFM).
We provide a pair of methods which obtain two new query versus depth trade-offs a submodular function defined on subsets of $n$ elements that has integer values between $-M$ and $M$. The first method has depth $2$ and query complexity $n^{O(M)}$ and the second method has depth $\widetilde{O}(n^{1/3} M^{2/3})$ and query complexity $O(\mathrm{poly}(n, M))$. Despite a line of work on improved parallel lower bounds for SFM, prior to our work the only known algorithms for parallel SFM either followed from more general methods for sequential SFM or highly-parallel minimization of convex $\ell_2$-Lipschitz functions. Interestingly, to obtain our second result we provide the first highly-parallel algorithm for minimizing $\ell_\infty$-Lipschitz function over the hypercube which obtains near-optimal depth for obtaining constant accuracy.
354. ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation
tl;dr: We achieve photo-realistic text-to-3D results by only using 2D diffusion models, with our variational score distillation training objective.
Score distillation sampling (SDS) has shown great promise in text-to-3D generation by distilling pretrained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, but suffers from over-saturation, over-smoothing, and low-diversity problems. In this work, we propose to model the 3D parameter as a random variable instead of a constant as in SDS and present *variational score distillation* (VSD), a principled particle-based variational framework to explain and address the aforementioned issues in text-to-3D generation. We show that SDS is a special case of VSD and leads to poor samples with both small and large CFG weights. In comparison, VSD works well with various CFG weights as ancestral sampling from diffusion models and simultaneously improves the diversity and sample quality with a common CFG weight (i.e., 7.5). We further present various improvements in the design space for text-to-3D such as distillation time schedule and density initialization, which are orthogonal to the distillation algorithm yet not well explored. Our overall approach, dubbed *ProlificDreamer*, can generate high rendering resolution (i.e., 512$\times$512) and high-fidelity NeRF with rich structure and complex effects (e.g., smoke and drops). Further, initialized from NeRF, meshes fine-tuned by VSD are meticulously detailed and photo-realistic.
Current machine learning models for vision are often highly specialized and limited to a single modality and task. In contrast, recent large language models exhibit a wide range of capabilities, hinting at a possibility for similarly versatile models in computer vision.
In this paper, we take a step in this direction and propose a multimodal training scheme called 4M. It consists of training a single unified Transformer encoder-decoder using a masked modeling objective across a wide range of input/output modalities – including text, images, geometric, and semantic modalities, as well as neural network feature maps. 4M achieves scalability by unifying the representation space of all modalities through mapping them into discrete tokens and performing multimodal masked modeling on a small randomized subset of tokens.
4M leads to models that exhibit several key capabilities: (1) they can perform a diverse set of vision tasks out of the box, (2) they excel when fine-tuned for unseen downstream tasks or new input modalities, and (3) they can function as a generative model that can be conditioned on arbitrary modalities, enabling a wide variety of expressive multimodal editing capabilities with remarkable flexibility.
Through experimental analyses, we demonstrate the potential of 4M for training versatile and scalable foundation models for vision tasks, setting the stage for further exploration in multimodal learning for vision and other domains.
tl;dr: We show that current AI-generated text detectors are brittle against paraphrasing attacks, and present a retrieval-based detector as a defense.
The rise in malicious usage of large language models, such as fake content creation and academic plagiarism, has motivated the development of approaches that identify AI-generated text, including those based on watermarking or outlier detection. However, the robustness of these detection algorithms to paraphrases of AI-generated text remains unclear. To stress test these detectors, we build a 11B parameter paraphrase generation model (DIPPER) that can paraphrase paragraphs, condition on surrounding context, and control lexical diversity and content reordering. Paraphrasing text generated by three large language models (including GPT3.5-davinci-003) with DIPPER successfully evades several detectors, including watermarking, GPTZero, DetectGPT, and OpenAI's text classifier. For example, DIPPER drops detection accuracy of DetectGPT from 70.3% to 4.6% (at a constant false positive rate of 1%), without appreciably modifying the input semantics.
To increase the robustness of AI-generated text detection to paraphrase attacks, we introduce a simple defense that relies on retrieving semantically-similar generations and must be maintained by a language model API provider. Given a candidate text, our algorithm searches a database of sequences previously generated by the API, looking for sequences that match the candidate text within a certain threshold. We empirically verify our defense using a database of 15M generations from a fine-tuned T5-XXL model and find that it can detect 80% to 97% of paraphrased generations across different settings while only classifying 1% of human-written sequences as AI-generated. We open-source our models, code and data.
Liquid democracy with ranked delegations is a novel voting scheme that unites the practicability of representative democracy with the idealistic appeal of direct democracy: Every voter decides between casting their vote on a question at hand or delegating their voting weight to some other, trusted agent. Delegations are transitive, and since voters may end up in a delegation cycle, they are encouraged to indicate not only a single delegate, but a set of potential delegates and a ranking among them. Based on the delegation preferences of all voters, a delegation rule selects one representative per voter. Previous work has revealed a trade-off between two properties of delegation rules called anonymity and copy-robustness.
To overcome this issue we study two fractional delegation rules: Mixed Borda branching, which generalizes a rule satisfying copy-robustness, and the random walk rule, which satisfies anonymity. Using the Markov chain tree theorem, we show that the two rules are in fact equivalent, and simultaneously satisfy generalized versions of the two properties. Combining the same theorem with Fulkerson's algorithm, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm for computing the outcome of the studied delegation rule. This algorithm is of independent interest, having applications in semi-supervised learning and graph theory.
tl;dr: This study presents a new algorithm that improves the contextual bandit problem by using post-serving context, demonstrating superior performance on various data sets.
Standard contextual bandit problem assumes that all the relevant contexts are observed before the algorithm chooses an arm. This modeling paradigm, while useful, often falls short when dealing with problems in which additional valuable contexts can be observed after arm selection. For example, content recommendation platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok receive much additional features about a user's reward after the user clicks a content (e.g., how long the user stayed, what is the user's watch speed, etc.). To improve online learning efficiency in these applications, we study a novel contextual bandit problem with post-serving contexts and design a new algorithm, poLinUCB, that achieves tight regret under standard assumptions. Core to our technical proof is a robustified and generalized version of the well-known Elliptical Potential Lemma (EPL), which can accommodate noise in data. Such robustification is necessary for tackling our problem, though we believe it could also be of general interest.
Extensive empirical tests on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the significant benefit of utilitzing post-serving contexts as well as the superior performance of our algorithm over the state-of-the-art approaches.
Over the last several years, there has been significant progress in developing neural solvers for the Schrödinger Bridge (SB) problem and applying them to generative modelling. This new research field is justifiably fruitful as it is interconnected with the practically well-performing diffusion models and theoretically grounded entropic optimal transport (EOT). Still, the area lacks non-trivial tests allowing a researcher to understand how well the methods solve SB or its equivalent continuous EOT problem. We fill this gap and propose a novel way to create pairs of probability distributions for which the ground truth OT solution is known by the construction. Our methodology is generic and works for a wide range of OT formulations, in particular, it covers the EOT which is equivalent to SB (the main interest of our study). This development allows us to create continuous benchmark distributions with the known EOT and SB solutions on high-dimensional spaces such as spaces of images. As an illustration, we use these benchmark pairs to test how well existing neural EOT/SB solvers actually compute the EOT solution. Our code for constructing benchmark pairs under different setups is available at: https://github.com/ngushchin/EntropicOTBenchmark
tl;dr: We found structural inconsistencies in human density estimation and (from a large nonparametric class) we identified a bounded-rational internal model in human cognition.
Learning to accurately represent environmental uncertainty is crucial for adaptive and optimal behaviors in various cognitive tasks. However, it remains unclear how the human brain, constrained by finite cognitive resources, constructs an internal model from an infinite space of probability distributions. In this study, we explore how these learned distributions deviate from the ground truth, resulting in observable inconsistency in a novel structured density estimation task. During each trial, human participants were asked to form and report the latent probability distribution functions underlying sequentially presented independent observations. As the number of observations increased, the reported predictive density became closer to the ground truth. Nevertheless, we observed an intriguing inconsistency in human structure estimation, specifically a large error in the number of reported clusters. Such inconsistency is invariant to the scale of the distribution and persists across stimulus modalities. We modeled uncertainty learning as approximate Bayesian inference in a nonparametric mixture prior of distributions. Human reports were best explained under resource rationality embodied in a decaying tendency towards model expansion. Our study offers insights into human cognitive processes under uncertainty and lays the groundwork for further exploration of resource-rational representations in the brain under more complex tasks.
tl;dr: We show that additive decoders have an identifiable representation and allow to generate novel images never seen during training, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation.
We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and "out-of-support'' image generation in representation learning. We show that both are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well suited for images that can be decomposed as a sum of object-specific images. We provide conditions under which exactly solving the reconstruction problem using an additive decoder is guaranteed to identify the blocks of latent variables up to permutation and block-wise invertible transformations. This guarantee relies only on very weak assumptions about the distribution of the latent factors, which might present statistical dependencies and have an almost arbitrarily shaped support. Our result provides a new setting where nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) is possible and adds to our theoretical understanding of OCRL methods. We also show theoretically that additive decoders can generate novel images by recombining observed factors of variations in novel ways, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation. We show empirically that additivity is crucial for both identifiability and extrapolation on simulated data.
tl;dr: We replace the discrete Tanimoto kernel/metric with continuous versions and show improved performance on a variety of tasks.
The Tanimoto coefficient is commonly used to measure the similarity between molecules represented as discrete fingerprints,
either as a distance metric or a positive definite kernel. While many kernel methods can be accelerated using random feature approximations, at present there is a lack of such approximations for the Tanimoto kernel. In this paper we propose two kinds of novel random features to allow this kernel to scale to large datasets, and in the process discover a novel extension of the kernel to real-valued vectors. We theoretically characterize these random features, and provide error bounds on the spectral norm of the Gram matrix. Experimentally, we show that these random features are effective at approximating the Tanimoto coefficient of real-world datasets
and are useful for molecular property prediction and optimization tasks. Future updates to this work will be available at http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14809.
tl;dr: We present a provably efficient algorithm for offline Reinforcement Learning in episodic Regular Decision Processes
This paper deals with offline (or batch) Reinforcement Learning (RL) in episodic Regular Decision Processes (RDPs). RDPs are the subclass of Non-Markov Decision Processes where the dependency on the history of past events can be captured by a finite-state automaton. We consider a setting where the automaton that underlies the RDP is unknown, and a learner strives to learn a near-optimal policy using pre-collected data, in the form of non-Markov sequences of observations, without further exploration. We present RegORL, an algorithm that suitably combines automata learning techniques and state-of-the-art algorithms for offline RL in MDPs. RegORL has a modular design allowing one to use any off-the-shelf offline RL algorithm in MDPs. We report a non-asymptotic high-probability sample complexity bound for RegORL to yield an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy, which makes appear a notion of concentrability relevant for RDPs. Furthermore, we present a sample complexity lower bound for offline RL in RDPs. To our best knowledge, this is the first work presenting a provably efficient algorithm for offline learning in RDPs.
tl;dr: We present C-Eval, the first comprehensive Chinese evaluation suite designed to assess advanced knowledge and reasoning abilities of foundation models in a Chinese context.
New NLP benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present C-Eval, the first comprehensive Chinese evaluation suite designed to assess advanced knowledge and reasoning abilities of foundation models in a Chinese context. C-Eval comprises multiple-choice questions across four difficulty levels: middle school, high school, college, and professional. The questions span 52 diverse disciplines, ranging from humanities to science and engineering. C-Eval is accompanied by C-Eval Hard, a subset of very challenging subjects in C-Eval that requires advanced reasoning abilities to solve. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the most advanced LLMs on C-Eval, including both English- and Chinese-oriented models. Results indicate that only GPT-4 could achieve an average accuracy of over 60%, suggesting that there is still significant room for improvement for current LLMs. We anticipate C-Eval will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of foundation models, and foster their development and growth for Chinese users.
tl;dr: A standard contrastive loss in recommender systems, particularly for out-of-distribution tasks.
Contrastive Learning (CL) has achieved impressive performance in self-supervised learning tasks, showing superior generalization ability. Inspired by the success, adopting CL into collaborative filtering (CF) is prevailing in semi-supervised topK recommendations. The basic idea is to routinely conduct heuristic-based data augmentation and apply contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE) on the augmented views. Yet, some CF-tailored challenges make this adoption suboptimal, such as the issue of out-of-distribution, the risk of false negatives, and the nature of top-K evaluation. They necessitate the CL-based CF scheme to focus more on mining hard negatives and distinguishing false negatives from the vast unlabeled user-item interactions, for informative contrast signals. Worse still, there is limited understanding of contrastive loss in CF methods, especially w.r.t. its generalization ability. To bridge the gap, we delve into the reasons underpinning the success of contrastive loss in CF, and propose a principled Adversarial InfoNCE loss (AdvInfoNCE), which is a variant of InfoNCE, specially tailored for CF methods. AdvInfoNCE adaptively explores and assigns hardness to each negative instance in an adversarial fashion and further utilizes a fine-grained hardness-aware ranking criterion to empower the recommender’s generalization ability. Training CF models with AdvInfoNCE, we validate the effectiveness of AdvInfoNCE on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets, thus showing its generalization ability to mitigate out-of-distribution problems. Given the theoretical guarantees and empirical superiority of AdvInfoNCE over most contrastive loss functions, we advocate its adoption as a standard loss in recommender systems, particularly for the out-of-distribution tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/LehengTHU/AdvInfoNCE.
tl;dr: We theoretically characterize when (sub-optimally) optimizing a proper loss, as we do in DNNs, leads to a near-optimally calibrated predictor.
Optimizing proper loss functions is popularly believed to yield predictors with good calibration properties; the intuition being that for such losses, the global optimum is to predict the ground-truth probabilities, which is indeed calibrated. However, typical machine learning models are trained to approximately minimize loss over restricted families of predictors, that are unlikely to contain the ground truth. Under what circumstances does optimizing proper loss over a restricted family yield calibrated models? What precise calibration guarantees does it give? In this work, we provide a rigorous answer to these questions. We replace the global optimality with a local optimality condition stipulating that the (proper) loss of the predictor cannot be reduced much by post-processing its predictions with a certain family of Lipschitz functions. We show that any predictor with this local optimality satisfies smooth calibration as defined in [Kakade and Foster, 2008, Błasiok et al., 2023]. Local optimality is plausibly satisfied by well-trained DNNs, which suggests an explanation for why they are calibrated from proper loss minimization alone. Finally, we show that the connection between local optimality and calibration error goes both ways: nearly calibrated predictors are also nearly locally optimal.
tl;dr: We identify conditions under which confidence-based cascades may suceed or fail, present a theoretically optimal deferral rule, and study post hoc deferral schemes to improve upon confidence-base deferral.
Cascades are a classical strategy to enable inference cost to vary adaptively across samples, wherein a sequence of classifiers are invoked in turn. A deferral rule determines whether to invoke the next classifier in the sequence, or to terminate prediction. One simple deferral rule employs the confidence of the current classifier, e.g., based on the maximum predicted softmax probability. Despite being oblivious to the structure of the cascade --- e.g., not modelling the errors of downstream models --- such confidence-based deferral often works remarkably well in practice. In this paper, we seek to better understand the conditions under which confidence-based deferral may fail, and when alternate deferral strategies can perform better. We first present a theoretical characterisation of the optimal deferral rule, which precisely characterises settings under which confidence-based deferral may suffer. We then study post-hoc deferral mechanisms, and demonstrate they can significantly improve upon confidence-based deferral in settings where (i) downstream models are specialists that only work well on a subset of inputs, (ii) samples are subject to label noise, and (iii) there is distribution shift between the train and test set.
tl;dr: LithoBench is a dataset and benchmarking platform for computational lithography, supporting lithography simulation and mask optimization.
Computational lithography provides algorithmic and mathematical support for resolution enhancement in optical lithography, which is the critical step in semiconductor manufacturing.
The time-consuming lithography simulation and mask optimization processes limit the practical application of inverse lithography technology (ILT), a promising solution to the challenges of advanced-node lithography.
Although various machine learning methods for ILT have shown promise for reducing the computational burden, this field is in lack of a dataset that can train the models thoroughly and evaluate the performance comprehensively.
To boost the development of AI-driven computational lithography, we present the LithoBench dataset, a collection of circuit layout tiles for deep-learning-based lithography simulation and mask optimization.
LithoBench consists of more than 120k tiles that are cropped from real circuit designs or synthesized according to the layout topologies of famous ILT testcases.
The ground truths are generated by a famous lithography model in academia and an advanced ILT method.
Based on the data, we provide a framework to design and evaluate deep neural networks (DNNs) with the data.
The framework is used to benchmark state-of-the-art models on lithography simulation and mask optimization.
We hope LithoBench can promote the research and development of computational lithography.
LithoBench is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/lithobench-APPL.
We study a decentralized multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which multiple clients are connected by time dependent random graphs provided by an environment. The reward distributions of each arm vary across clients and rewards are generated independently over time by an environment based on distributions that include both sub-exponential and sub-gaussian distributions. Each client pulls an arm and communicates with neighbors based on the graph provided by the environment. The goal is to minimize the overall regret of the entire system through collaborations. To this end, we introduce a novel algorithmic framework, which first provides robust simulation methods for generating random graphs using rapidly mixing markov chains or the random graph model, and then combines an averaging-based consensus approach with a newly proposed weighting technique and the upper confidence bound to deliver a UCB-type solution. Our algorithms account for the randomness in the graphs, removing the conventional doubly stochasticity assumption, and only require the knowledge of the number of clients at initialization. We derive optimal instance-dependent regret upper bounds of order $\log{T}$ in both sub-gaussian and sub-exponential environments, and a nearly optimal instance-free regret upper bound of order $\sqrt{T}\log T$ up to a $\log T$ factor. Importantly, our regret bounds hold with high probability and capture graph randomness, whereas prior works consider expected regret under assumptions and require more stringent reward distributions.
Understanding the parameter estimation of softmax gating Gaussian mixture of experts has remained a long-standing open problem in the literature. It is mainly due to three fundamental theoretical challenges associated with the softmax gating function: (i) the identifiability only up to the translation of parameters; (ii) the intrinsic interaction via partial differential equations between the softmax gating and the expert functions in the Gaussian density; (iii) the complex dependence between the numerator and denominator of the conditional density of softmax gating Gaussian mixture of experts. We resolve these challenges by proposing novel Voronoi loss functions among parameters and establishing the convergence rates of maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for solving parameter estimation in these models. When the true number of experts is unknown and over-specified, our findings show a connection between the convergence rate of the MLE and a solvability problem of a system of polynomial equations.
tl;dr: We propose causal spaces, a measure-theoretic axiomatisation of causality.
Causality is a central concept in a wide range of research areas, yet there is still no universally agreed axiomatisation of causality. We view causality both as an extension of probability theory and as a study of what happens when one intervenes on a system, and argue in favour of taking Kolmogorov's measure-theoretic axiomatisation of probability as the starting point towards an axiomatisation of causality. To that end, we propose the notion of a causal space, consisting of a probability space along with a collection of transition probability kernels, called causal kernels, that encode the causal information of the space. Our proposed framework is not only rigorously grounded in measure theory, but it also sheds light on long-standing limitations of existing frameworks including, for example, cycles, latent variables and stochastic processes.
Humans outperform object recognizers despite the fact that models perform well on current datasets, including those explicitly designed to challenge machines with debiased images or distribution shift. This problem persists, in part, because we have no guidance on the absolute difficulty of an image or dataset making it hard to objectively assess progress toward human-level performance, to cover the range of human abilities, and to increase the challenge posed by a dataset. We develop a dataset difficulty metric MVT, Minimum Viewing Time, that addresses these three problems. Subjects view an image that flashes on screen and then classify the object in the image. Images that require brief flashes to recognize are easy, those which require seconds of viewing are hard. We compute the ImageNet and ObjectNet image difficulty distribution, which we find significantly undersamples hard images. Nearly 90% of current benchmark performance is derived from images that are easy for humans. Rather than hoping that we will make harder datasets, we can for the first time objectively guide dataset difficulty during development. We can also subset recognition performance as a function of difficulty: model performance drops precipitously while human performance remains stable. Difficulty provides a new lens through which to view model performance, one which uncovers new scaling laws: vision-language models stand out as being the most robust and human-like while all other techniques scale poorly. We release tools to automatically compute MVT, along with image sets which are tagged by difficulty. Objective image difficulty has practical applications – one can measure how hard a test set is before deploying a real-world system – and scientific applications such as discovering the neural correlates of image difficulty and enabling new object recognition techniques that eliminate the benchmark-vs- real-world performance gap.
tl;dr: A new benchmark dataset for large scale above ground biomass estimation using satellite multi-spectral and radar time series
Above Ground Biomass is an important variable as forests play a crucial role in mitigating climate change as they act as an efficient, natural and cost-effective carbon sink. Traditional field and airborne LiDAR measurements have been proven to provide reliable estimations of forest biomass. Nevertheless, the use of these techniques at a large scale can be challenging and expensive. Satellite data have been widely used as a valuable tool in estimating biomass on a global scale. However, the full potential of dense multi-modal satellite time series data, in combination with modern deep learning approaches, has yet to be fully explored. The aim of the "BioMassters" data challenge and benchmark dataset is to investigate the potential of multi-modal satellite data (Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI) to estimate forest biomass at a large scale using the Finnish Forest Centre's open forest and nature airborne LiDAR data as a reference.
The performance of the top three baseline models shows the potential of deep learning to produce accurate and higher-resolution biomass maps. Our benchmark dataset is publically available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/nascetti-a/BioMassters (doi:10.57967/hf/1009) and the implementation of the top three winning models are available at https://github.com/drivendataorg/the-biomassters.
tl;dr: A set of generative models for synthetic time-series data that can satisfy soft and hard constraints.
Synthetic time series are often used in practical applications to augment the historical time series dataset,
amplify the occurrence of rare events and also create counterfactual scenarios.
Distributional-similarity (which we refer to as realism) as well as the satisfaction of certain numerical constraints are common requirements for counterfactual time series generation. For instance, the US Federal Reserve publishes synthetic market stress scenarios given by the constrained time series for financial institutions to assess their performance in hypothetical recessions.
Existing approaches for generating constrained time series usually penalize training loss to enforce constraints, and reject non-conforming samples. However, these approaches would require re-training if we change constraints, and rejection sampling can be computationally expensive, or impractical for complex constraints.
In this paper, we propose a novel set of methods to tackle the constrained time series generation problem and provide efficient sampling while ensuring the realism of generated time series.
In particular, we frame the problem using a constrained optimization framework and then we propose a set of generative methods including 'GuidedDiffTime', a guided diffusion model.
We empirically evaluate our work on several datasets for financial and energy data, where incorporating constraints is critical. We show that our approaches outperform existing work both qualitatively and quantitatively, and that 'GuidedDiffTime' does not require re-training for new constraints, resulting in a significant carbon footprint reduction, up to 92% w.r.t. existing deep learning methods.
tl;dr: A new upper bound of $W^2_2$ that is fast to compute and comes with a transport plan
Wasserstein distance (WD) and the associated optimal transport plan have been proven useful in many applications where probability measures are at stake. In this paper, we propose a new proxy of the squared WD, coined $\textnormal{min-SWGG}$, that is based on the transport map induced by an optimal one-dimensional projection of the two input distributions. We draw connections between $\textnormal{min-SWGG}$, and Wasserstein generalized geodesics in which the pivot measure is supported on a line. We notably provide a new closed form for the exact Wasserstein distance in the particular case of one of the distributions supported on a line allowing us to derive a fast computational scheme that is amenable to gradient descent optimization. We show that $\textnormal{min-SWGG}$, is an upper bound of WD and that it has a complexity similar to as Sliced-Wasserstein, with the additional feature of providing an associated transport plan. We also investigate some theoretical properties such as metricity, weak convergence, computational and topological properties. Empirical evidences support the benefits of $\textnormal{min-SWGG}$, in various contexts, from gradient flows, shape matching and image colorization, among others.
tl;dr: We introduce a new real-world 3D object inverse rendering benchmark, with ground-truth 3D scans, multi-view images, and environment lighting of in-the-wild scenes.
We introduce Stanford-ORB, a new real-world 3D Object inverse Rendering Benchmark. Recent advances in inverse rendering have enabled a wide range of real-world applications in 3D content generation, moving rapidly from research and commercial use cases to consumer devices. While the results continue to improve, there is no real-world benchmark that can quantitatively assess and compare the performance of various inverse rendering methods. Existing real-world datasets typically only consist of the shape and multi-view images of objects, which are not sufficient for evaluating the quality of material recovery and object relighting. Methods capable of recovering material and lighting often resort to synthetic data for quantitative evaluation, which on the other hand does not guarantee generalization to complex real-world environments. We introduce a new dataset of real-world objects captured under a variety of natural scenes with ground-truth 3D scans, multi-view images, and environment lighting. Using this dataset, we establish the first comprehensive real-world evaluation benchmark for object inverse rendering tasks from in-the-wild scenes, and compare the performance of various existing methods. All data, code, and models can be accessed at https://stanfordorb.github.io/
tl;dr: We present a rigorous methodology for auditing DP with multiple random canaries, based on an equivalent "lifted" definition of DP, multiple dependent hypothesis tests, and novel adaptive confidence intervals.
We present a rigorous methodology for auditing differentially private machine learning by adding multiple carefully designed examples called canaries. We take a first principles approach based on three key components. First, we introduce Lifted Differential Privacy (LiDP) that expands the definition of differential privacy to handle randomized datasets. This gives us the freedom to design randomized canaries. Second, we audit LiDP by trying to distinguish between the model trained with $K$ canaries versus $K-1$ canaries in the dataset, leaving one canary out. By drawing the canaries i.i.d., LiDP can leverage the symmetry in the design and reuse each privately trained model to run multiple statistical tests, one for each canary. Third, we introduce novel confidence intervals that take advantage of the multiple test statistics by adapting to the empirical higher-order correlations. Together, this new recipe demonstrates significant improvements in sample complexity, both theoretically and empirically, using synthetic and real data. Further, recent advances in designing stronger canaries can be readily incorporated in the new framework.
tl;dr: We developed a new differential privacy paradigm which enables the safe use of privacy parameter estimate.
Bounding privacy leakage over compositions, i.e., privacy accounting, is a key challenge in differential privacy (DP). However, the privacy parameter ($\varepsilon$ or $\delta$) is often easy to estimate but hard to bound. In this paper, we propose a new differential privacy paradigm called estimate-verify-release (EVR), which tackles the challenges of providing a strict upper bound for the privacy parameter in DP compositions by converting an *estimate* of privacy parameter into a formal guarantee. The EVR paradigm first verifies whether the mechanism meets the *estimated* privacy guarantee, and then releases the query output based on the verification result. The core component of the EVR is privacy verification. We develop a randomized privacy verifier using Monte Carlo (MC) technique. Furthermore, we propose an MC-based DP accountant that outperforms existing DP accounting techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency. MC-based DP verifier and accountant is applicable to an important and commonly used class of DP algorithms, including the famous DP-SGD. An empirical evaluation shows the proposed EVR paradigm improves the utility-privacy tradeoff for privacy-preserving machine learning.
tl;dr: We provide reconstruction, regeneration and generation guarantees for VAEs using PAC-Bayesian Theory
Since their inception, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have become central in machine learning. Despite their widespread use, numerous questions regarding their theoretical properties remain open. Using PAC-Bayesian theory, this work develops statistical guarantees for VAEs. First, we derive the first PAC-Bayesian bound for posterior distributions conditioned on individual samples from the data-generating distribution. Then, we utilize this result to develop generalization guarantees for the VAE's reconstruction loss, as well as upper bounds on the distance between the input and the regenerated distributions. More importantly, we provide upper bounds on the Wasserstein distance between the input distribution and the distribution defined by the VAE's generative model.
tl;dr: We propose MuSe-GNN to effectively generate meaningful gene embeddings.
Discovering genes with similar functions across diverse biomedical contexts poses a significant challenge in gene representation learning due to data heterogeneity. In this study, we resolve this problem by introducing a novel model called Multimodal Similarity Learning Graph Neural Network, which combines Multimodal Machine Learning and Deep Graph Neural Networks to learn gene representations from single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomic data. Leveraging 82 training datasets from 10 tissues, three sequencing techniques, and three species, we create informative graph structures for model training and gene representations generation, while incorporating regularization with weighted similarity learning and contrastive learning to learn cross-data gene-gene relationships. This novel design ensures that we can offer gene representations containing functional similarity across different contexts in a joint space. Comprehensive benchmarking analysis shows our model's capacity to effectively capture gene function similarity across multiple modalities, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in gene representation learning by up to $\textbf{100.4}$%. Moreover, we employ bioinformatics tools in conjunction with gene representations to uncover pathway enrichment, regulation causal networks, and functions of disease-associated genes. Therefore, our model efficiently produces unified gene representations for the analysis of gene functions, tissue functions, diseases, and species evolution.
tl;dr: We generalize importance weighting for distribution shift problems so that we no longer require the support of the test distribution must be covered by the support of the training distribution.
Distribution shift (DS) may have two levels: the distribution itself changes, and the support (i.e., the set where the probability density is non-zero) also changes. When considering the support change between the training and test distributions, there can be four cases: (i) they exactly match; (ii) the training support is wider (and thus covers the test support); (iii) the test support is wider; (iv) they partially overlap. Existing methods are good at cases (i) and (ii), while cases (iii) and (iv) are more common nowadays but still under-explored. In this paper, we generalize importance weighting (IW), a golden solver for cases (i) and (ii), to a universal solver for all cases. Specifically, we first investigate why IW might fail in cases (iii) and (iv); based on the findings, we propose generalized IW (GIW) that could handle cases (iii) and (iv) and would reduce to IW in cases (i) and (ii). In GIW, the test support is split into an in-training (IT) part and an out-of-training (OOT) part, and the expected risk is decomposed into a weighted classification term over the IT part and a standard classification term over the OOT part, which guarantees the risk consistency of GIW. Then, the implementation of GIW consists of three components: (a) the split of validation data is carried out by the one-class support vector machine, (b) the first term of the empirical risk can be handled by any IW algorithm given training data and IT validation data, and (c) the second term just involves OOT validation data. Experiments demonstrate that GIW is a universal solver for DS problems, outperforming IW methods in cases (iii) and (iv).
tl;dr: We obtain sharp bounds for the sample complexity of pure exploration bandits with infinitely many arms.
We study pure exploration with infinitely many bandit arms generated \iid from an unknown distribution. Our goal is to efficiently select a single high quality arm whose average reward is, with probability $1-\delta$, within $\varepsilon$ of being with the top $\eta$-fraction of arms; this is a natural adaptation of the classical PAC guarantee for infinite action sets. We consider both the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings, aiming respectively for optimal \emph{expected} and \emph{fixed} sample complexity.
For fixed confidence, we give an algorithm with expected sample complexity $O\left(\frac{\log (1/\eta)\log (1/\delta)}{\eta\varepsilon^2}\right)$. This is optimal except for the $\log (1/\eta)$ factor, and the $\delta$-dependence closes a quadratic gap in the literature. For fixed budget, we show the asymptotically optimal sample complexity as $\delta\to 0$ is $c^{-1}\log(1/\delta)\big(\log\log(1/\delta)\big)^2$ to leading order; equivalently, the optimal failure probability with exactly $N$ samples decays as
$\exp\big(-(1\pm o(1))\frac{cN}{\log^2 N}\big)$.
The value of $c$ depends explicitly on the problem parameters (including the unknown arm distribution) through a certain Fisher information distance. Even the strictly super-linear dependence on $\log(1/\delta)$ was not known and resolves a question of Grossman-Moshkovitz (FOCS 2015).
383. Optimality in Mean Estimation: Beyond Worst-Case, Beyond Sub-Gaussian, and Beyond $1+\alpha$ Moments
There is growing interest in improving our algorithmic understanding of fundamental statistical problems such as mean estimation, driven by the goal of understanding the fundamental limits of what we can extract from limited and valuable data.
The state of the art results for mean estimation in $\mathbb{R}$ are 1) the optimal sub-Gaussian mean estimator by [Lee and Valiant, 2022], attaining the optimal sub-Gaussian error constant for all distributions with finite but unknown variance, and 2) the analysis of the median-of-means algorithm by [Bubeck, Cesa-Bianchi and Lugosi, 2013] and a matching lower bound by [Devroye, Lerasle, Lugosi, and Oliveira, 2016], characterizing the big-O optimal errors for distributions that have tails heavy enough that only a $1+\alpha$ moment exists for some $\alpha \in (0,1)$.
Both of these results, however, are optimal only in the worst case.
Motivated by the recent effort in the community to go "beyond the worst-case analysis" of algorithms, we initiate the fine-grained study of the mean estimation problem:
Is it possible for algorithms to leverage *beneficial* features/quirks of their input distribution to *beat* the sub-Gaussian rate, without explicit knowledge of these features?
We resolve this question, finding an unexpectedly nuanced answer: "Yes in limited regimes, but in general no".
Given a distribution $p$, assuming *only* that it has a finite mean and absent any additional assumptions,
we show how to construct a distribution $q_{n,\delta}$ such that the means of $p$ and $q$ are well-separated, yet $p$ and $q$ are impossible to distinguish with $n$ samples with probability $1-\delta$, and $q$ further preserves the finiteness of moments of $p$.
Moreover, the variance of $q$ is at most twice the variance of $p$ if it exists.
The main consequence of our result is that, no reasonable estimator can asymptotically achieve better than the sub-Gaussian error rate for any distribution, up to constant factors, which matches the worst-case result of [Lee and Valiant, 2022].
More generally, we introduce a new definitional framework to analyze the fine-grained optimality of algorithms, which we call "neighborhood optimality", interpolating between the unattainably strong "instance optimality" and the trivially weak admissibility/Pareto optimality definitions.
As an application of the new framework, we show that the median-of-means algorithm is neighborhood optimal, up to constant factors.
It is an open question to find a neighborhood-optimal estimator *without* constant factor slackness.
tl;dr: The difference of confidence labels on unlabeled data pairs, as a novel type of weak supervision, is sufficient to train binary classifiers with theoretical guarantees.
Recently, learning with soft labels has been shown to achieve better performance than learning with hard labels in terms of model generalization, calibration, and robustness. However, collecting pointwise labeling confidence for all training examples can be challenging and time-consuming in real-world scenarios. This paper delves into a novel weakly supervised binary classification problem called confidence-difference (ConfDiff) classification. Instead of pointwise labeling confidence, we are given only unlabeled data pairs with confidence difference that specifies the difference in the probabilities of being positive. We propose a risk-consistent approach to tackle this problem and show that the estimation error bound achieves the optimal convergence rate. We also introduce a risk correction approach to mitigate overfitting problems, whose consistency and convergence rate are also proven. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets and a real-world recommender system data set validate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches in exploiting the supervision information of the confidence difference.
tl;dr: Non-robust features are not cross-paradigmly useful features.
The existence of adversarial examples has been a mystery for years and attracted much interest. A well-known theory by \citet{ilyas2019adversarial} explains adversarial vulnerability from a data perspective by showing that one can extract non-robust features from adversarial examples and these features alone are useful for classification. However, the explanation remains quite counter-intuitive since non-robust features are mostly noise features to humans. In this paper, we re-examine the theory from a larger context by incorporating multiple learning paradigms. Notably, we find that contrary to their good usefulness under supervised learning, non-robust features attain poor usefulness when transferred to other self-supervised learning paradigms, such as contrastive learning, masked image modeling, and diffusion models. It reveals that non-robust features are not really as useful as robust or natural features that enjoy good transferability between these paradigms. Meanwhile, for robustness, we also show that naturally trained encoders from robust features are largely non-robust under AutoAttack. Our cross-paradigm examination suggests that the non-robust features are not really useful but more like paradigm-wise shortcuts, and robust features alone might be insufficient to attain reliable model robustness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/AdvNotRealFeatures}.
Self-supervised learning is introduced to train graph neural networks (GNNs) by employing propagation-based GNNs designed for semi-supervised learning tasks. Unfortunately, this common choice tends to cause two serious issues. Firstly, global parameters cause the model lack the ability to capture the local property. Secondly, it is difficult to handle networks beyond homophily without label information.
This paper tends to break through the common choice of employing propagation-based GNNs, which aggregate representations of nodes belonging to different classes and tend to lose discriminative information. If the propagation in each ego-network is just between the nodes from the same class, the obtained representation matrix should follow the low-rank characteristic. To meet this requirement, this paper proposes the Low-Rank Decomposition-based GNNs (LRD-GNN-Matrix) by employing Low-Rank Decomposition to the attribute matrix.
Furthermore, to incorporate long-distance information, Low-Rank Tensor Decomposition-based GNN (LRD-GNN-Tensor) is proposed by constructing the node attribute tensor from selected similar ego-networks and performing Low-Rank Tensor Decomposition. The employed tensor nuclear norm facilitates the capture of the long-distance relationship between original and selected similar ego-networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and the robustness of LRD-GNNs.
tl;dr: We provide new SOTA methods for DP image classification when training from scratch by using image priors
In privacy-preserving machine learning, differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) performs worse than SGD due to per-sample gradient clipping and noise addition.
A recent focus in private learning research is improving the performance of DP-SGD on private data by incorporating priors that are learned on real-world public data.
In this work, we explore how we can improve the privacy-utility tradeoff of DP-SGD by learning priors from images generated by random processes and transferring these priors to private data.
We propose DP-RandP, a three-phase approach.
We attain new state-of-the-art accuracy when training from scratch on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, MedMNIST and ImageNet for a range of privacy budgets $\\varepsilon \\in [1, 8]$. In particular, we improve the previous best reported accuracy on CIFAR10 from $60.6 \\%$ to $72.3 \\%$ for $\\varepsilon=1$.
Geometric deep learning enables the encoding of physical symmetries in modeling 3D objects. Despite rapid progress in encoding 3D symmetries into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a comprehensive evaluation of the expressiveness of these network architectures through a local-to-global analysis lacks today. In this paper, we propose a local hierarchy of 3D isomorphism to evaluate the expressive power of equivariant GNNs and investigate the process of representing global geometric information from local patches. Our work leads to two crucial modules for designing expressive and efficient geometric GNNs; namely local substructure encoding (\textbf{LSE}) and frame transition encoding (\textbf{FTE}). To demonstrate the applicability of our theory, we propose LEFTNet which effectively implements these modules and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both scalar-valued and vector-valued molecular property prediction tasks. We further point out future design space for 3D equivariant graph neural networks. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/yuanqidu/LeftNet}.
We study an abstract framework for interactive learning called interactive estimation in which the goal is to estimate a target from its ``similarity'' to points queried by the learner.
We introduce a combinatorial measure called Dissimilarity dimension which largely captures learnability in our model.
We present a simple, general, and broadly-applicable algorithm, for which we obtain both regret and PAC generalization bounds that are polynomial in the new dimension. We show that our framework subsumes and thereby unifies two classic learning models:
statistical-query learning and structured bandits. We also delineate how the Dissimilarity dimension is related to well-known parameters for both frameworks, in some cases yielding significantly improved analyses.
tl;dr: We present a set of technique for integrating Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers into the forward and backward passes of a deep network layer, called SMTLayer
Recent techniques that integrate solver layers into Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown promise in bridging a long-standing gap between inductive learning and symbolic reasoning techniques. In this paper we present a set of techniques for integrating Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers into the forward and backward passes of a deep network layer, called SMTLayer.
Using this approach, one can encode rich domain knowledge into the network in the form of mathematical formulas.
In the forward pass, the solver uses symbols produced by prior layers, along with these formulas, to construct inferences; in the backward pass, the solver informs updates to the network, driving it towards representations that are compatible with the solver's theory.
Notably, the solver need not be differentiable. We implement SMTLayer as a Pytorch module, and our empirical results show that it leads to models that 1) require fewer training samples than conventional models, 2) that are robust to certain types of covariate shift, and 3) that ultimately learn representations that are consistent with symbolic knowledge, and thus naturally interpretable.
Explicit finite-sample statistical guarantees on model performance are an important ingredient in responsible machine learning. Previous work has focused mainly on bounding either the expected loss of a predictor or the probability that an individual prediction will incur a loss value in a specified range. However, for many high-stakes applications it is crucial to understand and control the \textit{dispersion} of a loss distribution, or the extent to which different members of a population experience unequal effects of algorithmic decisions. We initiate the study of distribution-free control of statistical dispersion measures with societal implications and propose a simple yet flexible framework that allows us to handle a much richer class of statistical functionals beyond previous work. Our methods are verified through experiments in toxic comment detection, medical imaging, and film recommendation.
tl;dr: We prove necessary and sufficient conditions for the statistical consistency of surrogate risks in the adversarial setting
We study the consistency of surrogate risks for robust binary classification.
It is common to learn robust classifiers by adversarial training, which seeks to minimize the expected $0$-$1$ loss when each example can be maliciously corrupted within a small ball.
We give a simple and complete characterization of the set of surrogate loss functions that are \emph{consistent}, i.e., that can replace the $0$-$1$ loss without affecting the minimizing sequences of the original adversarial risk, for any data distribution.
We also prove a quantitative version of adversarial consistency for the $\rho$-margin loss.
Our results reveal that the class of adversarially consistent surrogates is substantially smaller than in the standard setting, where many common surrogates are known to be consistent.
tl;dr: Propose a unified framework to predict the behavior of both deterministic and stochastic systems by generative model
Accurate prediction of dynamical systems in unstructured meshes has recently shown successes in scientific simulations. Many dynamical systems have a nonnegligible level of stochasticity introduced by various factors (e.g. chaoticity), so there is a need for a unified framework that captures both deterministic and stochastic components in the rollouts of these systems. Inspired by regeneration learning, we propose a new model that combines generative and sequential networks to model dynamical systems. Specifically, we use an autoencoder to learn compact representations of full-space physical variables in a low-dimensional space. We then integrate a transformer with a conditional normalizing flow model to model the temporal sequence of latent representations. We evaluate the new model in both deterministic and stochastic systems. The model outperforms several competitive baseline models and makes more accurate predictions of deterministic systems. Its own prediction error is also reflected in its uncertainty estimations. When predicting stochastic systems, the proposed model generates high-quality rollout samples. The mean and variance of these samples well match the statistics of samples computed from expensive numerical simulations.
394. Discriminative Calibration: Check Bayesian Computation from Simulations and Flexible Classifier
tl;dr: We use a classifier+statistical feature approach to diagnose Bayesian computations, applicable to MCMC, variational and simulation based inference. We provide a high-power test and a divergence estimate.
To check the accuracy of Bayesian computations, it is common to use rank-based simulation-based calibration (SBC). However, SBC has drawbacks: The test statistic is somewhat ad-hoc, interactions are difficult to examine, multiple testing is a challenge, and the resulting p-value is not a divergence metric. We propose to replace the marginal rank test with a flexible classification approach that learns test statistics from data. This measure typically has a higher statistical power than the SBC test and returns an interpretable divergence measure of miscalibration, computed from classification accuracy. This approach can be used with different data generating processes to address simulation-based inference or traditional inference methods like Markov chain Monte Carlo or variational inference. We illustrate an automated implementation using neural networks and statistically-inspired features, and validate the method with numerical and real data experiments.
tl;dr: We mathematically prove that trained Transformers cluster in long time.
Viewing Transformers as interacting particle systems, we describe the geometry of learned representations when the weights are not time-dependent. We show that particles, representing tokens, tend to cluster toward particular limiting objects as time tends to infinity. Using techniques from dynamical systems and partial differential equations, we show that type of limiting object that emerges depends on the spectrum of the value matrix. Additionally, in the one-dimensional case we prove that the self-attention matrix converges to a low-rank Boolean matrix. The combination of these results mathematically confirms the empirical observation made by Vaswani et al. [ VSP`17 ] that leaders appear in a sequence of tokens when processed by Transformers.
tl;dr: Find and evaluate several methods to bound the loss of optimal multi-class classifiers against test-time attacks
Finding classifiers robust to adversarial examples is critical for their safe
deployment. Determining the robustness of the best possible classifier under a
given threat model for a fixed data distribution and comparing it to that
achieved by state-of-the-art training methods is thus an important diagnostic
tool. In this paper, we find achievable information-theoretic lower bounds on
robust loss in the presence of a test-time attacker for *multi-class
classifiers on any discrete dataset*. We provide a general framework for finding
the optimal $0-1$ loss that revolves around the construction of a conflict
hypergraph from the data and adversarial constraints. The prohibitive cost of
this formulation in practice leads us to formulate other variants of the attacker-classifier
game that more efficiently determine the range of the optimal loss. Our
valuation shows, for the first time, an analysis of the gap to optimal
robustness for classifiers in the multi-class setting on benchmark datasets.
tl;dr: We develop a novel framework that guarantees last-iterate convergence in Wasserstein distance for many advanced sampling algorithms at once.
Non-convex sampling is a key challenge in machine learning, central to non-convex optimization in deep learning as well as to approximate probabilistic inference. Despite its significance, theoretically there remain some important challenges: Existing guarantees suffer from the drawback of lacking guarantees for the last-iterates, and little is known beyond the elementary schemes of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics. To address these issues, we develop a novel framework that lifts the above issues by harnessing several tools from the theory of dynamical systems. Our key result is that, for a large class of state-of-the-art sampling schemes, their last-iterate convergence in Wasserstein distances can be reduced to the study of their continuous-time counterparts, which is much better understood. Coupled with standard assumptions of MCMC sampling, our theory immediately yields the last-iterate Wasserstein convergence of many advanced sampling schemes such as mirror Langevin, proximal, randomized mid-point, and Runge-Kutta methods.
tl;dr: The paper proposes a highly parallelizable, efficient gradient-free update rule formulated as an Optimal Transport problem, applying to trajectory optimization for optimizing a batch of high-dimensional trajectories on multiple non-convex objectives.
Motion planning is still an open problem for many disciplines, e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, due to their need for high computational resources that hinder real-time, efficient decision-making. A class of methods striving to provide smooth solutions is gradient-based trajectory optimization. However, those methods usually suffer from bad local minima, while for many settings, they may be inapplicable due to the absence of easy-to-access gradients of the optimization objectives. In response to these issues, we introduce Motion Planning via Optimal Transport (MPOT)---a \textit{gradient-free} method that optimizes a batch of smooth trajectories over highly nonlinear costs, even for high-dimensional tasks, while imposing smoothness through a Gaussian Process dynamics prior via the planning-as-inference perspective. To facilitate batch trajectory optimization, we introduce an original zero-order and highly-parallelizable update rule----the Sinkhorn Step, which uses the regular polytope family for its search directions. Each regular polytope, centered on trajectory waypoints, serves as a local cost-probing neighborhood, acting as a \textit{trust region} where the Sinkhorn Step ``transports'' local waypoints toward low-cost regions. We theoretically show that Sinkhorn Step guides the optimizing parameters toward local minima regions of non-convex objective functions. We then show the efficiency of MPOT in a range of problems from low-dimensional point-mass navigation to high-dimensional whole-body robot motion planning, evincing its superiority compared to popular motion planners, paving the way for new applications of optimal transport in motion planning.
tl;dr: We scale self-training for open-vocabulary object detection to billions of examples, leading to massive improvements in detection performance.
Open-vocabulary object detection has benefited greatly from pretrained vision-language models, but is still limited by the amount of available detection training data. While detection training data can be expanded by using Web image-text pairs as weak supervision, this has not been done at scales comparable to image-level pretraining. Here, we scale up detection data with self-training, which uses an existing detector to generate pseudo-box annotations on image-text pairs. Major challenges in scaling self-training are the choice of label space, pseudo-annotation filtering, and training efficiency. We present the OWLv2 model and OWL-ST self-training recipe, which address these challenges. OWLv2 surpasses the performance of previous state-of-the-art open-vocabulary detectors already at comparable training scales (~10M examples). However, with OWL-ST, we can scale to over 1B examples, yielding further large improvement: With an L/14 architecture, OWL-ST improves AP on LVIS rare classes, for which the model has seen no human box annotations, from 31.2% to 44.6% (43% relative improvement). OWL-ST unlocks Web-scale training for open-world localization, similar to what has been seen for image classification and language modelling. Code and checkpoints are available on GitHub.
tl;dr: Most multiple instance learning papers don't check if they respect the multiple instance assumption. Some simple unit tests detect this.
Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a sub-domain of classification problems with positive and negative labels and a "bag" of inputs, where the label is positive if and only if a positive element is contained within the bag, and otherwise is negative. Training in this context requires associating the bag-wide label to instance-level information, and implicitly contains a causal assumption and asymmetry to the task (i.e., you can't swap the labels without changing the semantics). MIL problems occur in healthcare (one malignant cell indicates cancer), cyber security (one malicious executable makes an infected computer), and many other tasks. In this work, we examine five of the most prominent deep-MIL models and find that none of them respects the standard MIL assumption. They are able to learn anti-correlated instances, i.e., defaulting to "positive" labels until seeing a negative counter-example, which should not be possible for a correct MIL model. We suspect that enhancements and other works derived from these models will share the same issue. In any context in which these models are being used, this creates the potential for learning incorrect models, which creates risk of operational failure. We identify and demonstrate this problem via a proposed ``algorithmic unit test'', where we create synthetic datasets that can be solved by a MIL respecting model, and which clearly reveal learning that violates MIL assumptions. The five evaluated methods each fail one or more of these tests. This provides a model-agnostic way to identify violations of modeling assumptions, which we hope will be useful for future development and evaluation of MIL models.
tl;dr: We derive the first generalization guarantee for the representation learning in terms of the minimum description length of the representations (latent variables).
A major challenge in designing efficient statistical supervised learning algorithms is finding representations that perform well not only on available training samples but also on unseen data. While the study of representation learning has spurred much interest, most existing such approaches are heuristic; and very little is known about theoretical generalization guarantees. For example, the information bottleneck method seeks a good generalization by finding a minimal description of the input that is maximally informative about the label variable, where minimality and informativeness are both measured by Shannon’s mutual information.
In this paper, we establish a compressibility framework that allows us to derive upper bounds on the generalization error of a representation learning algorithm in terms of the "Minimum Description Length'' (MDL) of the labels or the latent variables (representations). Rather than the mutual information between the encoder’s input and the representation, which is often believed to reflect the algorithm’s generalization capability in the related literature but in fact, falls short of doing so, our new bounds involve the "multi-letter" relative entropy between the distribution of the representations (or labels) of the training and test sets and a fixed prior. In particular, these new bounds reflect the structure of the encoder and are not vacuous for deterministic algorithms. Our compressibility approach, which is information-theoretic in nature, builds upon that of Blum-Langford for PAC-MDL bounds and introduces two essential ingredients: block-coding and lossy-compression. The latter allows our approach to subsume the so-called geometrical compressibility as a special case. To the best knowledge of the authors, the established generalization bounds are the first of their kind for Information Bottleneck type encoders and representation learning. Finally, we partly exploit the theoretical results by introducing a new data-dependent prior. Numerical simulations illustrate the advantages of well-chosen such priors over classical priors used in IB.
tl;dr: We prove tempered and benign overfitting for ReLU NNs in various settings
Overparameterized neural networks (NNs) are observed to generalize well even when trained to perfectly fit noisy data. This phenomenon motivated a large body of work on "benign overfitting", where interpolating predictors achieve near-optimal performance. Recently, it was conjectured and empirically observed that the behavior of NNs is often better described as "tempered overfitting", where the performance is non-optimal yet also non-trivial, and degrades as a function of the noise level. However, a theoretical justification of this claim for non-linear NNs has been lacking so far. In this work, we provide several results that aim at bridging these complementing views. We study a simple classification setting with 2-layer ReLU NNs, and prove that under various assumptions, the type of overfitting transitions from tempered in the extreme case of one-dimensional data, to benign in high dimensions. Thus, we show that the input dimension has a crucial role on the overfitting profile in this setting, which we also validate empirically for intermediate dimensions. Overall, our results shed light on the intricate connections between the dimension, sample size, architecture and training algorithm on the one hand, and the type of resulting overfitting on the other hand.
Recent research has developed several Monte Carlo methods for estimating the normalization constant (partition function) based on the idea of annealing. This means sampling successively from a path of distributions which interpolate between a tractable "proposal" distribution and the unnormalized "target" distribution. Prominent estimators in this family include annealed importance sampling and annealed noise-contrastive estimation (NCE). Such methods hinge on a number of design choices: which estimator to use, which path of distributions to use and whether to use a path at all; so far, there is no definitive theory on which choices are efficient. Here, we evaluate each design choice by the asymptotic estimation error it produces. First, we show that using NCE is more efficient than the importance sampling estimator, but in the limit of infinitesimal path steps, the difference vanishes. Second, we find that using the geometric path brings down the estimation error from an exponential to a polynomial function of the parameter distance between the target and proposal distributions. Third, we find that the arithmetic path, while rarely used, can offer optimality properties over the universally-used geometric path. In fact, in a particular limit, the optimal path is arithmetic. Based on this theory, we finally propose a two-step estimator to approximate the optimal path in an efficient way.
tl;dr: The paper introduces a framework to address fairness and bias in Canonical Correlation Analysis, ensuring comparable correlation levels across groups without sacrificing accuracy.
This paper investigates fairness and bias in Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), a widely used statistical technique for examining the relationship between two sets of variables. We present a framework that alleviates unfairness by minimizing the correlation disparity error associated with protected attributes. Our approach enables the CCA model to learn global projection matrices from all data points while ensuring that these matrices yield comparable correlation levels to group-specific projection matrices. Experimental evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our method in reducing unfairness without compromising CCA model accuracy. These findings emphasize the importance of considering fairness in CCA applications to real-world problems.
tl;dr: We introduce ReSync algorithm for solving robust rotation synchronization and provide strong theoretical guarantees.
This work presents ReSync, a Riemannian subgradient-based algorithm for solving the robust rotation synchronization problem, which arises in various engineering applications. ReSync solves a least-unsquared minimization formulation over the rotation group, which is nonsmooth and nonconvex, and aims at recovering the underlying rotations directly. We provide strong theoretical guarantees for ReSync under the random corruption setting. Specifically, we first show that the initialization procedure of ReSync yields a proper initial point that lies in a local region around the ground-truth rotations. We next establish the weak sharpness property of the aforementioned formulation and then utilize this property to derive the local linear convergence of ReSync to the ground-truth rotations. By combining these guarantees, we conclude that ReSync converges linearly to the ground-truth rotations under appropriate conditions. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of ReSync.
tl;dr: We propose a new framework based on mean field theory and analyze adversarial training theoretically.
Although adversarial training is known to be effective against adversarial examples, training dynamics are not well understood. In this study, we present the first theoretical analysis of adversarial training in random deep neural networks without any assumptions on data distributions. We introduce a new theoretical framework based on mean field theory, which addresses the limitations of existing mean field-based approaches. Based on the framework, we derive the (empirically tight) upper bounds of $\ell_q$ norm-based adversarial loss with $\ell_p$ norm-based adversarial examples for various values of $p$ and $q$. Moreover, we prove that networks without shortcuts are generally not adversarially trainable and that adversarial training reduces network capacity. We also show that the network width alleviates these issues. Furthermore, the various impacts of input and output dimensions on the upper bounds and time evolution of weight variance are presented.
We present a new high-quality validated image caption rating (VICR) dataset. How well a caption fits an image can be difficult to assess due to the subjective nature of caption quality. How do we evaluate whether a caption is good? We generated a new dataset to help answer this question by using our new image caption rating system, which consists of a novel robust rating scale and gamified approach to gathering human ratings. We show that our approach is consistent and teachable. 113 participants were involved in generating the dataset, which is composed of 68,217 ratings among 15,646 image-caption pairs. Our new dataset has greater inter-rater agreement than the state of the art, and custom machine learning rating predictors that were trained on our dataset outperform previous metrics. We improve over Flickr8k-Expert in Kendall's $W$ by 12\% and in Fleiss' $\kappa$ by 19\%, and thus provide a new benchmark dataset for image caption rating.
tl;dr: Text-driven high-quality 3D-consistent texture generation for mesh retexturing
This paper presents Decorate3D, a versatile and user-friendly method for the creation and editing of 3D objects using images. Decorate3D models a real-world object of interest by neural radiance field (NeRF) and decomposes the NeRF representation into an explicit mesh representation, a view-dependent texture, and a diffuse UV texture. Subsequently, users can either manually edit the UV or provide a prompt for the automatic generation of a new 3D-consistent texture. To achieve high-quality 3D texture generation, we propose a structure-aware score distillation sampling method to optimize a neural UV texture based on user-defined text and empower an image diffusion model with 3D-consistent generation capability. Furthermore, we introduce a few-view resampling training method and utilize a super-resolution model to obtain refined high-resolution UV textures (2048$\times$2048) for 3D texturing. Extensive experiments collectively validate the superior performance of Decorate3D in retexturing real-world 3D objects. Project page: https://decorate3d.github.io/Decorate3D/.
tl;dr: We introduce a method to increase the capacity of modern transformers without significantly increasing the computational burden.
It has been well established that increasing scale in deep transformer networks leads to improved quality and performance. However, this increase in scale often comes with prohibitive increases in compute cost and inference latency. We introduce Alternating Updates (AltUp), a simple-to-implement method to increase a model's capacity without the computational burden. AltUp enables the widening of the learned representation, i.e., the token embedding, while only incurring a negligible increase in latency. AltUp achieves this by working on a subblock of the widened representation at each layer and using a predict-and-correct mechanism to update the inactivated blocks. We present extensions of AltUp, such as its applicability to the sequence dimension, and demonstrate how AltUp can be synergistically combined with existing approaches, such as Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models, to obtain efficient models with even
higher capacity. Our experiments on benchmark transformer models and language tasks demonstrate the consistent effectiveness of AltUp on a diverse set of scenarios. Notably, on SuperGLUE and SQuAD benchmarks, AltUp enables up to $87\%$ speedup relative to the dense baselines at the same accuracy.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a method for applying quasi-random numbers to Langevin Monte Carlo algorithms.
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) and its stochastic gradient versions are powerful algorithms for sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions. To sample from a distribution with density $\pi(\theta)\propto \exp(-U(\theta)) $, LMC iteratively generates the next sample by taking a step in the gradient direction $\nabla U$ with added Gaussian perturbations. Expectations w.r.t. the target distribution $\pi$ are estimated by averaging over LMC samples. In ordinary Monte Carlo, it is well known that the estimation error can be substantially reduced by replacing independent random samples by quasi-random samples like low-discrepancy sequences. In this work, we show that the estimation error of LMC can also be reduced by using quasi-random samples. Specifically, we propose to use completely uniformly distributed (CUD) sequences with certain low-discrepancy property to generate the Gaussian perturbations. Under smoothness and convexity conditions, we prove that LMC with a low-discrepancy CUD sequence achieves smaller error than standard LMC. The theoretical analysis is supported by compelling numerical experiments, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
411. Zero-sum Polymatrix Markov Games: Equilibrium Collapse and Efficient Computation of Nash Equilibria
The works of (Daskalakis et al., 2009, 2022; Jin et al., 2022; Deng et al., 2023) indicate that computing Nash equilibria in multi-player Markov games is a computationally hard task. This fact raises the question of whether or not computational intractability can be circumvented if one focuses on specific classes of Markov games. One such example is two-player zero-sum Markov games, in which efficient ways to compute a Nash equilibrium are known. Inspired by zero-sum polymatrix normal-form games (Cai et al., 2016), we define a class of zero-sum multi-agent Markov games in which there are only pairwise interactions described by a graph that changes per state.
For this class of Markov games, we show that an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium can be found efficiently. To do so, we generalize the techniques of (Cai et al., 2016), by showing that the set of coarse-correlated equilibria collapses to the set of Nash equilibria. Afterwards, it is possible to use any algorithm in the literature that computes approximate coarse-correlated equilibria Markovian policies to get an approximate Nash equilibrium.
tl;dr: Seal is a spatial and temporal consistent framework that leverages vision foundation models for self-supervised learning on large-scale point clouds.
Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have opened up new possibilities for versatile and efficient visual perception. In this work, we introduce Seal, a novel framework that harnesses VFMs for segmenting diverse automotive point cloud sequences. Seal exhibits three appealing properties: i) Scalability: VFMs are directly distilled into point clouds, obviating the need for annotations in either 2D or 3D during pretraining. ii) Consistency: Spatial and temporal relationships are enforced at both the camera-to-LiDAR and point-to-segment regularization stages, facilitating cross-modal representation learning. iii) Generalizability: Seal enables knowledge transfer in an off-the-shelf manner to downstream tasks involving diverse point clouds, including those from real/synthetic, low/high-resolution, large/small-scale, and clean/corrupted datasets. Extensive experiments conducted on eleven different point cloud datasets showcase the effectiveness and superiority of Seal. Notably, Seal achieves a remarkable 45.0% mIoU on nuScenes after linear probing, surpassing random initialization by 36.9% mIoU and outperforming prior arts by 6.1% mIoU. Moreover, Seal demonstrates significant performance gains over existing methods across 20 different few-shot fine-tuning tasks on all eleven tested point cloud datasets. The code is available at this link.
tl;dr: We design, train, and evaluate a neural program synthesizer that can construct arbitrary lambda functions for use within higher-order functions to perform looping computations.
Search is an important technique in program synthesis that allows for adaptive strategies such as focusing on particular search directions based on execution results. Several prior works have demonstrated that neural models are effective at guiding program synthesis searches. However, a common drawback of those approaches is the inability to handle iterative loops, higher-order functions, or lambda functions, thus limiting prior neural searches from synthesizing longer and more general programs. We address this gap by designing a search algorithm called LambdaBeam that can construct arbitrary lambda functions that compose operations within a given DSL. We create semantic vector representations of the execution behavior of the lambda functions and train a neural policy network to choose which lambdas to construct during search, and pass them as arguments to higher-order functions to perform looping computations. Our experiments show that LambdaBeam outperforms neural, symbolic, and LLM-based techniques in an integer list manipulation domain.
Privacy and communication constraints are two major bottlenecks in federated learning (FL) and analytics (FA). We study the optimal accuracy of mean and frequency estimation (canonical models for FL and FA respectively) under joint communication and $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy (DP) constraints. We consider both the central and the multi-message shuffled DP models. We show that in order to achieve the optimal $\ell_2$ error under $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP, it is sufficient for each client to send $\Theta\left( n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right)\right)$ bits for FL %{\color{blue}(assuming the dimension $d \gg n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right)$)}
and $\Theta\left(\log\left( n\min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right) \right)\right)$ bits for FA to the server, where $n$ is the number of participating clients. Without compression, each client needs $O(d)$ bits and $O\left(\log d\right)$ bits for the mean and frequency estimation problems respectively (where $d$ corresponds to the number of trainable parameters in FL or the domain size in FA), meaning that we can get significant savings in the regime $ n \min\left(\varepsilon, \varepsilon^2\right) = o(d)$, which is often the relevant regime in practice.
We propose two different ways to leverage compression for privacy amplification and achieve the optimal privacy-communication-accuracy trade-offs. In both cases, each client communicates only partial information about its sample and we show that privacy is amplified by randomly selecting the part contributed by each client. In the first method, the random selection is revealed to the server, which results in a central DP guarantee with optimal privacy-communication-accuracy trade-offs. In the second method, the random data parts from the clients are shuffled by a secure shuffler resulting in a multi-message shuffling scheme with the same optimal trade-offs. As a result, we establish the optimal three-way trade-offs between privacy, communication, and accuracy for both the central DP and multi-message shuffling frameworks.
tl;dr: We give improved algorithms for training regression models with label differential privacy.
We propose a new family of label randomizers for training _regression_ models under the constraint of label differential privacy (DP). In particular, we leverage the trade-offs between bias and variance to construct better label randomizers depending on a privately estimated prior distribution over the labels. We demonstrate that these randomizers achieve state-of-the-art privacy-utility trade-offs on several datasets, highlighting the importance of reducing bias when training neural networks with label DP. We also provide theoretical results shedding light on the structural properties of the optimal unbiased randomizers.
tl;dr: In this paper, we provide the first provably oracle-efficient, no-regret algorithm for prediction in piecewise affine systems
The problem of piecewise affine (PWA) regression and planning is of foundational importance to the study of online learning, control, and robotics, where it provides a theoretically and empirically tractable setting to study systems undergoing sharp changes in the dynamics. Unfortunately, due to the discontinuities that arise when crossing into different ``pieces,'' learning in general sequential settings is impossible and practical algorithms are forced to resort to heuristic approaches. This paper builds on the recently developed smoothed online learning framework and provides the first algorithms for prediction and simulation in PWA systems whose regret is polynomial in all relevant problem parameters under a weak smoothness assumption; moreover, our algorithms are efficient in the number of calls to an optimization oracle. We further apply our results to the problems of one-step prediction and multi-step simulation regret in piecewise affine dynamical systems, where the learner is tasked with simulating trajectories and regret is measured in terms of the Wasserstein distance between simulated and true data. Along the way, we develop several technical tools of more general interest.
tl;dr: Perform imitation learning by using a behavioural cloning policy to construct an estimate of a shaped reward function.
Imitation learning methods seek to learn from an expert either through behavioral cloning (BC) for the policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for the reward.
Such methods enable agents to learn complex tasks from humans that are difficult to capture with hand-designed reward functions.
Choosing between BC or IRL for imitation depends on the quality and state-action coverage of the demonstrations, as well as additional access to the Markov decision process.
Hybrid strategies that combine BC and IRL are rare, as initial policy optimization against inaccurate rewards diminishes the benefit of pretraining the policy with BC.
Our work derives an imitation method that captures the strengths of both BC and IRL.
In the entropy-regularized (`soft') reinforcement learning setting, we show that the behavioral-cloned policy can be used as both a shaped reward and a critic hypothesis space by inverting the regularized policy update.
This coherency facilitates fine-tuning cloned policies using the reward estimate and additional interactions with the environment.
This approach conveniently achieves imitation learning through initial behavioral cloning and subsequent refinement via RL with online or offline data sources.
The simplicity of the approach enables graceful scaling to high-dimensional and vision-based tasks, with stable learning and minimal hyperparameter tuning, in contrast to adversarial approaches.
For the open-source implementation and simulation results, see https://joemwatson.github.io/csil/.
tl;dr: We study proper PAC learnability under relaxed notions of adversarial robustness.
Recently, Montasser at al. (2019) showed that finite VC dimension is not sufficient for proper adversarially robust PAC learning. In light of this hardness, there is a growing effort to study what type of relaxations to the adversarially robust PAC learning setup can enable proper learnability. In this work, we initiate the study of proper learning under relaxations of the worst-case robust loss. We give a family of robust loss relaxations under which VC classes are properly PAC learnable with sample complexity close to what one would require in the standard PAC learning setup. On the other hand, we show that for an existing and natural relaxation of the worst-case robust loss, finite VC dimension is not sufficient for proper learning. Lastly, we give new generalization guarantees for the adversarially robust empirical risk minimizer.
tl;dr: We derive tight generalization bounds for NNs trained by gradient flow through a connection between NN and kernel machine.
Deep neural networks have been increasingly used in real-world applications, making it critical to ensure their ability to adapt to new, unseen data. In this paper, we study the generalization capability of neural networks trained with (stochastic) gradient flow. We establish a new connection between the loss dynamics of gradient flow and general kernel machines by proposing a new kernel, called loss path kernel. This kernel measures the similarity between two data points by evaluating the agreement between loss gradients along the path determined by the gradient flow. Based on this connection, we derive a new generalization upper bound that applies to general neural network architectures. This new bound is tight and strongly correlated with the true generalization error. We apply our results to guide the design of neural architecture search (NAS) and demonstrate favorable performance compared with state-of-the-art NAS algorithms through numerical experiments.
Open-world classification systems should discern out-of-distribution (OOD) data whose labels deviate from those of in-distribution (ID) cases, motivating recent studies in OOD detection. Advanced works, despite their promising progress, may still fail in the open world, owing to the lacking knowledge about unseen OOD data in advance. Although one can access auxiliary OOD data (distinct from unseen ones) for model training, it remains to analyze how such auxiliary data will work in the open world. To this end, we delve into such a problem from a learning theory perspective, finding that the distribution discrepancy between the auxiliary and the unseen real OOD data is the key to affect the open-world detection performance. Accordingly, we propose Distributional-Augmented OOD Learning (DAOL), alleviating the OOD distribution discrepancy by crafting an OOD distribution set that contains all distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered on the auxiliary OOD distribution. We justify that the predictor trained over the worst OOD data in the ball can shrink the OOD distribution discrepancy, thus improving the open-world detection performance given only the auxiliary OOD data. We conduct extensive evaluations across representative OOD detection setups, demonstrating the superiority of our DAOL over its advanced counterparts.
421. Randomized and Deterministic Maximin-share Approximations for Fractionally Subadditive Valuations
We consider the problem of guaranteeing maximin-share ($\MMS$) when allocating a set of indivisible items to a set of agents with fractionally subadditive ($\XOS$) valuations.
For $\XOS$ valuations, it has been previously shown that for some instances no allocation can guarantee a fraction better than $1/2$ of maximin-share to all the agents. Also, a deterministic allocation exists that guarantees $0.219225$ of the maximin-share of each agent.
Our results involve both deterministic and randomized allocations. On the deterministic side, we improve the best approximation guarantee for fractionally subadditive valuations to $3/13 = 0.230769$. We develop new ideas on allocating large items in our allocation algorithm which might be of independent interest. Furthermore, we investigate randomized algorithms and the Best-of-both-worlds fairness guarantees. We propose a randomized allocation that is $1/4$-$\MMS$ ex-ante and $1/8$-$\MMS$ ex-post for $\XOS$ valuations. Moreover, we prove an upper bound of $3/4$ on the ex-ante guarantee for this class of valuations.
Feature transformation aims to generate new pattern-discriminative feature space from original features to improve downstream machine learning (ML) task performances. However, the discrete search space for the optimal feature explosively grows on the basis of combinations of features and operations from low-order forms to high-order forms. Existing methods, such as exhaustive search, expansion reduction, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, and iterative greedy, suffer from large search space. Overly emphasizing efficiency in algorithm design usually sacrifice stability or robustness. To fundamentally fill this gap, we reformulate discrete feature transformation as a continuous space optimization task and develop an embedding-optimization-reconstruction framework. This framework includes four steps: 1) reinforcement-enhanced data preparation, aiming to prepare high-quality transformation-accuracy training data; 2) feature transformation operation sequence embedding, intending to encapsulate the knowledge of prepared training data within a continuous space; 3) gradient-steered optimal embedding search, dedicating to uncover potentially superior embeddings within the learned space; 4) transformation operation sequence reconstruction, striving to reproduce the feature transformation solution to pinpoint the optimal feature space. Finally, extensive experiments and case studies are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. The code and data are publicly accessible https://www.dropbox.com/sh/imh8ckui7va3k5u/AACulQegVx0MuywYyoCqSdVPa?dl=0.
We study the convergence behavior of the celebrated temporal-difference (TD) learning algorithm. By looking at the algorithm through the lens of optimization, we first argue that TD can be viewed as an iterative optimization algorithm where the function to be minimized changes per iteration. By carefully investigating the divergence displayed by TD on a classical counter example, we identify two forces that determine the convergent or divergent behavior of the algorithm. We next formalize our discovery in the linear TD setting with quadratic loss and prove that convergence of TD hinges on the interplay between these two forces. We extend this optimization perspective to prove convergence of TD in a much broader setting than just linear approximation and squared loss. Our results provide a theoretical explanation for the successful application of TD in reinforcement learning.
Motivated by the striking ability of transformers for in-context learning, several works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate gradient descent iterations.
Going beyond the question of expressivity, we ask: \emph{Can transformers can learn to implement such algorithms by training over random problem instances?} To our knowledge, we make the first theoretical progress toward this question via analysis of the loss landscape for linear transformers trained over random instances of linear regression. For a single attention layer, we prove the global minimum of the training objective implements a single iteration of preconditioned gradient descent.
Notably, the preconditioning matrix not only adapts to the input distribution but also to the variance induced by data inadequacy. For a transformer with $k$ attention layers, we prove certain critical points of the training objective implement $k$ iterations of preconditioned gradient descent. Our results call for future theoretical studies on learning algorithms by training transformers.
We investigate the problem of machine learning-based (ML) predictive inference on individual treatment effects (ITEs). Previous work has focused primarily on developing ML-based “meta-learners” that can provide point estimates of the conditional average treatment effect (CATE)—these are model-agnostic approaches for combining intermediate nuisance estimates to produce estimates of CATE. In this paper, we develop conformal meta-learners, a general framework for issuing predictive intervals for ITEs by applying the standard conformal prediction (CP) procedure on top of CATE meta-learners. We focus on a broad class of meta-learners based on two-stage pseudo-outcome regression and develop a stochastic ordering framework to study their validity. We show that inference with conformal meta-learners is marginally valid if their (pseudo-outcome) conformity scores stochastically dominate “oracle” conformity scores evaluated on the unobserved ITEs. Additionally, we prove that commonly used CATE meta-learners, such as the doubly-robust learner, satisfy a model- and distribution-free stochastic (or convex) dominance condition, making their conformal inferences valid for practically-relevant levels of target coverage. Whereas existing procedures conduct inference on nuisance parameters (i.e., potential outcomes) via weighted CP, conformal meta-learners enable direct inference on the target parameter (ITE). Numerical experiments show that conformal meta-learners provide valid intervals with competitive efficiency while retaining the favorable point estimation properties of CATE meta-learners.
Recurrent spiking neural networks (RSNNs) hold great potential for advancing artificial general intelligence, as they draw inspiration from the biological nervous system and show promise in modeling complex dynamics.
However, the widely-used surrogate gradient-based training methods for RSNNs are inherently inaccurate and unfriendly to neuromorphic hardware.
To address these limitations, we propose the evolving connectivity (EC) framework, an inference-only method for training RSNNs.
The EC framework reformulates weight-tuning as a search into parameterized connection probability distributions, and employs Natural Evolution Strategies (NES) for optimizing these distributions.
Our EC framework circumvents the need for gradients and features hardware-friendly characteristics, including sparse boolean connections and high scalability.
We evaluate EC on a series of standard robotic locomotion tasks, where it achieves comparable performance with deep neural networks and outperforms gradient-trained RSNNs, even solving the complex 17-DoF humanoid task.
Additionally, the EC framework demonstrates a two to three fold speedup in efficiency compared to directly evolving parameters.
By providing a performant and hardware-friendly alternative, the EC framework lays the groundwork for further energy-efficient applications of RSNNs and advances the development of neuromorphic devices.
Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/imoneoi/EvolvingConnectivity.
A long standing goal in neuroscience has been to elucidate the functional organization of the brain. Within higher visual cortex, functional accounts have remained relatively coarse, focusing on regions of interest (ROIs) and taking the form of selectivity for broad categories such as faces, places, bodies, food, or words. Because the identification of such ROIs has typically relied on manually assembled stimulus sets consisting of isolated objects in non-ecological contexts, exploring functional organization without robust a priori hypotheses has been challenging. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a data-driven approach in which we synthesize images predicted to activate a given brain region using paired natural images and fMRI recordings, bypassing the need for category-specific stimuli. Our approach -- Brain Diffusion for Visual Exploration ("BrainDiVE") -- builds on recent generative methods by combining large-scale diffusion models with brain-guided image synthesis. Validating our method, we demonstrate the ability to synthesize preferred images with appropriate semantic specificity for well-characterized category-selective ROIs. We then show that BrainDiVE can characterize differences between ROIs selective for the same high-level category. Finally we identify novel functional subdivisions within these ROIs, validated with behavioral data. These results advance our understanding of the fine-grained functional organization of human visual cortex, and provide well-specified constraints for further examination of cortical organization using hypothesis-driven methods.
tl;dr: We refine long convolution sequence models in quality and efficiency: (a) we develop method to distill compact recurrences from large convolutional models without loss in quality, and (b) we introduce architectural improvements.
Recent advances in attention-free sequence models rely on convolutions as alternatives to the attention operator at the core of Transformers. In particular, long convolution sequence models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many domains, but incur a significant cost during auto-regressive inference workloads -- naively requiring a full pass (or caching of activations) over the input sequence for each generated token -- similarly to attention-based models. In this paper, we seek to enable $\mathcal O(1)$ compute and memory cost per token in any pre-trained long convolution architecture to reduce memory footprint and increase throughput during generation. Concretely, our methods consist in extracting low-dimensional linear state-space models from each convolution layer, building upon rational interpolation and model-order reduction techniques. We further introduce architectural improvements to convolution-based layers such as Hyena: by weight-tying the filters across channels into heads, we achieve higher pre-training quality and reduce the number of filters to be distilled. The resulting model achieves 10x higher throughput than Transformers and 1.5x higher than Hyena at 1.3B parameters, without any loss in quality after distillation.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are considered promising brain-inspired energy-efficient models due to their event-driven computing paradigm.
The spatiotemporal spike patterns used to convey information in SNNs consist of both rate coding and temporal coding, where the temporal coding is crucial to biological-plausible learning rules such as spike-timing-dependent-plasticity.
The time-based training strategy is proposed to better utilize the temporal information in SNNs and learn in an asynchronous fashion.
However, some recent works train SNNs by the time-based scheme with rate-coding-dominated loss functions.
In this paper, we first map rate-based loss functions to time-based counterparts and explain why they are also applicable to the time-based training scheme.
After that, we infer that loss functions providing adequate positive overall gradients help training by theoretical analysis.
Based on this, we propose the enhanced counting loss to replace the commonly used mean square counting loss.
In addition, we transfer the training of scale factor in weight standardization into thresholds.
Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous time-based training methods in most datasets.
Our work provides insights for training SNNs with time-based schemes and offers a fresh perspective on the correlation between rate coding and temporal coding.
Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuyaoyu/SNN-temporal-training-losses.
The task of tuning regularization coefficients in regularized regression models with provable guarantees across problem instances still poses a significant challenge in the literature. This paper investigates the sample complexity of tuning regularization parameters in linear and logistic regressions under $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$-constraints in the data-driven setting. For the linear regression problem, by more carefully exploiting the structure of the dual function class, we provide a new upper bound for the pseudo-dimension of the validation loss function class, which significantly improves the best-known results on the problem. Remarkably, we also instantiate the first matching lower bound, proving our results are tight. For tuning the regularization parameters of logistic regression, we introduce a new approach to studying the learning guarantee via an approximation of the validation loss function class. We examine the pseudo-dimension of the approximation class and construct a uniform error bound between the validation loss function class and its approximation, which allows us to instantiate the first learning guarantee for the problem of tuning logistic regression regularization coefficients.
Interacting particle systems have proven highly successful in various machine
learning tasks, including approximate Bayesian inference and neural network optimization. However, the analysis of these
systems often relies on the simplifying assumption of the \emph{mean-field} limit, where particle
numbers approach infinity and infinitesimal step sizes are used. In practice, discrete time steps,
finite particle numbers, and complex integration schemes are employed, creating a theoretical gap
between continuous-time and discrete-time processes. In this paper, we present a novel framework
that establishes a precise connection between these discrete-time schemes and their corresponding
mean-field limits in terms of convergence properties and asymptotic behavior. By adopting a dynamical system perspective, our framework seamlessly integrates various numerical schemes that are typically analyzed independently.
For example, our framework provides a unified treatment of optimizing an infinite-width two-layer neural network and sampling via Stein Variational Gradient descent, which were previously studied in isolation.
We consider the problem of variational Bayesian inference in a latent variable model where a (possibly complex) observed stochastic process is governed by the unobserved solution of a latent stochastic differential equation (SDE). Motivated by the challenges that arise when trying to learn a latent SDE in $\mathbb{R}^n$ from large-scale data, such as efficient gradient computation, we take a step back and study a specific subclass instead. In our case, the SDE evolves inside a homogeneous latent space and is induced by stochastic dynamics of the corresponding (matrix) Lie group. In the context of learning problems, SDEs on the $n$-dimensional unit sphere are arguably the most relevant incarnation of this setup. For variational inference, the sphere not only facilitates using a uniform prior on the initial state of the SDE, but we also obtain a particularly simple and intuitive expression for the KL divergence between the approximate posterior and prior process in the evidence lower bound. We provide empirical evidence that a latent SDE of the proposed type can be learned efficiently by means of an existing one-step geometric Euler-Maruyama scheme. Despite restricting ourselves to a less diverse class of SDEs, we achieve competitive or even state-of-the-art performance on a collection of time series interpolation and classification benchmarks.
tl;dr: We address the feasibility imitation in a causal setting when certain context-specific independence relations are known.
Drawbacks of ignoring the causal mechanisms when performing imitation learning have recently been acknowledged. Several approaches both to assess the feasibility of imitation and to circumvent causal confounding and causal misspecifications have been proposed in the literature.
However, the potential benefits of the incorporation of additional information about the underlying causal structure are left unexplored.
An example of such overlooked information is context-specific independence (CSI), i.e., independence that holds only in certain contexts.
We consider the problem of causal imitation learning when CSI relations are known.
We prove that the decision problem pertaining to the feasibility of imitation in this setting is NP-hard.
Further, we provide a necessary graphical criterion for imitation learning under CSI and show that under a structural assumption, this criterion is also sufficient.
Finally, we propose a sound algorithmic approach for causal imitation learning which takes both CSI relations and data into account.
tl;dr: We propose a novel model to exploit the synergy between graph neural networks and orthogonal spline collocation to accelerate learned simulations of physical systems by interpolating solutions of graph neural networks.
While complex simulations of physical systems have been widely used in engineering and scientific computing, lowering their often prohibitive computational requirements has only recently been tackled by deep learning approaches. In this paper, we present GraphSplineNets, a novel deep-learning method to speed up the forecasting of physical systems by reducing the grid size and number of iteration steps of deep surrogate models. Our method uses two differentiable orthogonal spline collocation methods to efficiently predict response at any location in time and space. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive collocation strategy in space to prioritize sampling from the most important regions. GraphSplineNets improve the accuracy-speedup tradeoff in forecasting various dynamical systems with increasing complexity, including the heat equation, damped wave propagation, Navier-Stokes equations, and real-world ocean currents in both regular and irregular domains.
tl;dr: We present a diffusion model which generates joint traffic scenes, and investigate its performance and test time conditioning methods.
Simulation of autonomous vehicle systems requires that simulated traffic participants exhibit diverse and realistic behaviors. The use of prerecorded real-world traffic scenarios in simulation ensures realism but the rarity of safety critical events makes large scale collection of driving scenarios expensive. In this paper, we present DJINN -- a diffusion based method of generating traffic scenarios. Our approach jointly diffuses the trajectories of all agents, conditioned on a flexible set of state observations from the past, present, or future. On popular trajectory forecasting datasets, we report state of the art performance on joint trajectory metrics. In addition, we demonstrate how DJINN flexibly enables direct test-time sampling from a variety of valuable conditional distributions including goal-based sampling, behavior-class sampling, and scenario editing.
tl;dr: We present CoMeDi, a technique for generating a diverse set of good-faith conventions in multi-agent coordination games, and demonstrate its utility for human-AI collaboration.
Conventions are crucial for strong performance in cooperative multi-agent games, because they allow players to coordinate on a shared strategy without explicit communication. Unfortunately, standard multi-agent reinforcement learning techniques, such as self-play, converge to conventions that are arbitrary and non-diverse, leading to poor generalization when interacting with new partners. In this work, we present a technique for generating diverse conventions by (1) maximizing their rewards during self-play, while (2) minimizing their rewards when playing with previously discovered conventions (cross-play), stimulating conventions to be semantically different. To ensure that learned policies act in good faith despite the adversarial optimization of cross-play, we introduce mixed-play, where an initial state is randomly generated by sampling self-play and cross-play transitions and the player learns to maximize the self-play reward from this initial state. We analyze the benefits of our technique on various multi-agent collaborative games, including Overcooked, and find that our technique can adapt to the conventions of humans, surpassing human-level performance when paired with real users.
tl;dr: Our findings suggest that the neural mechanisms and behaviors of primate mental simulation are thus far most consistent with being optimized to future predict on reusable visual representations on dynamic scenes.
Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the consequences of actions.
However, the neural mechanisms underlying these computations are unclear.
We combine a goal-driven modeling approach with dense neurophysiological data and high-throughput human behavioral readouts that contain thousands of comparisons to directly impinge on this question.
Specifically, we construct and evaluate several classes of sensory-cognitive networks to predict the future state of rich, ethologically-relevant environments, ranging from self-supervised end-to-end models with pixel-wise or object-slot objectives, to models that future predict in the latent space of purely static image-pretrained or dynamic video-pretrained foundation models.
We find that ``scale is \emph{not} all you need'', and that many state-of-the-art machine learning models fail to perform well on our neural and behavioral benchmarks for future prediction.
In fact, only one class of models matches these data well overall.
We find that neural responses are currently best predicted by models trained to predict the future state of their environment in the \emph{latent} space of pretrained foundation models optimized for \emph{dynamic} scenes in a self-supervised manner.
These models also approach the neurons' ability to predict the environmental state variables that are visually hidden from view, despite not being explicitly trained to do so.
Finally, we find that not all foundation model latents are equal.
Notably, models that future predict in the latent space of video foundation models that are optimized to support a \emph{diverse} range of egocentric sensorimotor tasks, reasonably match \emph{both} human behavioral error patterns and neural dynamics across all environmental scenarios that we were able to test.
Overall, these findings suggest that the neural mechanisms and behaviors of primate mental simulation have strong inductive biases associated with them, and are thus far most consistent with being optimized to future predict on \emph{reusable} visual representations that are useful for Embodied AI more generally.
tl;dr: PDE-Refiner enables neural operator training for accurate and stable predictions over long time horizons.
Time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Recently, mostly due to the high computational cost of traditional solution techniques, deep neural network based surrogates have gained increased interest. The practical utility of such neural PDE solvers relies on their ability to provide accurate, stable predictions over long time horizons, which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of common temporal rollout strategies, identifying the neglect of non-dominant spatial frequency information, often associated with high frequencies in PDE solutions, as the primary pitfall limiting stable, accurate rollout performance. Based on these insights, we draw inspiration from recent advances in diffusion models to introduce PDE-Refiner; a novel model class that enables more accurate modeling of all frequency components via a multistep refinement process. We validate PDE-Refiner on challenging benchmarks of complex fluid dynamics, demonstrating stable and accurate rollouts that consistently outperform state-of-the-art models, including neural, numerical, and hybrid neural-numerical architectures. We further demonstrate that PDE-Refiner greatly enhances data efficiency, since the denoising objective implicitly induces a novel form of spectral data augmentation. Finally, PDE-Refiner's connection to diffusion models enables an accurate and efficient assessment of the model's predictive uncertainty, allowing us to estimate when the surrogate becomes inaccurate.
tl;dr: We introduce a decoupled mechanism to enhance the training efficiency of hand-crafted mixups by mining hard mixed samples without any extra cost.
Mixup is an efficient data augmentation approach that improves the generalization of neural networks by smoothing the decision boundary with mixed data. Recently, dynamic mixup methods have improved previous \textit{static} policies effectively (e.g., linear interpolation) by maximizing target-related salient regions in mixed samples, but excessive additional time costs are not acceptable. These additional computational overheads mainly come from optimizing the mixed samples according to the mixed labels. However, we found that the extra optimizing step may be redundant because label-mismatched mixed samples are informative hard mixed samples for deep models to localize discriminative features. In this paper, we thus are not trying to propose a more complicated dynamic mixup policy but rather an efficient mixup objective function with decoupled regularizer, named decoupled mixup (DM). The primary effect is that DM can adaptively utilize those hard mixed samples to mine discriminative features without losing the original smoothness of mixup. As a result, DM enables static mixup methods to achieve comparable or even exceed the performance of dynamic methods without any extra computation. This also leads to an interesting objective design problem for mixup training that we need to focus on both smoothing the decision boundaries and identifying discriminative features. Extensive experiments on supervised and semi-supervised learning benchmarks across seven datasets validate the effectiveness of DM.
tl;dr: We provide an explanation for the benefits of distributional RL through the lens of small-loss bounds, which scale with the instance-dependent optimal cost.
While distributional reinforcement learning (DistRL) has been empirically effective, the question of when and why it is better than vanilla, non-distributional RL has remained unanswered.
This paper explains the benefits of DistRL through the lens of small-loss bounds, which are instance-dependent bounds that scale with optimal achievable cost.
Particularly, our bounds converge much faster than those from non-distributional approaches if the optimal cost is small.
As warmup, we propose a distributional contextual bandit (DistCB) algorithm, which we show enjoys small-loss regret bounds and empirically outperforms the state-of-the-art on three real-world tasks.
In online RL, we propose a DistRL algorithm that constructs confidence sets using maximum likelihood estimation. We prove that our algorithm enjoys novel small-loss PAC bounds in low-rank MDPs.
As part of our analysis, we introduce the $\ell_1$ distributional eluder dimension which may be of independent interest.
Then, in offline RL, we show that pessimistic DistRL enjoys small-loss PAC bounds that are novel to the offline setting and are more robust to bad single-policy coverage.
tl;dr: FamO2O, a novel plug-in framework for offline-to-online reinforcement learning, effectively determines state-adaptive improvement-constraint balances, resulting in significant performance improvements on the D4RL benchmark.
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) is a training paradigm that combines pre-training on a pre-collected dataset with fine-tuning in an online environment. However, the incorporation of online fine-tuning can intensify the well-known distributional shift problem. Existing solutions tackle this problem by imposing a policy constraint on the policy improvement objective in both offline and online learning. They typically advocate a single balance between policy improvement and constraints across diverse data collections. This one-size-fits-all manner may not optimally leverage each collected sample due to the significant variation in data quality across different states. To this end, we introduce Family Offline-to-Online RL (FamO2O), a simple yet effective framework that empowers existing algorithms to determine state-adaptive improvement-constraint balances. FamO2O utilizes a universal model to train a family of policies with different improvement/constraint intensities, and a balance model to select a suitable policy for each state. Theoretically, we prove that state-adaptive balances are necessary for achieving a higher policy performance upper bound. Empirically, extensive experiments show that FamO2O offers a statistically significant improvement over various existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmark. Codes are available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/FamO2O.
Model reparametrization, which follows the change-of-variable rule of calculus, is a popular way to improve the training of neural nets. But it can also be problematic since it can induce inconsistencies in, e.g., Hessian-based flatness measures, optimization trajectories, and modes of probability densities. This complicates downstream analyses: e.g. one cannot definitively relate flatness with generalization since arbitrary reparametrization changes their relationship. In this work, we study the invariance of neural nets under reparametrization from the perspective of Riemannian geometry. From this point of view, invariance is an inherent property of any neural net _if_ one explicitly represents the metric and uses the correct associated transformation rules. This is important since although the metric is always present, it is often implicitly assumed as identity, and thus dropped from the notation, then lost under reparametrization. We discuss implications for measuring the flatness of minima, optimization, and for probability-density maximization. Finally, we explore some interesting directions where invariance is useful.
Quantifying variable importance is essential for answering high-stakes questions in fields like genetics, public policy, and medicine. Current methods generally calculate variable importance for a given model trained on a given dataset. However, for a given dataset, there may be many models that explain the target outcome equally well; without accounting for all possible explanations, different researchers may arrive at many conflicting yet equally valid conclusions given the same data. Additionally, even when accounting for all possible explanations for a given dataset, these insights may not generalize because not all good explanations are stable across reasonable data perturbations. We propose a new variable importance framework that quantifies the importance of a variable across the set of all good models and is stable across the data distribution. Our framework is extremely flexible and can be integrated with most existing model classes and global variable importance metrics. We demonstrate through experiments that our framework recovers variable importance rankings for complex simulation setups where other methods fail. Further, we show that our framework accurately estimates the _true importance_ of a variable for the underlying data distribution. We provide theoretical guarantees on the consistency and finite sample error rates for our estimator. Finally, we demonstrate its utility with a real-world case study exploring which genes are important for predicting HIV load in persons with HIV, highlighting an important gene that has not previously been studied in connection with HIV.
tl;dr: We create a dataset for natural language reasoning when the provided information may be contradictory, and then benchmark various types of language models and show that current models perform poorly on this task.
Automated reasoning with unstructured natural text is a key requirement for many potential applications of NLP and for developing robust AI systems. Recently, Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated complex reasoning capacities even without any finetuning. However, existing evaluation for automated reasoning assumes access to a consistent and coherent set of information over which models reason. When reasoning in the real-world, the available information is frequently inconsistent or contradictory, and therefore models need to be equipped with a strategy to resolve such conflicts when they arise. One widely-applicable way of resolving conflicts is to impose preferences over information sources (e.g., based on source credibility or information recency) and adopt the source with higher preference. In this paper, we formulate the problem of reasoning with contradictory information guided by preferences over sources as the classical problem of defeasible reasoning, and develop a dataset called BoardgameQA for measuring the reasoning capacity of LMs in this setting. BoardgameQA also incorporates reasoning with implicit background knowledge, to better reflect reasoning problems in downstream applications. We benchmark various LMs on BoardgameQA and the results reveal a significant gap in the reasoning capacity of state-of-the-art LMs on this problem, showing that reasoning with conflicting information does not surface out-of-the-box in LMs. While performance can be improved with finetuning, it nevertheless remains poor.
tl;dr: A new benchmark and datasets for text-to-video generation of stories
Generating video stories from text prompts is a complex task. In addition to having high visual quality, videos need to realistically adhere to a sequence of text prompts whilst being consistent throughout the frames. Creating a benchmark for video generation requires data annotated over time, which contrasts with the single caption used often in video datasets. To fill this gap, we collect comprehensive human annotations on three existing datasets, and introduce StoryBench: a new, challenging multi-task benchmark to reliably evaluate forthcoming text-to-video models. Our benchmark includes three video generation tasks of increasing difficulty: action execution, where the next action must be generated starting from a conditioning video; story continuation, where a sequence of actions must be executed starting from a conditioning video; and story generation, where a video must be generated from only text prompts. We evaluate small yet strong text-to-video baselines, and show the benefits of training on story-like data algorithmically generated from existing video captions. Finally, we establish guidelines for human evaluation of video stories, and reaffirm the need of better automatic metrics for video generation. StoryBench aims at encouraging future research efforts in this exciting new area.
tl;dr: We identify structural properties of multiplayer games where self-play is guaranteed to perform well against opponents.
Self-play is a technique for machine learning in multi-agent systems where a learning algorithm learns by interacting with copies of itself. Self-play is useful for generating large quantities of data for learning, but has the drawback that the agents the learner will face post-training may have dramatically different behavior than the learner came to expect by interacting with itself. For the special case of two-player constant-sum games, self-play that reaches Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to produce strategies that perform well against any post-training opponent; however, no such guarantee exists for multiplayer games. We show that in games that approximately decompose into a set of two-player constant-sum games (called constant-sum polymatrix games) where global $\epsilon$-Nash equilibria are boundedly far from Nash equilibria in each subgame (called subgame stability), any no-external-regret algorithm that learns by self-play will produce a strategy with bounded vulnerability. For the first time, our results identify a structural property of multiplayer games that enable performance guarantees for the strategies produced by a broad class of self-play algorithms. We demonstrate our findings through experiments on Leduc poker.
AI alignment refers to models acting towards human-intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. Analyzing the similarity between models and humans can be a proxy measure for ensuring AI safety. In this paper, we focus on the models' visual perception alignment with humans, further referred to as AI-human visual alignment. Specifically, we propose a new dataset for measuring AI-human visual alignment in terms of image classification. In order to evaluate AI-human visual alignment, a dataset should encompass samples with various scenarios and have gold human perception labels. Our dataset consists of three groups of samples, namely Must-Act (i.e., Must-Classify), Must-Abstain, and Uncertain, based on the quantity and clarity of visual information in an image and further divided into eight categories. All samples have a gold human perception label; even Uncertain (e.g., severely blurry) sample labels were obtained via crowd-sourcing. The validity of our dataset is verified by sampling theory, statistical theories related to survey design, and experts in the related fields. Using our dataset, we analyze the visual alignment and reliability of five popular visual perception models and seven abstention methods. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/jiyounglee-0523/VisAlign.
tl;dr: We conduct a complete theoretical characterization of the whole training process and nonlinear behaviors of ReLU networks trained by Gradient Flow on a linearly separable data.
The training process of ReLU neural networks often exhibits complicated nonlinear phenomena.
The nonlinearity of models and non-convexity of loss pose significant challenges for theoretical analysis. Therefore, most previous theoretical works on the optimization dynamics of neural networks focus either on local analysis (like the end of training) or approximate linear models (like Neural Tangent Kernel).
In this work, we conduct a complete theoretical characterization of the training process of a two-layer ReLU network trained by Gradient Flow on a linearly separable data. In this specific setting, our analysis captures the whole optimization process starting from random initialization to final convergence.
Despite the relatively simple model and data that we studied, we reveal four different phases from the whole training process showing a general simplifying-to-complicating learning trend.
Specific nonlinear behaviors can also be precisely identified and captured theoretically, such as
initial condensation, saddle-to-plateau dynamics, plateau escape, changes of activation patterns,
learning with increasing complexity, etc.
tl;dr: We combine LLM's capabilities of generating and evaluating diverse “thoughts” with search algorithms for robust problem solving.
Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role. To surmount these challenges, we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving. ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.
Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities on three novel tasks requiring non-trivial planning or search: Game of 24, Creative Writing, and Mini Crosswords. For instance, in Game of 24, while GPT-4 with chain-of-thought prompting only solved 4\% of tasks, our method achieved a success rate of 74\%. Code repo with all prompts: https://github.com/princeton-nlp/tree-of-thought-llm.
tl;dr: We introduce Pick-a-Pic, a large, open dataset of text-to-image prompts and real users’ preferences over generated images.
The ability to collect a large dataset of human preferences from text-to-image users is usually limited to companies, making such datasets inaccessible to the public. To address this issue, we create a web app that enables text-to-image users to generate images and specify their preferences. Using this web app we build Pick-a-Pic, a large, open dataset of text-to-image prompts and real users’ preferences over generated images. We leverage this dataset to train a CLIP-based scoring function, PickScore, which exhibits superhuman performance on the task of predicting human preferences. Then, we test PickScore’s ability to perform model evaluation and observe that it correlates better with human rankings than other automatic evaluation metrics. Therefore, we recommend using PickScore for evaluating future text-to-image generation models, and using Pick-a-Pic prompts as a more relevant dataset than MS-COCO. Finally, we demonstrate how PickScore can enhance existing text-to-image models via ranking.
tl;dr: We show an equivalence between entangled and separable exact learning, exponential separation between quantum statistical queries and noisy measurements, and generalize known limitations on quantum error mitigation and learning distributions.
In this work we make progress in understanding the relationship between learning models when given access to entangled measurements, separable measurements and statistical measurements in the quantum statistical query ($\mathsf{QSQ}$) model. To this end, we show the following results.
$\textbf{Entanglement versus separable measurements.}$ The goal here is to learn an unknown $f$ from the concept class $\mathcal{C} \subseteq \{f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow [k]\}$ given copies of $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2^n}}\sum_x \ket{x,f(x)}$. We show that, if $T$ copies suffice to learn $f$ using entangled measurements, then $O(nT^2)$ copies suffice to learn $f$ using just separable measurements. Additionally, we exhibit a concept class $\mathcal{C}$ for which, in order to learn some \emph{property} of $f$, the sample complexity of learning using entangled measurements is exponentially smaller than separable measurements.
$\textbf{Entangled versus statistical measurements}$ The goal here is to learn a function $f \in \mathcal{C}$ given access to separable measurements and statistical measurements. We exhibit a concept class $\mathcal{C}$ based on degree-$2$ functions that gives an exponential separation between $\mathsf{QSQ}$ learning and quantum learning with entangled measurements (even in the presence of noise). This proves the "quantum analogue" of the seminal result of (Blum, 2003) that separates classical $\mathsf{SQ}$ learning from classical $\mathsf{PAC}$ learning with classification~noise.
$\textbf{$\mathsf{QSQ}$ lower bounds for learning states.}$ The main technical contribution is to introduce a quantum statistical query dimension ($\mathsf{QSDA}$), which we use to give lower bounds on the $\mathsf{QSQ}$ complexity of learning. Using this, we prove exponential $\mathsf{QSQ}$ lower bounds for testing purity of quantum states, learning CCHL states, coset states of Abelian groups, degree-$2$ functions, planted bi-clique states and learning output states of Clifford circuits of depth polylog($n$).
$\textbf{Further applications.}$ Using our $\mathsf{QSQ}$ lower bounds give an $\textit{unconditional}$ separation between weak and strong error mitigation and prove lower bounds for learning distributions in the $\mathsf{QSQ}$ model. Prior works by (Quek et al., 2022), (Hinsche et al., 2022), and (Neitner et al., 23) proved the analogous results $\textit{assuming}$ diagonal measurements and our work removes this assumption.
Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) using machine-generated instruction-following data has been shown to improve zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, but the idea is less explored in the multimodal field. We present the first attempt to use language-only GPT-4 to generate multimodal language-image instruction-following data. By instruction tuning on such generated data, we introduce LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model that connects a vision encoder and an LLM for general-purpose visual and language understanding. To facilitate future research on visual instruction following, we construct two evaluation benchmarks with diverse and challenging application-oriented tasks. Our experiments show that LLaVA demonstrates impressive multimodal chat abilities, sometimes exhibiting the behaviors of multimodal GPT-4 on unseen images/instructions, and yields a 85.1% relative score compared with GPT-4 on a synthetic multimodal instruction-following dataset. When fine-tuned on Science QA, the synergy of LLaVA and GPT-4 achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.53%. We make GPT-4 generated visual instruction tuning data, our model, and code publicly available.
Data-driven machine learning approaches are being increasingly used to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). They have shown particularly striking successes when training an operator, which takes as input a PDE in some family, and outputs its solution. However, the architectural design space, especially given structural knowledge of the PDE family of interest, is still poorly understood. We seek to remedy this gap by studying the benefits of weight-tied neural network architectures for steady-state PDEs. To achieve this, we first demonstrate that the solution of most steady-state PDEs can be expressed as a fixed point of a non-linear operator. Motivated by this observation, we propose FNO-DEQ, a deep equilibrium variant of the FNO architecture that directly solves for the solution of a steady-state PDE as the infinite-depth fixed point of an implicit operator layer using a black-box root solver and differentiates analytically through this fixed point resulting in $\mathcal{O}(1)$ training memory. Our experiments indicate that FNO-DEQ-based architectures outperform FNO-based baselines with $4\times$ the number of parameters in predicting the solution to steady-state PDEs such as Darcy Flow and steady-state incompressible Navier-Stokes. Finally, we show FNO-DEQ is more robust when trained with datasets with more noisy observations than the FNO-based baselines, demonstrating the benefits of using appropriate inductive biases in architectural design for different neural network based PDE solvers. Further, we show a universal approximation result that demonstrates that FNO-DEQ can approximate the solution to any steady-state PDE that can be written as a fixed point equation.
Large transformers are powerful architectures used for self-supervised data analysis across various data types, including protein sequences, images, and text. In these models, the semantic structure of the dataset emerges from a sequence of transformations between one representation and the next.
We characterize the geometric and statistical properties of these representations and how they change as we move through the layers.
By analyzing the intrinsic dimension (ID) and neighbor composition, we find that the representations evolve similarly in transformers trained on protein language taskand image reconstruction tasks. In the first layers, the data manifold expands, becoming high-dimensional, and then contracts significantly in the intermediate layers. In the last part of the model, the ID remains approximately constant or forms a second shallow peak.
We show that the semantic information of the dataset is better expressed at the end of the first peak, and this phenomenon can be observed across many models trained on diverse datasets.
Based on our findings, we point out an explicit strategy to identify, without supervision, the layers that maximize semantic content: representations at intermediate layers corresponding to a relative minimum of the ID profile are more suitable for downstream learning tasks.
Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context learning capabilities of transformers in decision-making problems, i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) for bandits and Markov decision processes. To do so, we introduce and study the Decision-Pretrained Transformer (DPT), a supervised pretraining method where a transformer predicts an optimal action given a query state and an in-context dataset of interactions from a diverse set of tasks. While simple, this procedure produces a model with several surprising capabilities. We find that the trained transformer can solve a range of RL problems in-context, exhibiting both exploration online and conservatism offline, despite not being explicitly trained to do so. The model also generalizes beyond the pretraining distribution to new tasks and automatically adapts its decision-making strategies to unknown structure. Theoretically, we show DPT can be viewed as an efficient implementation of Bayesian posterior sampling, a provably sample-efficient RL algorithm. We further leverage this connection to provide guarantees on the regret of the in-context algorithm yielded by DPT, and prove that it can learn faster than algorithms used to generate the pretraining data. These results suggest a promising yet simple path towards instilling strong in-context decision-making abilities in transformers.
We propose the Multimodal Clinical Benchmark for Emergency Care (MC-BEC), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating foundation models in Emergency Medicine using a dataset of 100K+ continuously monitored Emergency Department visits from 2020-2022. MC-BEC focuses on clinically relevant prediction tasks at timescales from minutes to days, including predicting patient decompensation, disposition, and emergency department (ED) revisit, and includes a standardized evaluation framework with train-test splits and evaluation metrics. The multimodal dataset includes a wide range of detailed clinical data, including triage information, prior diagnoses and medications, continuously measured vital signs, electrocardiogram and photoplethysmograph waveforms, orders placed and medications administered throughout the visit, free-text reports of imaging studies, and information on ED diagnosis, disposition, and subsequent revisits. We provide performance baselines for each prediction task to enable the evaluation of multimodal, multitask models. We believe that MC-BEC will encourage researchers to develop more effective, generalizable, and accessible foundation models for multimodal clinical data.
tl;dr: We proposed a novel low-shot learning problem that leverage mutual exclusivity bias phenomenon observed in human word learning.
This paper introduces Low-shot Object Learning with Mutual Exclusivity Bias (LSME), the first computational framing of mutual exclusivity bias, a phenomenon commonly observed in infants during word learning. We provide a novel dataset, comprehensive baselines, and a SOTA method to enable the ML community to tackle this challenging learning task. The goal of LSME is to analyze an RGB image of a scene containing multiple objects and correctly associate a previously-unknown object instance with a provided category label. This association is then used to perform low-shot learning to test category generalization. We provide a data generation pipeline for the LSME problem and conduct a thorough analysis of the factors that contribute to its difficulty. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of multiple baselines, including state-of-the-art foundation models. Finally, we present a baseline approach that outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of low-shot accuracy. Code and data are available at https://github.com/rehg-lab/LSME.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient end-to-end training approach for human-AI zero-shot coordination with mixture partner policy and partner modeling module incorporated.
The goal of zero-shot human-AI coordination is to develop an agent that can collaborate with humans without relying on human data. Prevailing two-stage population-based methods require a diverse population of mutually distinct policies to simulate diverse human behaviors. The necessity of such populations severely limits their computational efficiency. To address this issue, we propose E3T, an **E**fficient **E**nd-to-**E**nd **T**raining approach for zero-shot human-AI coordination. E3T employs a mixture of ego policy and random policy to construct the partner policy, making it both coordination-skilled and diverse. In this way, the ego agent is end-to-end trained with this mixture policy without the need of a pre-trained population, thus significantly improving the training efficiency. In addition, a partner modeling module is proposed to predict the partner's action from historical information. With the predicted partner's action, the ego policy is able to adapt its policy and take actions accordingly when collaborating with humans of different behavior patterns. Empirical results on the Overcooked environment show that our method significantly improves the training efficiency while preserving comparable or superior performance than the population-based baselines. Demo videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/e3t-overcooked.
The performance of deep learning models heavily relies on the quality of the training data. Inadequacies in the training data, such as corrupt input or noisy labels, can lead to the failure of model generalization. Recent studies propose repairing the model by identifying the training samples that contribute to the failure and removing their influence from the model. However, it is important to note that the identified data may contain both beneficial and detrimental information. Simply erasing the information of the identified data from the model can have a negative impact on its performance, especially when accurate data is mistakenly identified as detrimental and removed. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages the knowledge obtained from a retained clean set. Our method first identifies harmful data by utilizing the clean set, then separates the beneficial and detrimental information within the identified data. Finally, we utilize the extracted beneficial information to enhance the model's performance. Through empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches in both identifying harmful data and rectifying model failures. Particularly in scenarios where identification is challenging and a significant amount of benign data is involved, our method improves performance while the baselines deteriorate due to the erroneous removal of beneficial information.
tl;dr: A hardware accelerated data generator for Quantum Chemistry with a dataset containing 10^9 training examples.
The emergence of foundation models in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing have resulted in immense progress on downstream tasks. This progress was enabled by datasets with billions of training examples. Similar benefits are yet to be unlocked for quantum chemistry, where the potential of deep learning is constrained by comparatively small datasets with 100k to 20M training examples. These datasets are limited in size because the labels are computed using the accurate (but computationally demanding) predictions of Density Functional Theory (DFT). Notably, prior DFT datasets were created using CPU supercomputers without leveraging hardware acceleration. In this paper, we take a first step towards utilising hardware accelerators by introducing the data generator PySCF$_{\text{IPU}}$ using Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs). This allows us to create the dataset QM1B with one billion training examples containing 9-11 heavy atoms. We demonstrate that a simple baseline neural network (SchNet 9M) improves its performance by simply increasing the amount of training data without additional inductive biases. To encourage future researchers to use QM1B responsibly, we highlight several limitations of QM1B and emphasise the low resolution of our DFT options, which also serves as motivation for even larger, more accurate datasets.
tl;dr: A text-to-image model that runs in less than two seconds on mobile devices with a similar quality as the Stable Diffusion.
Text-to-image diffusion models can create stunning images from natural language descriptions that rival the work of professional artists and photographers. However, these models are large, with complex network architectures and tens of denoising iterations, making them computationally expensive and slow to run. As a result, high-end GPUs and cloud-based inference are required to run diffusion models at scale. This is costly and has privacy implications, especially when user data is sent to a third party. To overcome these challenges, we present a generic approach that, for the first time, unlocks running text-to-image diffusion models on mobile devices in **less than 2 seconds**. We achieve so by introducing efficient network architecture and improving step distillation. Specifically, we propose an efficient UNet by identifying the redundancy of the original model and reducing the computation of the image decoder via data distillation.
Further, we enhance the step distillation by exploring training strategies and introducing regularization from classifier-free guidance. Our extensive experiments on MS-COCO show that our model with $8$ denoising steps achieves better FID and CLIP scores than Stable Diffusion v$1.5$ with $50$ steps. Our work democratizes content creation by bringing powerful text-to-image diffusion models to the hands of users.
tl;dr: We present an efficient method of computing the standard transformer architecture, enabling effective processing of long contextual information.
Transformers have emerged as the cornerstone of state-of-the-art natural language processing models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands posed by the self-attention mechanism and the large feedforward network in Transformers limit their ability to handle long sequences, thereby creating challenges for tasks involving multiple long sequences or long-term dependencies. We present a distinct approach, Blockwise Parallel Transformer (BPT), that leverages blockwise computation of self-attention and feedforward network fusion to minimize memory costs. By processing longer input sequences while maintaining memory efficiency, BPT enables training sequences 32 times longer than vanilla Transformers and up to 4 times longer than previous memory-efficient methods. Extensive experiments on language modeling and reinforcement learning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BPT in reducing memory requirements and improving performance.
tl;dr: Introducing Hyper-Skin, a comprehensive hyperspectral dataset enabling facial skin-spectra reconstruction on consumer devices.
We introduce Hyper-Skin, a hyperspectral dataset covering wide range of wavelengths from visible (VIS) spectrum (400nm - 700nm) to near-infrared (NIR) spectrum (700nm - 1000nm), uniquely designed to facilitate research on facial skin-spectra reconstruction.
By reconstructing skin spectra from RGB images, our dataset enables the study of hyperspectral skin analysis, such as melanin and hemoglobin concentrations, directly on the consumer device.
Overcoming limitations of existing datasets, Hyper-Skin consists of diverse facial skin data collected with a pushbroom hyperspectral camera.
With 330 hyperspectral cubes from 51 subjects, the dataset covers the facial skin from different angles and facial poses.
Each hyperspectral cube has dimensions of 1024$\times$1024$\times$448, resulting in millions of spectra vectors per image.
The dataset, carefully curated in adherence to ethical guidelines, includes paired hyperspectral images and synthetic RGB images generated using real camera responses.
We demonstrate the efficacy of our dataset by showcasing skin spectra reconstruction using state-of-the-art models on 31 bands of hyperspectral data resampled in the VIS and NIR spectrum.
This Hyper-Skin dataset would be a valuable resource to NeurIPS community, encouraging the development of novel algorithms for skin spectral reconstruction while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in hyperspectral skin analysis related to cosmetology and skin's well-being.
Instructions to request the data and the related benchmarking codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/hyperspectral-skin/Hyper-Skin-2023.
tl;dr: We propose a conditional mutual information approach to learn disentangled representations that improve generalisation in reinforcement learning under correlation shifts
Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments can produce training data with spurious correlations between features due to the amount of training data or its limited feature coverage. This can lead to RL agents encoding these misleading correlations in their latent representation, preventing the agent from generalising if the correlation changes within the environment or when deployed in the real world. Disentangled representations can improve robustness, but existing disentanglement techniques that minimise mutual information between features require independent features, thus they cannot disentangle correlated features. We propose an auxiliary task for RL algorithms that learns a disentangled representation of high-dimensional observations with correlated features by minimising the conditional mutual information between features in the representation. We demonstrate experimentally, using continuous control tasks, that our approach improves generalisation under correlation shifts, as well as improving the training performance of RL algorithms in the presence of correlated features.
tl;dr: We propose a neural circuit for adaptive whitening with synapses that learn across statistical contexts and gains that adapt within statistical contexts.
Neurons in early sensory areas rapidly adapt to changing sensory statistics, both by normalizing the variance of their individual responses and by reducing correlations between their responses. Together, these transformations may be viewed as an adaptive form of statistical whitening. Existing mechanistic models of adaptive whitening exclusively use either synaptic plasticity or gain modulation as the biological substrate for adaptation; however, on their own, each of these models has significant limitations. In this work, we unify these approaches in a normative multi-timescale mechanistic model that adaptively whitens its responses with complementary computational roles for synaptic plasticity and gain modulation. Gains are modified on a fast timescale to adapt to the current statistical context, whereas synapses are modified on a slow timescale to match structural properties of the input statistics that are invariant across contexts. Our model is derived from a novel multi-timescale whitening objective that factorizes the inverse whitening matrix into basis vectors, which correspond to synaptic weights, and a diagonal matrix, which corresponds to neuronal gains. We test our model on synthetic and natural datasets and find that the synapses learn optimal configurations over long timescales that enable adaptive whitening on short timescales using gain modulation.
tl;dr: We annotated 11 fine-grained attributes for each of the 10k microscopic images of white blood cells (WBCs) because no prior WBC dataset included them, despite their significance in explaining how to recognize different WBC types.
The examination of blood samples at a microscopic level plays a fundamental role in clinical diagnostics. For instance, an in-depth study of White Blood Cells (WBCs), a crucial component of our blood, is essential for diagnosing blood-related diseases such as leukemia and anemia. While multiple datasets containing WBC images have been proposed, they mostly focus on cell categorization, often lacking the necessary morphological details to explain such categorizations, despite the importance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in medical domains. This paper seeks to address this limitation by introducing comprehensive annotations for WBC images. Through collaboration with pathologists, a thorough literature review, and manual inspection of microscopic images, we have identified 11 morphological attributes associated with the cell and its components (nucleus, cytoplasm, and granules). We then annotated ten thousand WBC images with these attributes, resulting in 113k labels (11 attributes x 10.3k images). Annotating at this level of detail and scale is unprecedented, offering unique value to AI in pathology. Moreover, we conduct experiments to predict these attributes from cell images, and also demonstrate specific applications that can benefit from our detailed annotations. Overall, our dataset paves the way for interpreting WBC recognition models, further advancing XAI in the fields of pathology and hematology.
tl;dr: We derive and verify a scaling law for model exponential moving averages, allowing the systematic scaling of model classes depending on EMA, like distillation self-supervised methods.
Preserving training dynamics across batch sizes is an important tool for practical machine learning as it enables the trade-off between batch size and wall-clock time. This trade-off is typically enabled by a scaling rule, for example, in stochastic gradient descent, one should scale the learning rate linearly with the batch size. Another important machine learning tool is the model EMA, a functional copy of a target model, whose parameters move towards those of its target model according to an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) at a rate parameterized by a momentum hyperparameter. This model EMA can improve the robustness and generalization of supervised learning, stabilize pseudo-labeling, and provide a learning signal for Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). Prior works have not considered the optimization of the model EMA when performing scaling, leading to different training dynamics across batch sizes and lower model performance. In this work, we provide a scaling rule for optimization in the presence of a model EMA and demonstrate the rule's validity across a range of architectures, optimizers, and data modalities. We also show the rule's validity where the model EMA contributes to the optimization of the target model, enabling us to train EMA-based pseudo-labeling and SSL methods at small and large batch sizes. For SSL, we enable training of BYOL up to batch size 24,576 without sacrificing performance, a 6$\times$ wall-clock time reduction under idealized hardware settings.
tl;dr: SwiftSage: An Agent Framework for Complex Interactive Reasoning Tasks, integrating the strengths of behavior cloning of smaller LMs and prompting LLMs to improve task completion performance and efficiency.
We introduce SwiftSage, a novel agent framework inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, designed to excel in action planning for complex interactive reasoning tasks. SwiftSage integrates the strengths of behavior cloning and prompting large language models (LLMs) to enhance task completion performance. The framework comprises two primary modules: the Swift module, representing fast and intuitive thinking, and the Sage module, emulating deliberate thought processes. The Swift module is a small encoder-decoder LM fine-tuned on the oracle agent's action trajectories, while the Sage module employs LLMs such as GPT-4 for subgoal planning and grounding. We develop a heuristic method to harmoniously integrate the two modules, resulting in a more efficient and robust problem-solving process. In 30 tasks from the ScienceWorld benchmark, SwiftSage significantly outperforms other methods such as SayCan, ReAct, and Reflexion, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving complex interactive tasks.
tl;dr: We evaluate the adversarial robustness of large vision-language models, under the most realistic and challenging threat model of black-box access and targeted goal.
Large vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4 have achieved unprecedented performance in response generation, especially with visual inputs, enabling more creative and adaptable interaction than large language models such as ChatGPT. Nonetheless, multimodal generation exacerbates safety concerns, since adversaries may successfully evade the entire system by subtly manipulating the most vulnerable modality (e.g., vision). To this end, we propose evaluating the robustness of open-source large VLMs in the most realistic and high-risk setting, where adversaries have only black-box system access and seek to deceive the model into returning the targeted responses. In particular, we first craft targeted adversarial examples against pretrained models such as CLIP and BLIP, and then transfer these adversarial examples to other VLMs such as MiniGPT-4, LLaVA, UniDiffuser, BLIP-2, and Img2Prompt. In addition, we observe that black-box queries on these VLMs can further improve the effectiveness of targeted evasion, resulting in a surprisingly high success rate for generating targeted responses. Our findings provide a quantitative understanding regarding the adversarial vulnerability of large VLMs and call for a more thorough examination of their potential security flaws before deployment in practice. Our project page: https://yunqing-me.github.io/AttackVLM/.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel task where we select an optimal VLM given only a text description of the application.
Pre-trained multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their exceptional performance on downstream vision applications, particularly in the few- and zero-shot settings. However, selecting the best-performing VLM for some downstream applications is non-trivial, as it is dataset and task-dependent. Meanwhile, the exhaustive evaluation of all available VLMs on a novel application is not only time and computationally demanding but also necessitates the collection of a labeled dataset for evaluation. As the number of open-source VLM variants increases, there is a need for an efficient model selection strategy that does not require access to a curated evaluation dataset. This paper proposes a novel task and benchmark for efficiently evaluating VLMs' zero-shot performance on downstream applications without access to the downstream task dataset. Specifically, we introduce a new task LOVM: **L**anguage-**O**nly **V**ision **M**odel Selection , where methods are expected to perform both model selection and performance prediction based solely on a text description of the desired downstream application. We then introduced an extensive LOVM benchmark consisting of ground-truth evaluations of 35 pre-trained VLMs and 23 datasets, where methods are expected to rank the pre-trained VLMs and predict their zero-shot performance.
tl;dr: We give a characterization of learnability for multilabel ranking problems.
Multilabel ranking is a central task in machine learning. However, the most fundamental question of learnability in a multilabel ranking setting with relevance-score feedback remains unanswered. In this work, we characterize the learnability of multilabel ranking problems in both batch and online settings for a large family of ranking losses. Along the way, we give two equivalence classes of ranking losses based on learnability that capture most losses used in practice.
tl;dr: This paper assesses image quality metrics' faithfulness to human perception of privacy in reconstructed images and proposes SemSim, a learning-based measure with higher correlation to human judgment and generalization
Hand-crafted image quality metrics, such as PSNR and SSIM, are commonly used to evaluate model privacy risk under reconstruction attacks. Under these metrics, reconstructed images that are determined to resemble the original one generally indicate more privacy leakage. Images determined as overall dissimilar, on the other hand, indicate higher robustness against attack. However, there is no guarantee that these metrics well reflect human opinions, which offers trustworthy judgement for model privacy leakage. In this paper, we comprehensively study the faithfulness of these hand-crafted metrics to human perception of privacy information from the reconstructed images. On 5 datasets ranging from natural images, faces, to fine-grained classes, we use 4 existing attack methods to reconstruct images from many different classification models and, for each reconstructed image, we ask multiple human annotators to assess whether this image is recognizable. Our studies reveal that the hand-crafted metrics only have a weak correlation with the human evaluation of privacy leakage and that even these metrics themselves often contradict each other. These observations suggest risks of current metrics in the community. To address this potential risk, we propose a learning-based measure called SemSim to evaluate the Semantic Similarity between the original and reconstructed images. SemSim is trained with a standard triplet loss, using an original image as an anchor, one of its recognizable reconstructed images as a positive sample, and an unrecognizable one as a negative. By training on human annotations, SemSim exhibits a greater reflection of privacy leakage on the semantic level. We show that SemSim has a significantly higher correlation with human judgment compared with existing metrics. Moreover, this strong correlation generalizes to unseen datasets, models and attack methods. We envision this work as a milestone for image quality evaluation closer to the human level. The project webpage can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/view/semsim.
tl;dr: We present a novel image-to-image benchmark: a minimal world modeling problem focused on visual systematic compositionality.
Systematic compositionality, or the ability to adapt to novel situations by creating a mental model of the world using reusable pieces of knowledge, remains a significant challenge in machine learning. While there has been considerable progress in the language domain, efforts towards systematic visual imagination, or envisioning the dynamical implications of a visual observation, are in their infancy. We introduce the Systematic Visual Imagination Benchmark (SVIB), the first benchmark designed to address this problem head-on. SVIB offers a novel framework for a minimal world modeling problem, where models are evaluated based on their ability to generate one-step image-to-image transformations under a latent world dynamics. The framework provides benefits such as the possibility to jointly optimize for systematic perception and imagination, a range of difficulty levels, and the ability to control the fraction of possible factor combinations used during training. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of various baseline models on SVIB, offering insight into the current state-of-the-art in systematic visual imagination. We hope that this benchmark will help advance visual systematic compositionality.
We present an extensive study of surrogate losses for structured prediction supported by *$H$-consistency bounds*. These are recently introduced guarantees that are more relevant to learning than Bayes-consistency, since they are not asymptotic and since they take into account the hypothesis set $H$ used. We first show that no non-trivial $H$-consistency bound can be derived for widely used surrogate structured prediction losses. We then define several new families of surrogate losses, including *structured comp-sum losses* and *structured constrained losses*, for which we prove $H$-consistency bounds and thus Bayes-consistency. These loss functions readily lead to new structured prediction algorithms with stronger theoretical guarantees, based on their minimization. We describe efficient algorithms for minimizing several of these surrogate losses, including a new *structured logistic loss*.
tl;dr: We have studied fixed-confidence best arm identification in multi-armed bandits and provide the first non-asymptotic analysis of a Top Two algorithm.
A Top Two sampling rule for bandit identification is a method which selects the next arm to sample from among two candidate arms, a *leader* and a *challenger*. Due to their simplicity and good empirical performance, they have received increased attention in recent years. However, for fixed-confidence best arm identification, theoretical guarantees for Top Two methods have only been obtained in the asymptotic regime, when the error level vanishes. In this paper, we derive the first non-asymptotic upper bound on the expected sample complexity of a Top Two algorithm, which holds for any error level. Our analysis highlights sufficient properties for a regret minimization algorithm to be used as leader. These properties are satisfied by the UCB algorithm, and our proposed UCB-based Top Two algorithm simultaneously enjoys non-asymptotic guarantees and competitive empirical performance.
tl;dr: We synergize ideal large eddy simulation and neural stochastic differential equations for a probabilistic approach to turbulence modeling.
We introduce a data-driven learning framework that assimilates two powerful ideas: ideal large eddy simulation (LES) from turbulence closure modeling and neural stochastic differential equations (SDE) for stochastic modeling. The ideal LES models the LES flow by treating each full-order trajectory as a random realization of the underlying dynamics, as such, the effect of small-scales is marginalized to obtain the deterministic evolution of the LES state. However, ideal LES is analytically intractable. In our work, we use a latent neural SDE to model the evolution of the stochastic process and an encoder-decoder pair for transforming between the latent space and the desired ideal flow field. This stands in sharp contrast to other types of neural parameterization of closure models where each trajectory is treated as a deterministic realization of the dynamics. We show the effectiveness of our approach (niLES – neural ideal LES) on two challenging chaotic dynamical systems: Kolmogorov flow at a Reynolds number of 20,000 and flow past a cylinder at Reynolds number 500. Compared to competing methods, our method can handle non-uniform geometries using unstructured meshes seamlessly. In particular, niLES leads to trajectories with more accurate statistics and enhances stability, particularly for long-horizon rollouts. (Source codes and datasets will be made publicly available.)
tl;dr: We study the limits of Transformers confronted with compositional tasks that require multi-step reasoning to arrive at the solution.
Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems.
This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they signal more substantial limitations?
In an attempt to demystify transformer LLMs, we investigate the limits of these models across three representative compositional tasks---multi-digit multiplication, logic grid puzzles, and a classic dynamic programming problem. These tasks require breaking problems down into sub-steps and synthesizing these steps into a precise answer. We formulate compositional tasks as computation graphs to systematically quantify the level of complexity, and break down reasoning steps into intermediate sub-procedures.
Our empirical findings suggest that transformer LLMs solve compositional tasks by reducing multi-step compositional reasoning into linearized subgraph matching, without necessarily developing systematic problem-solving skills. To round off our empirical study, we provide theoretical arguments on abstract multi-step reasoning problems that highlight how autoregressive generations' performance can rapidly decay with increased task complexity.
tl;dr: We study the conditions under which randomized classifiers offer improvements for adversarial robustness. We show that for any binary randomized classifiers, there exists a deterministic one that is at least as robust.
Deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations in test data. To defend against adversarial attacks, probabilistic classifiers have been proposed as an alternative to deterministic ones. However, literature has conflicting findings on the effectiveness of probabilistic classifiers in comparison to deterministic ones. In this paper, we clarify the role of randomization in building adversarially robust classifiers.
Given a base hypothesis set of deterministic classifiers, we show the conditions under which a randomized ensemble outperforms the hypothesis set in adversarial risk, extending previous results.
Additionally, we show that for any probabilistic binary classifier (including randomized ensembles), there exists a deterministic classifier that outperforms it. Finally, we give an explicit description of the deterministic hypothesis set that contains such a deterministic classifier for many types of commonly used probabilistic classifiers, *i.e.* randomized ensembles and parametric/input noise injection.
Meta-learning has attracted attention due to its strong ability to learn experiences from known tasks, which can speed up and enhance the learning process for new tasks. However, most existing meta-learning approaches only can learn from tasks without any constraint. This paper proposes an online constrained meta-learning framework, which continuously learns meta-knowledge from sequential learning tasks, and the learning tasks are subject to hard constraints. Beyond existing meta-learning analyses, we provide the upper bounds of optimality gaps and constraint violations produced by the proposed framework, which considers the dynamic regret of online learning, as well as the generalization ability of the task-specific models. Moreover, we provide a practical algorithm for the framework, and validate its superior effectiveness through experiments conducted on meta-imitation learning and few-shot image classification.
tl;dr: We develop a multidimensional version of backtracking line-search to find per-coordinate step-sizes for gradient descent with strong theoretical guarantees.
The backtracking line-search is an effective technique to automatically tune the step-size in smooth optimization. It guarantees similar performance to using the theoretically optimal step-size. Many approaches have been developed to instead tune per-coordinate step-sizes, also known as diagonal preconditioners, but none of the existing methods are provably competitive with the optimal per-coordinate step-sizes. We propose multidimensional backtracking, an extension of the backtracking line-search to find good diagonal preconditioners for smooth convex problems. Our key insight is that the gradient with respect to the step-sizes, also known as hyper-gradients, yields separating hyperplanes that let us search for good preconditioners using cutting-plane methods. As black-box cutting-plane approaches like the ellipsoid method are computationally prohibitive, we develop an efficient algorithm tailored to our setting. Multidimensional backtracking is provably competitive with the best diagonal preconditioner and requires no manual tuning.
tl;dr: We introduce Fine-Grained RLHF, a framework that enables training and learning from fine-grained rewards: (1) density, providing a reward after each granular segment; and (2) mixing multiple reward models associated with different feedback types.
Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)---where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal---has recently shown promise in addressing these issues. However, such holistic feedback conveys limited information on long text outputs; it does not indicate which aspects of the outputs influenced user preference; e.g., which parts contain what type(s) of errors. In this paper, we use fine-grained human feedback (e.g., which sentence is false, which sub-sentence is irrelevant) as an explicit training signal. We introduce Fine-Grained RLHF, a framework that enables training and learning from reward functions that are fine-grained in two respects: (1) density, providing a reward after every segment (e.g., a sentence) is generated; and (2) incorporating multiple reward models associated with different feedback types (e.g., factual incorrectness, irrelevance, and information incompleteness). We conduct experiments on detoxification and long-form question answering to illustrate how learning with this reward function leads to improved performance, supported by both automatic and human evaluation. Additionally, we show that LM behaviors can be customized using different combinations of fine-grained reward models. We release all data, collected human feedback, and codes at https://FineGrainedRLHF.github.io.
tl;dr: Of four categories of large language models evaluated the only type of model that understands implicatures is those fine-tuned on example-level instruction data.
Despite widespread use of LLMs as conversational agents, evaluations of performance fail to capture a crucial aspect of communication: interpreting language in context---incorporating its pragmatics. Humans interpret language using beliefs and prior knowledge about the world. For example, we intuitively understand the response "I wore gloves" to the question "Did you leave fingerprints?" as meaning "No". To investigate whether LLMs have the ability to make this type of inference, known as an implicature, we design a simple task and evaluate four categories of widely used state-of-the-art models. We find that, despite only evaluating on utterances that require a binary inference (yes or no), models in three of these categories perform close to random. However, LLMs instruction-tuned at the example-level perform significantly better. These results suggest that certain fine-tuning strategies are far better at inducing pragmatic understanding in models. We present our findings as the starting point for further research into evaluating how LLMs interpret language in context and to drive the development of more pragmatic and useful models of human discourse.
Many approaches in machine learning rely on a weighted graph to encode the
similarities between samples in a dataset. Entropic affinities (EAs), which are notably used in the popular Dimensionality Reduction (DR) algorithm t-SNE, are particular instances of such graphs. To ensure robustness to heterogeneous sampling densities, EAs assign a kernel bandwidth parameter to every sample in such a way that the entropy of each row in the affinity matrix is kept constant at a specific value, whose exponential is known as perplexity. EAs are inherently asymmetric and row-wise stochastic, but they are used in DR approaches after undergoing heuristic symmetrization methods that violate both the row-wise constant entropy and stochasticity properties. In this work, we uncover a novel characterization of EA as an optimal transport problem, allowing a natural symmetrization that can be computed efficiently using dual ascent.
The corresponding novel affinity matrix derives advantages from symmetric doubly stochastic normalization in terms of clustering performance, while also effectively controlling the entropy of each row thus making it particularly robust to varying noise levels. Following, we present a new DR algorithm, SNEkhorn, that leverages this new affinity matrix. We show its clear superiority to state-of-the-art approaches with several indicators on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Intrinsic interpretable graph neural networks aim to provide transparent predictions by identifying the influential fraction of the input graph that guides the model prediction, i.e., the explanatory subgraph. However, current interpretable GNNs mostly are dataset-specific and hard to generalize to different graphs. A more generalizable GNN interpretation model which can effectively distill the universal structural patterns of different graphs is until-now unexplored. Motivated by the great success of recent pre-training techniques, we for the first time propose the Pre-training Interpretable Graph Neural Network ($\pi$-GNN) to distill the universal interpretability of GNNs by pre-training over synthetic graphs with ground-truth explanations. Specifically, we introduce a structural pattern learning module to extract diverse universal structure patterns and integrate them together to comprehensively represent the graphs of different types. Next, a hypergraph refining module is proposed to identify the explanatory subgraph by incorporating the universal structure patterns with local edge interactions. Finally, the task-specific predictor is cascaded with the pre-trained $\pi$-GNN model and fine-tuned over downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $\pi$-GNN significantly surpasses the leading interpretable GNN baselines with up to 9.98\% interpretation improvement and 16.06\% classification accuracy improvement. Meanwhile, $\pi$-GNN pre-trained on graph classification task also achieves the top-tier interpretation performance on node classification task, which further verifies its promising generalization performance among different downstream tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PI-GNN-F86C
tl;dr: We propose BiMatting, an accurate and efficient video matting model using binarization.
Real-time video matting on edge devices faces significant computational resource constraints, limiting the widespread use of video matting in applications such as online conferences and short-form video production. Binarization is a powerful compression approach that greatly reduces computation and memory consumption by using 1-bit parameters and bitwise operations. However, binarization of the video matting model is not a straightforward process, and our empirical analysis has revealed two primary bottlenecks: severe representation degradation of the encoder and massive redundant computations of the decoder. To address these issues, we propose BiMatting, an accurate and efficient video matting model using binarization. Specifically, we construct shrinkable and dense topologies of the binarized encoder block to enhance the extracted representation. We sparsify the binarized units to reduce the low-information decoding computation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that BiMatting outperforms other binarized video matting models, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) binarization methods, by a significant margin. Our approach even performs comparably to the full-precision counterpart in visual quality. Furthermore, BiMatting achieves remarkable savings of 12.4$\times$ and 21.6$\times$ in computation and storage, respectively, showcasing its potential and advantages in real-world resource-constrained scenarios. Our code and models are released at https://github.com/htqin/BiMatting .
tl;dr: We scale deep learning models that use symbolic reasoning using a neural network that performs approximate inference
We study the problem of combining neural networks with symbolic reasoning. Recently introduced frameworks for Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning (PNL), such as DeepProbLog, perform exponential-time exact inference, limiting the scalability of PNL solutions. We introduce Approximate Neurosymbolic Inference (A-NeSI): a new framework for PNL that uses neural networks for scalable approximate inference. A-NeSI 1) performs approximate inference in polynomial time without changing the semantics of probabilistic logics; 2) is trained using data generated by the background knowledge; 3) can generate symbolic explanations of predictions; and 4) can guarantee the satisfaction of logical constraints at test time, which is vital in safety-critical applications. Our experiments show that A-NeSI is the first end-to-end method to solve three neurosymbolic tasks with exponential combinatorial scaling. Finally, our experiments show that A-NeSI achieves explainability and safety without a penalty in performance.
tl;dr: For natural exponential families, optimizing MLE using zero- and first-order methods can be NP-hard, while score matching is computationally efficient and statistically comparable.
Score matching is an alternative to maximum likelihood (ML) for estimating a probability distribution parametrized up to a constant of proportionality. By fitting the ''score'' of the distribution, it sidesteps the need to compute this constant of proportionality (which is often intractable).
While score matching and variants thereof are popular in practice, precise theoretical understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs with maximum likelihood---both computational and statistical---are not well understood. In this work, we give the first example of a natural exponential family of distributions such that the score matching loss is computationally efficient to optimize, and has a comparable statistical efficiency to ML, while the ML loss is intractable to optimize using a gradient-based method. The family consists of exponentials of polynomials of fixed degree, and our result can be viewed as a continuous analogue of recent developments in the discrete setting. Precisely, we show: (1) Designing a zeroth-order or first-order oracle for optimizing the maximum likelihood loss is NP-hard. (2) Maximum likelihood has a statistical efficiency polynomial in the ambient dimension and the radius of the parameters of the family. (3)
Minimizing the score matching loss is both computationally and statistically efficient, with complexity polynomial in the ambient dimension.
tl;dr: We introduce 3D-LLMs, new foudation models for 3D reasoning.
Large language models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been proved to excel at multiple tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. Powerful as these models can be, they are not grounded in the 3D physical world, which involves richer concepts such as spatial relationships, affordances, physics, layout, and so on. In this work, we propose to inject the 3D world into large language models, and introduce a whole new family of 3D-LLMs. Specifically, 3D-LLMs can take 3D point clouds and their features as input and perform a diverse set of 3D-related tasks, including captioning, dense captioning, 3D question answering, task decomposition, 3D
grounding, 3D-assisted dialog, navigation, and so on. Using three types of prompting mechanisms that we design, we are able to collect over 300k 3D-language data covering these tasks. To efficiently train 3D-LLMs, we first utilize a 3D feature extractor that obtains 3D features from rendered multi-view images. Then, we use 2D VLMs as our backbones to train our 3D-LLMs. By introducing a 3D localization mechanism, 3D-LLMs could better capture 3D spatial information. Experiments on ScanQA show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin (\textit{e.g.}, the BLEU-1 score surpasses state-of-the-art score by 9\%). Furthermore, experiments on our held-in datasets for 3D captioning, task composition, and 3D-assisted dialogue show that our model outperforms 2D VLMs. Qualitative examples also show that our model could perform more tasks beyond the scope of existing LLMs and VLMs. Our model and data will be publicly available.
tl;dr: We propose a meta learning algorithm to train a meta generator to generate dataset distillation results efficiently so that the distilled datasets can be generated in a one-stop feed-forward inference after adaptation.
Existing dataset distillation (DD) techniques typically rely on iterative strategies to synthesize condensed datasets, where datasets before and after distillation are forward and backward through neural networks a massive number of times. Despite the promising results achieved, the time efficiency of prior approaches is still far from satisfactory. Moreover, when different sizes of synthetic datasets are required, they have to repeat the iterative training procedures, which is highly cumbersome and lacks flexibility. In this paper, different from the time-consuming forward-backward passes, we introduce a generative fashion for dataset distillation with significantly improved efficiency. Specifically, synthetic samples are produced by a generator network conditioned on the initialization of DD, while synthetic labels are obtained by solving a least-squares problem in a feature space. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the errors of synthetic datasets solved in the original space and then processed by any conditional generators are upper-bounded. To find a satisfactory generator efficiently, we propose a meta-learning algorithm, where a meta generator is trained on a large dataset so that only a few steps are required to adapt to a target dataset. The meta generator is termed as MGDD in our approach. Once adapted, it can handle arbitrary sizes of synthetic datasets, even for those unseen during adaptation. Experiments demonstrate that the generator adapted with only a limited number of steps performs on par with those state-of-the-art DD methods and yields $22\times$ acceleration.
tl;dr: This paper presents GoMARL, a domain-agnostic method that learns automatic group division for efficient cooperation by promoting intra- and inter-group coordination.
Grouping is ubiquitous in natural systems and is essential for promoting efficiency in team coordination. This paper proposes a novel formulation of Group-oriented Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (GoMARL), which learns automatic grouping without domain knowledge for efficient cooperation. In contrast to existing approaches that attempt to directly learn the complex relationship between the joint action-values and individual utilities, we empower grouping as a bridge to model the connection between small sets of agents and encourage cooperation among them, thereby improving the learning efficiency of the whole team. In particular, we factorize the joint action-values as a combination of group-wise values, which guide agents to improve their policies in a fine-grained fashion. We present an automatic grouping mechanism to generate dynamic groups and group action-values. We further introduce a hierarchical control for policy learning that drives the agents in the same group to specialize in similar policies and possess diverse strategies for various groups. Experiments on the StarCraft II micromanagement tasks and Google Research Football scenarios verify our method's effectiveness. Extensive component studies show how grouping works and enhances performance.
tl;dr: Regularization method for neural simulation-based inference that uses a differentiable computation of posterior's expected coverage probability.
Bayesian inference allows expressing the uncertainty of posterior belief under a probabilistic model given prior information and the likelihood of the evidence. Predominantly, the likelihood function is only implicitly established by a simulator posing the need for simulation-based inference (SBI). However, the existing algorithms can yield overconfident posteriors (Hermans *et al.*, 2022) defeating the whole purpose of credibility if the uncertainty quantification is inaccurate. We propose to include a calibration term directly into the training objective of the neural model in selected amortized SBI techniques. By introducing a relaxation of the classical formulation of calibration error we enable end-to-end backpropagation. The proposed method is not tied to any particular neural model and brings moderate computational overhead compared to the profits it introduces. It is directly applicable to existing computational pipelines allowing reliable black-box posterior inference. We empirically show on six benchmark problems that the proposed method achieves competitive or better results in terms of coverage and expected posterior density than the previously existing approaches.
tl;dr: Through a variational study on high-resolution ODEs, we propose better convergence rate of the gradient norm minimization for the NAG method, deeper study on the rate-matching technique, and an accelerated method for noisy gradients.
We consider unconstrained minimization of smooth convex functions. We propose a novel variational perspective using forced Euler-Lagrange equation that allows for studying high-resolution ODEs. Through this, we obtain a faster convergence rate for gradient norm minimization using Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. Additionally, we show that Nesterov's method can be interpreted as a rate-matching discretization of an appropriately chosen high-resolution ODE. Finally, using the results from the new variational perspective, we propose a stochastic method for noisy gradients. Several numerical experiments compare and illustrate our stochastic algorithm with state of the art methods.
493. MedSat: A Public Health Dataset for England Featuring Medical Prescriptions and Satellite Imagery
tl;dr: This unique dataset combines prescription data, satellite imagery, and socioeconomic data for studying spatial-temporal health attributes in England.
As extreme weather events become more frequent, understanding their impact on human health becomes increasingly crucial. However, the utilization of Earth Observation to effectively analyze the environmental context in relation to health remains limited. This limitation is primarily due to the lack of fine-grained spatial and temporal data in public and population health studies, hindering a comprehensive understanding of health outcomes. Additionally, obtaining appropriate environmental indices across different geographical levels and timeframes poses a challenge. For the years 2019 (pre-COVID) and 2020 (COVID), we collected spatio-temporal indicators for all Lower Layer Super Output Areas in England. These indicators included: i) 111 sociodemographic features linked to health in existing literature, ii) 43 environmental point features (e.g., greenery and air pollution levels), iii) 4 seasonal composite satellite images each with 11 bands, and iv) prescription prevalence associated with five medical conditions (depression, anxiety, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma), opioids and total prescriptions. We combined these indicators into a single MedSat dataset, the availability of which presents an opportunity for the machine learning community to develop new techniques specific to public health. These techniques would address challenges such as handling large and complex data volumes, performing effective feature engineering on environmental and sociodemographic factors, capturing spatial and temporal dependencies in the models, addressing imbalanced data distributions, developing novel computer vision methods for health modeling based on satellite imagery, ensuring model explainability, and achieving generalization beyond the specific geographical region.
MCMC algorithms offer empirically efficient tools for sampling from a target distribution $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. However, on the theory side, MCMC algorithms suffer from slow mixing rate when $\pi(x)$ is non-log-concave. Our work examines this gap and shows that when Poincar\'e-style inequality holds on a subset $\mathcal{X}$ of the state space, the conditional distribution of MCMC iterates over $\mathcal{X}$ mixes fast to the true conditional distribution. This fast mixing guarantee can hold in cases when global mixing is provably slow. We formalize the statement and quantify the conditional mixing rate. We further show that conditional mixing can have interesting implications for sampling from mixtures of Gaussians, parameter estimation for Gaussian mixture models, and Gibbs-sampling with well-connected local minima.
Given a training set, a loss function, and a neural network architecture, it is often taken for granted that optimal network parameters exist, and a common practice is to apply available optimization algorithms to search for them. In this work, we show that the existence of an optimal solution is not always guaranteed, especially in the context of sparse ReLU neural networks.
In particular, we first show that optimization problems involving deep networks with certain sparsity patterns do not always have optimal parameters, and that optimization algorithms may then diverge. Via a new topological relation between sparse ReLU neural networks and their linear counterparts, we derive --using existing tools from real algebraic geometry-- an algorithm to verify that a given sparsity pattern suffers from this issue. Then, the existence of a global optimum is proved for every concrete optimization problem involving
a shallow sparse ReLU neural network of output dimension one. Overall, the analysis is based on the investigation of two topological properties of the space of functions implementable as sparse ReLU neural networks: a best approximation property, and a closedness property, both in the uniform norm. This is studied both for (finite) domains corresponding to practical training on finite training sets, and for more general domains such as the unit cube. This allows us to provide conditions for the guaranteed existence of an optimum given a sparsity pattern. The results apply not only to several sparsity patterns proposed in recent works on network pruning/sparsification, but also to classical dense neural networks, including architectures not covered by existing results.
496. Training Your Image Restoration Network Better with Random Weight Network as Optimization Function
tl;dr: This is a first time attempt to investigate the potential of ``Random Weights Networks can Be Acted as Loss Prior Constraint for Image Restoration''.
The blooming progress made in deep learning-based image restoration has been largely attributed to the availability of high-quality, large-scale datasets and advanced network structures. However, optimization functions such as L_1 and L_2 are still de facto. In this study, we propose to investigate new optimization functions to improve image restoration performance. Our key insight is that ``random weight network can be acted as a constraint for training better image restoration networks''. However, not all random weight networks are suitable as constraints. We draw inspiration from Functional theory and show that alternative random weight networks should be represented in the form of a strict mathematical manifold. We explore the potential of our random weight network prototypes that satisfy this requirement: Taylor's unfolding network, invertible neural network, central difference convolution, and zero-order filtering. We investigate these prototypes from four aspects: 1) random weight strategies, 2) network architectures, 3) network depths, and 4) combinations of random weight networks. Furthermore, we devise the random weight in two variants: the weights are randomly initialized only once during the entire training procedure, and the weights are randomly initialized in each training epoch. Our approach can be directly integrated into existing networks without incurring additional training and testing computational costs. We perform extensive experiments across multiple image restoration tasks, including image denoising, low-light image enhancement, and guided image super-resolution to demonstrate the consistent performance gains achieved by our method. Upon acceptance of this paper, we will release the code.
tl;dr: We propose a novel Reachability Estimation for Safe Policy Optimization algorithm for stochastic safety-constrained reinforcement learning with safety guarantees and optimal convergence analysis.
Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise safety satisfaction, and avoiding overly conservative behaviors that sacrifice performance. We propose a new framework, Reachability Estimation for Safe Policy Optimization (RESPO), for safety-constrained RL in general stochastic settings. In the feasible set where there exist violation-free policies, we optimize for rewards while maintaining persistent safety. Outside this feasible set, our optimization produces the safest behavior by guaranteeing entrance into the feasible set whenever possible with the least cumulative discounted violations. We introduce a class of algorithms using our novel reachability estimation function to optimize in our proposed framework and in similar frameworks such as those concurrently handling multiple hard and soft constraints. We theoretically establish that our algorithms almost surely converge to locally optimal policies of our safe optimization framework. We evaluate the proposed methods on a diverse suite of safe RL environments from Safety Gym, PyBullet, and MuJoCo, and show the benefits in improving both reward performance and safety compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
tl;dr: The NIST Collaborative Research Cycle seeks to advance deidentification algorithms with real-world benchmark data (Diverse Community Excerpts), a suite of evaluation software (SDNist), and more than 450 deidentified instances with evaluation data.
The Collaborative Research Cycle (CRC) is a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) benchmarking program intended to strengthen understanding of tabular data deidentification technologies. Deidentification algorithms are vulnerable to the same bias and privacy issues that impact other data analytics and machine learning applications, and it can even amplify those issues by contaminating downstream applications. This paper summarizes four CRC contributions: theoretical work on the relationship between diverse populations and challenges for equitable deidentification; public benchmark data focused on diverse populations and challenging features; a comprehensive open source suite of evaluation metrology for deidentified datasets; and an archive of more than 450 deidentified data samples from a broad range of techniques. The initial set of evaluation results demonstrate the value of the CRC tools for investigations in this field.
Neural decoding and its applications to brain computer interfaces (BCI) are essential for understanding the association between neural activity and behavior. A prerequisite for many decoding approaches is spike sorting, the assignment of action potentials (spikes) to individual neurons. Current spike sorting algorithms, however, can be inaccurate and do not properly model uncertainty of spike assignments, therefore discarding information that could potentially improve decoding performance. Recent advances in high-density probes (e.g., Neuropixels) and computational methods now allow for extracting a rich set of spike features from unsorted data; these features can in turn be used to directly decode behavioral correlates. To this end, we propose a spike sorting-free decoding method that directly models the distribution of extracted spike features using a mixture of Gaussians (MoG) encoding the uncertainty of spike assignments, without aiming to solve the spike clustering problem explicitly. We allow the mixing proportion of the MoG to change over time in response to the behavior and develop variational inference methods to fit the resulting model and to perform decoding. We benchmark our method with an extensive suite of recordings from different animals and probe geometries, demonstrating that our proposed decoder can consistently outperform current methods based on thresholding (i.e. multi-unit activity) and spike sorting. Open source code is available at https://github.com/yzhang511/density_decoding.
tl;dr: We introduce ProtoDiff, a novel framework that leverages a task-guided diffusion model during the meta-training phase to gradually generate prototypes, thereby providing efficient class representations.
Prototype-based meta-learning has emerged as a powerful technique for addressing few-shot learning challenges. However, estimating a deterministic prototype using a simple average function from a limited number of examples remains a fragile process. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ProtoDiff, a novel framework that leverages a task-guided diffusion model during the meta-training phase to gradually generate prototypes, thereby providing efficient class representations. Specifically, a set of prototypes is optimized to achieve per-task prototype overfitting, enabling accurately obtaining the overfitted prototypes for individual tasks.
Furthermore, we introduce a task-guided diffusion process within the prototype space, enabling the meta-learning of a generative process that transitions from a vanilla prototype to an overfitted prototype. ProtoDiff gradually generates task-specific prototypes from random noise during the meta-test stage, conditioned on the limited samples available for the new task. Furthermore, to expedite training and enhance ProtoDiff's performance, we propose the utilization of residual prototype learning, which leverages the sparsity of the residual prototype. We conduct thorough ablation studies to demonstrate its ability to accurately capture the underlying prototype distribution and enhance generalization. The new state-of-the-art performance on within-domain, cross-domain, and few-task few-shot classification further substantiates the benefit of ProtoDiff.
Optimization over trained machine learning models has applications including: verification, minimizing neural acquisition functions, and integrating a trained surrogate into a larger decision-making problem. This paper formulates and solves optimization problems constrained by trained graph neural networks (GNNs). To circumvent the symmetry issue caused by graph isomorphism, we propose two types of symmetry-breaking constraints: one indexing a node 0 and one indexing the remaining nodes by lexicographically ordering their neighbor sets. To guarantee that adding these constraints will not remove all symmetric solutions, we construct a graph indexing algorithm and prove that the resulting graph indexing satisfies the proposed symmetry-breaking constraints. For the classical GNN architectures considered in this paper, optimizing over a GNN with a fixed graph is equivalent to optimizing over a dense neural network. Thus, we study the case where the input graph is not fixed, implying that each edge is a decision variable, and develop two mixed-integer optimization formulations. To test our symmetry-breaking strategies and optimization formulations, we consider an application in molecular design.
tl;dr: We introduce Cap3D, an automatic approach for generating descriptive text for 3D objects, by leveraging pretrained models in captioning, alignment, and language to consolidate multi-view information.
We introduce Cap3D, an automatic approach for generating descriptive text for 3D objects. This approach utilizes pretrained models from image captioning, image-text alignment, and LLM to consolidate captions from multiple views of a 3D asset, completely side-stepping the time-consuming and costly process of manual annotation. We apply Cap3D to the recently introduced large-scale 3D dataset, Objaverse, resulting in 660k 3D-text pairs. Our evaluation, conducted using 41k human annotations from the same dataset, demonstrates that Cap3D surpasses human-authored descriptions in terms of quality, cost, and speed. Through effective prompt engineering, Cap3D rivals human performance in generating geometric descriptions on 17k collected annotations from the ABO dataset. Finally, we finetune Text-to-3D models on Cap3D and human captions, and show Cap3D outperforms; and benchmark the SOTA including Point·E, Shape·E, and DreamFusion.
tl;dr: We find that offline RL can produce surprisingly good policies even when trained on wrong reward labels. We provide explanations and discuss practical implications.
We present a novel observation about the behavior of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: on many benchmark datasets, offline RL can produce well-performing and safe policies even when trained with "wrong" reward labels, such as those that are zero everywhere or are negatives of the true rewards. This phenomenon cannot be easily explained by offline RL's return maximization objective. Moreover, it gives offline RL a degree of robustness that is uncharacteristic of its online RL counterparts, which are known to be sensitive to reward design. We demonstrate that this surprising robustness property is attributable to an interplay between the notion of *pessimism* in offline RL algorithms and certain implicit biases in common data collection practices. As we prove in this work, pessimism endows the agent with a *survival instinct*, i.e., an incentive to stay within the data support in the long term, while the limited and biased data coverage further constrains the set of survival policies. Formally, given a reward class -- which may not even contain the true reward -- we identify conditions on the training data distribution that enable offline RL to learn a near-optimal and safe policy from any reward within the class. We argue that the survival instinct should be taken into account when interpreting results from existing offline RL benchmarks and when creating future ones. Our empirical and theoretical results suggest a new paradigm for offline RL, whereby an agent is "nudged" to learn a desirable behavior with imperfect reward but purposely biased data coverage. Please visit our website [https://survival-instinct.github.io](https://survival-instinct.github.io) for accompanied code and videos.
Collaborative perception can substantially boost each agent's perception ability by facilitating communication among multiple agents. However, temporal asynchrony among agents is inevitable in the real world due to communication delays, interruptions, and clock misalignments. This issue causes information mismatch during multi-agent fusion, seriously shaking the foundation of collaboration. To address this issue, we propose CoBEVFlow, an asynchrony-robust collaborative perception system based on bird's eye view (BEV) flow. The key intuition of CoBEVFlow is to compensate motions to align asynchronous collaboration messages sent by multiple agents. To model the motion in a scene, we propose BEV flow, which is a collection of the motion vector corresponding to each spatial location. Based on BEV flow, asynchronous perceptual features can be reassigned to appropriate positions, mitigating the impact of asynchrony. CoBEVFlow has two advantages: (i) CoBEVFlow can handle asynchronous collaboration messages sent at irregular, continuous time stamps without discretization; and (ii) with BEV flow, CoBEVFlow only transports the original perceptual features, instead of generating new perceptual features, avoiding additional noises. To validate CoBEVFlow's efficacy, we create IRregular V2V(IRV2V), the first synthetic collaborative perception dataset with various temporal asynchronies that simulate different real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on both IRV2V and the real-world dataset DAIR-V2X show that CoBEVFlow consistently outperforms other baselines and is robust in extremely asynchronous settings. The code is available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/CoBEVFlow.
tl;dr: Language Rewrites by Large Language Models significantly improves CLIP training
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands as one of the most effective and scalable methods for training transferable vision models using paired image and text data. CLIP models are trained using contrastive loss, which typically relies on data augmentations to prevent overfitting and shortcuts. However, in the CLIP training paradigm, data augmentations are exclusively applied to image inputs, while language inputs remain unchanged throughout the entire training process, limiting the exposure of diverse texts to the same image. In this paper, we introduce Language augmented CLIP (LaCLIP), a simple yet highly effective approach to enhance CLIP training through language rewrites. Leveraging the in-context learning capability of large language models, we rewrite the text descriptions associated with each image. These rewritten texts exhibit diversity in sentence structure and vocabulary while preserving the original key concepts and meanings. During training, LaCLIP randomly selects either the original texts or the rewritten versions as text augmentations for each image. Extensive experiments on CC3M, CC12M, RedCaps and LAION-400M datasets show that CLIP pre-training with language rewrites significantly improves the transfer performance without computation or memory overhead during training. Specifically for ImageNet zero-shot accuracy, LaCLIP outperforms CLIP by 8.2% on CC12M and 2.4% on LAION-400M.
Open-world semi-supervised learning aims at inferring both known and novel classes in unlabeled data, by harnessing prior knowledge from a labeled set with known classes. Despite its importance, there is a lack of theoretical foundations for this problem. This paper bridges the gap by formalizing a graph-theoretic framework tailored for the open-world setting, where the clustering can be theoretically characterized by graph factorization. Our graph-theoretic framework illuminates practical algorithms and provides guarantees. In particular, based on our graph formulation, we apply the algorithm called Spectral Open-world Representation Learning (SORL), and show that minimizing our loss is equivalent to performing spectral decomposition on the graph. Such equivalence allows us to derive a provable error bound on the clustering performance for both known and novel classes, and analyze rigorously when labeled data helps. Empirically, SORL can match or outperform several strong baselines on common benchmark datasets, which is appealing for practical usage while enjoying theoretical guarantees.
507. Not All Neuro-Symbolic Concepts Are Created Equal: Analysis and Mitigation of Reasoning Shortcuts
tl;dr: A thorough analysis of learning shortcuts acquired by Neuro-Symbolic prediction models and of potential mitigation strategies
Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) predictive models hold the promise of improved compliance with given constraints, systematic generalization, and interpretability, as they allow to infer labels that are consistent with some prior knowledge by reasoning over high-level concepts extracted from sub-symbolic inputs. It was recently shown that NeSy predictors are affected by *reasoning shortcuts*: they can attain high accuracy but by leveraging concepts with \textit{unintended semantics}, thus coming short of their promised advantages. Yet, a systematic characterization of reasoning shortcuts and of potential mitigation strategies is missing. This work fills this gap by characterizing them as unintended optima of the learning objective and identifying four key conditions behind their occurrence. Based on this, we derive several natural mitigation strategies, and analyze their efficacy both theoretically and empirically. Our analysis shows reasoning shortcuts are difficult to deal with, casting doubts on the trustworthiness and interpretability of existing NeSy solutions.
tl;dr: We present a model that can generate accurate 3D sound fields of human bodies from headset microphones and body pose as inputs.
While 3D human body modeling has received much attention in computer vision, modeling the acoustic equivalent, i.e. modeling 3D spatial audio produced by body motion and speech, has fallen short in the community. To close this gap, we present a model that can generate accurate 3D spatial audio for full human bodies. The system consumes, as input, audio signals from headset microphones and body pose, and produces, as output, a 3D sound field surrounding the transmitter's body, from which spatial audio can be rendered at any arbitrary position in the 3D space. We collect a first-of-its-kind multimodal dataset of human bodies, recorded with multiple cameras and a spherical array of 345 microphones. In an empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our model can produce accurate body-induced sound fields when trained with a suitable loss. Dataset and code are available online.
Self-supervised pre-training methods on proteins have recently gained attention, with most approaches focusing on either protein sequences or structures, neglecting the exploration of their joint distribution, which is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of protein functions by integrating co-evolutionary information and structural characteristics. In this work, inspired by the success of denoising diffusion models in generative tasks, we propose the DiffPreT approach to pre-train a protein encoder by sequence-structure joint diffusion modeling. DiffPreT guides the encoder to recover the native protein sequences and structures from the perturbed ones along the joint diffusion trajectory, which acquires the joint distribution of sequences and structures. Considering the essential protein conformational variations, we enhance DiffPreT by a method called Siamese Diffusion Trajectory Prediction (SiamDiff) to capture the correlation between different conformers of a protein. SiamDiff attains this goal by maximizing the mutual information between representations of diffusion trajectories of structurally-correlated conformers. We study the effectiveness of DiffPreT and SiamDiff on both atom- and residue-level structure-based protein understanding tasks. Experimental results show that the performance of DiffPreT is consistently competitive on all tasks, and SiamDiff achieves new state-of-the-art performance, considering the mean ranks on all tasks. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Constructing a similarity graph from a set $X$ of data points in $ \mathbb{R}^d$ is the first step of many modern clustering algorithms. However, typical constructions of a similarity graph have high time complexity, and a quadratic space dependency with respect to $|X|$. We address this limitation and present a new algorithmic framework that constructs a sparse approximation of the fully connected similarity graph while preserving its cluster structure. Our presented algorithm is based on the kernel density estimation problem, and is applicable for arbitrary kernel functions. We compare our designed algorithm with the well-known implementations from the scikit-learn library and the FAISS library, and find that our method significantly outperforms the implementation from both libraries on a variety of datasets.
tl;dr: We propose an effective and inductive way to encode the higher-order patterns and dynamic laws of the hypergraphs via SetWalks, a new family of walks on hypergraphs, which significantly improves inductive representation learning on these networks.
Temporal hypergraphs provide a powerful paradigm for modeling time-dependent, higher-order interactions in complex systems. Representation learning for hypergraphs is essential for extracting patterns of the higher-order interactions that are critically important in real-world problems in social network analysis, neuroscience, finance, etc. However, existing methods are typically designed only for specific tasks or static hypergraphs. We present CAT-Walk, an inductive method that learns the underlying dynamic laws that govern the temporal and structural processes underlying a temporal hypergraph. CAT-Walk introduces a temporal, higher-order walk on hypergraphs, SetWalk, that extracts higher-order causal patterns. CAT-Walk uses a novel adaptive and permutation invariant pooling strategy, SetMixer, along with a set-based anonymization process that hides the identity of hyperedges. Finally, we present a simple yet effective neural network model to encode hyperedges. Our evaluation on 10 hypergraph benchmark datasets shows that CAT-Walk attains outstanding performance on temporal hyperedge prediction benchmarks in both inductive and transductive settings. It also shows competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods for node classification. (https://github.com/ubc-systopia/CATWalk)
tl;dr: a toolbox for remote physiological measurement
Camera-based physiological measurement is a fast growing field of computer vision. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) utilizes imaging devices (e.g., cameras) to measure the peripheral blood volume pulse (BVP) via photoplethysmography, and enables cardiac measurement via webcams and smartphones. However, the task is non-trivial with important pre-processing, modeling and post-processing steps required to obtain state-of-the-art results. Replication of results and benchmarking of new models is critical for scientific progress; however, as with many other applications of deep learning, reliable codebases are not easy to find or use. We present a comprehensive toolbox, rPPG-Toolbox, unsupervised and supervised rPPG models with support for public benchmark datasets, data augmentation and systematic evaluation: https://github.com/ubicomplab/rPPG-Toolbox.
This paper investigates the asymptotic distribution of the maximum-likelihood estimate (MLE) in multinomial logistic models in the high-dimensional regime where dimension and sample size are of the same order. While classical large-sample theory provides asymptotic normality of the MLE under certain conditions, such classical results are expected to fail in high-dimensions as documented for the binary logistic case in the seminal work of Sur and Candès [2019]. We address this issue in classification problems with 3 or more classes, by developing asymptotic normality and asymptotic chi-square results for the multinomial logistic MLE (also known as cross-entropy minimizer) on null covariates. Our theory leads to a new methodology to test the significance of a given feature. Extensive simulation studies on synthetic data corroborate these asymptotic results and confirm the validity of proposed p-values for testing the significance of a given feature.
Collaborative learning techniques have significantly advanced in recent years, enabling private model training across multiple organizations. Despite this opportunity, firms face a dilemma when considering data sharing with competitors—while collaboration can improve a company’s machine learning model, it may also benefit competitors and hence reduce profits. In this work, we introduce a general framework for analyzing this data-sharing trade-off. The framework consists of three components, representing the firms’ production decisions, the effect of additional data on model quality, and the data-sharing negotiation process, respectively. We then study an instantiation of the framework, based on a conventional market model from economic theory, to identify key factors that affect collaboration incentives. Our findings indicate a profound impact of market conditions on the data-sharing incentives. In particular, we find that reduced competition, in terms of the similarities between the firms’ products, and harder learning tasks foster collaboration.
tl;dr: Flexibly resize the condensed dataset without extra condensation process
Dataset condensation is a crucial tool for enhancing training efficiency by reducing the size of the training dataset, particularly in on-device scenarios. However, these scenarios have two significant challenges: 1) the varying computational resources available on the devices require a dataset size different from the pre-defined condensed dataset, and 2) the limited computational resources often preclude the possibility of conducting additional condensation processes. We introduce You Only Condense Once (YOCO) to overcome these limitations. On top of one condensed dataset, YOCO produces smaller condensed datasets with two embarrassingly simple dataset pruning rules: Low LBPE Score and Balanced Construction. YOCO offers two key advantages: 1) it can flexibly resize the dataset to fit varying computational constraints, and 2) it eliminates the need for extra condensation processes, which can be computationally prohibitive. Experiments validate our findings on networks including ConvNet, ResNet and DenseNet, and datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. For example, our YOCO surpassed various dataset condensation and dataset pruning methods on CIFAR-10 with ten Images Per Class (IPC), achieving 6.98-8.89% and 6.31-23.92% accuracy gains, respectively. The code is available at: [https://github.com/he-y/you-only-condense-once](https://github.com/he-y/you-only-condense-once).
tl;dr: We prove minimax optimal rates for kernel ridge regression with group invariances on manifolds.
In practice, encoding invariances into models improves sample complexity. In this work, we study this phenomenon from a theoretical perspective. In particular, we provide minimax optimal rates for kernel ridge regression on compact manifolds, with a target function that is invariant to a group action on the manifold. Our results hold for any smooth compact Lie group action, even groups of positive dimension. For a finite group, the gain effectively multiplies the number of samples by the group size. For groups of positive dimension, the gain is observed by a reduction in the manifold's dimension, in addition to a factor proportional to the volume of the quotient space. Our proof takes the viewpoint of differential geometry, in contrast to the more common strategy of using invariant polynomials. This new geometric viewpoint on learning with invariances may be of independent interest.
A key theme in the past decade has been that when large neural networks and large datasets combine they can produce remarkable results. In deep reinforcement learning (RL), this paradigm is commonly made possible through experience replay, whereby a dataset of past experiences is used to train a policy or value function. However, unlike in supervised or self-supervised learning, an RL agent has to collect its own data, which is often limited. Thus, it is challenging to reap the benefits of deep learning, and even small neural networks can overfit at the start of training. In this work, we leverage the tremendous recent progress in generative modeling and propose Synthetic Experience Replay (SynthER), a diffusion-based approach to flexibly upsample an agent's collected experience. We show that SynthER is an effective method for training RL agents across offline and online settings, in both proprioceptive and pixel-based environments. In offline settings, we observe drastic improvements when upsampling small offline datasets and see that additional synthetic data also allows us to effectively train larger networks. Furthermore, SynthER enables online agents to train with a much higher update-to-data ratio than before, leading to a significant increase in sample efficiency, without any algorithmic changes. We believe that synthetic training data could open the door to realizing the full potential of deep learning for replay-based RL algorithms from limited data. Finally, we open-source our code at https://github.com/conglu1997/SynthER.
Neural rendering is fuelling a unification of learning, 3D geometry and video understanding that has been waiting for more than two decades. Progress, however, is still hampered by a lack of suitable datasets and benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce EPIC Fields, an augmentation of EPIC-KITCHENS with 3D camera information. Like other datasets for neural rendering, EPIC Fields removes the complex and expensive step of reconstructing cameras using photogrammetry, and allows researchers to focus on modelling problems. We illustrate the challenge of photogrammetry in egocentric videos of dynamic actions and propose innovations to address them. Compared to other neural rendering datasets, EPIC Fields is better tailored to video understanding because it is paired with labelled action segments and the recent VISOR segment annotations. To further motivate the community, we also evaluate two benchmark tasks in neural rendering and segmenting dynamic objects, with strong baselines that showcase what is not possible today. We also highlight the advantage of geometry in semi-supervised video object segmentations on the VISOR annotations. EPIC Fields reconstructs 96\% of videos in EPIC-KITCHENS, registering 19M frames in 99 hours recorded in 45 kitchens, and is available from: http://epic-kitchens.github.io/epic-fields
We explore the minimax optimal error associated with a demographic parity-constrained regression problem within the context of a linear model. Our proposed model encompasses a broader range of discriminatory bias sources compared to the model presented by Chzhen and Schreuder. Our analysis reveals that the minimax optimal error for the demographic parity-constrained regression problem under our model is characterized by $\Theta(\frac{dM}{n})$, where $n$ denotes the sample size, $d$ represents the dimensionality, and $M$ signifies the number of demographic groups arising from sensitive attributes. Moreover, we demonstrate that the minimax error increases in conjunction with a larger bias present in the model.
tl;dr: In this work, we present trajdata, a unified interface to multiple human trajectory datasets, as well as a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the trajectory datasets underpinning much of AV and pedestrian motion forecasting research.
The field of trajectory forecasting has grown significantly in recent years, partially owing to the release of numerous large-scale, real-world human trajectory datasets for autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrian motion tracking. While such datasets have been a boon for the community, they each use custom and unique data formats and APIs, making it cumbersome for researchers to train and evaluate methods across multiple datasets. To remedy this, we present trajdata: a unified interface to multiple human trajectory datasets. At its core, trajdata provides a simple, uniform, and efficient representation and API for trajectory and map data. As a demonstration of its capabilities, in this work we conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing trajectory datasets, providing users with a rich understanding of the data underpinning much of current pedestrian and AV motion forecasting research, and proposing suggestions for future datasets from these insights. trajdata is permissively licensed (Apache 2.0) and can be accessed online at https://github.com/NVlabs/trajdata.
521. Transformers as Statisticians: Provable In-Context Learning with In-Context Algorithm Selection
tl;dr: Transformers can learn in context like statisticians --- A single transformer can select different algorithms for different data at hand.
Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter update to the model. This work first provides a comprehensive statistical theory for transformers to perform ICL. Concretely, we show that transformers can implement a broad class of standard machine learning algorithms in context, such as least squares, ridge regression, Lasso, learning generalized linear models, and gradient descent on two-layer neural networks, with near-optimal predictive power on various in-context data distributions. Using an efficient implementation of in-context gradient descent as the underlying mechanism, our transformer constructions admit mild size bounds, and can be learned with polynomially many pretraining sequences.
Building on these ``base'' ICL algorithms, intriguingly, we show that transformers can implement more complex ICL procedures involving \emph{in-context algorithm selection}, akin to what a statistician can do in real life---A \emph{single} transformer can adaptively select different base ICL algorithms---or even perform qualitatively different tasks---on different input sequences, without any explicit prompting of the right algorithm or task. We both establish this in theory by explicit constructions, and also observe this phenomenon experimentally. In theory, we construct two general mechanisms for algorithm selection with concrete examples: pre-ICL testing, and post-ICL validation. As an example, we use the post-ICL validation mechanism to construct a transformer that can perform nearly Bayes-optimal ICL on a challenging task---noisy linear models with mixed noise levels. Experimentally, we demonstrate the strong in-context algorithm selection capabilities of standard transformer architectures.
tl;dr: Unlock the in-context learning ability of diffusion models with vision-language prompt.
We present Prompt Diffusion, a framework for enabling in-context learning in diffusion-based generative models. Given a pair of task-specific example images, such as depth from/to image and scribble from/to image, and a text guidance, our model automatically understands the underlying task and performs the same task on a new query image following the text guidance. To achieve this, we propose a vision-language prompt that can model a wide range of vision-language tasks and a diffusion model that takes it as input. The diffusion model is trained jointly on six different tasks using these prompts. The resulting Prompt Diffusion model becomes the first diffusion-based vision-language foundation model capable of in-context learning. It demonstrates high-quality in-context generation for the trained tasks and effectively generalizes to new, unseen vision tasks using their respective prompts. Our model also shows compelling text-guided image editing results. Our framework aims to facilitate research into in-context learning for computer vision. We share our code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/Zhendong-Wang/Prompt-Diffusion.
tl;dr: We show how to alleviate distraction issues in scaling the context length of language models to multiple documents.
Large language models have an exceptional capability to incorporate new information in a contextual manner. However, the full potential of such an approach is often restrained due to a limitation in the effective context length. One solution to this issue is to endow an attention layer with access to an additional context, which comprises of (key, value) pairs. Yet, as the number of documents increases, the proportion of relevant keys to irrelevant ones decreases, leading the model to focus more on the irrelevant keys. We identify a significant challenge, dubbed the distraction issue, where keys linked to different semantic values might overlap, making them hard to distinguish. To tackle this problem, we introduce the Focused Transformer (FoT), a technique that employs a training process inspired by contrastive learning. This novel approach enhances the structure of the (key, value) space, enabling an extension of the context length. Our method allows for fine-tuning pre-existing, large-scale models to lengthen their effective context. This is demonstrated by our fine-tuning of $3 B$ and $7 B$ OpenLLaMA checkpoints. The resulting models, which we name LongLLaMA, exhibit advancements in tasks requiring a long context. We further illustrate that our LongLLaMA models adeptly manage a $256 k$ context length for passkey retrieval.
tl;dr: We introduce the decision adapter, an improved way to incorporate context into an agent's policy in contextual reinforcement learning.
While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in several domains, its real-world application is limited due to many methods failing to generalise to unfamiliar conditions. In this work, we consider the problem of generalising to new transition dynamics, corresponding to cases in which the environment's response to the agent's actions differs. For example, the gravitational force exerted on a robot depends on its mass and changes the robot's mobility. Consequently, in such cases, it is necessary to condition an agent's actions on extrinsic state information and pertinent contextual information reflecting how the environment responds. While the need for context-sensitive policies has been established, the manner in which context is incorporated architecturally has received less attention. Thus, in this work, we present an investigation into how context information should be incorporated into behaviour learning to improve generalisation. To this end, we introduce a neural network architecture, the Decision Adapter, which generates the weights of an adapter module and conditions the behaviour of an agent on the context information. We show that the Decision Adapter is a useful generalisation of a previously proposed architecture and empirically demonstrate that it results in superior generalisation performance compared to previous approaches in several environments. Beyond this, the Decision Adapter is more robust to irrelevant distractor variables than several alternative methods.
Recent research in mechanistic interpretability has attempted to reverse-engineer Transformer models by carefully inspecting network weights and activations. However, these approaches require considerable manual effort and still fall short of providing complete, faithful descriptions of the underlying algorithms. In this work, we introduce a procedure for training Transformers that are mechanistically interpretable by design. We build on RASP [Weiss et al., 2021], a programming language that can be compiled into Transformer weights. Instead of compiling human-written programs into Transformers, we design a modified Transformer that can be trained using gradient-based optimization and then automatically converted into a discrete, human-readable program. We refer to these models as Transformer Programs. To validate our approach, we learn Transformer Programs for a variety of problems, including an in-context learning task, a suite of algorithmic problems (e.g. sorting, recognizing Dyck languages), and NLP tasks including named entity recognition and text classification. The Transformer Programs can automatically find reasonable solutions, performing on par with standard Transformers of comparable size; and, more importantly, they are easy to interpret. To demonstrate these advantages, we convert Transformers into Python programs and use off-the-shelf code analysis tools to debug model errors and identify the “circuits” used to solve different sub-problems. We hope that Transformer Programs open a new path toward the goal of intrinsically interpretable machine learning.
526. Multi-Object Representation Learning via Feature Connectivity and Object-Centric Regularization
tl;dr: We leverage on feature connectivity to perform fine-grained object discovery and design two object-centric regularization terms as an alternative to the pixel-based reconstruction loss used in state-of-the-art methods.
Discovering object-centric representations from images has the potential to greatly improve the robustness, sample efficiency and interpretability of machine learning algorithms. Current works on multi-object images typically follow a generative approach that optimizes for input reconstruction and fail to scale to real-world datasets despite significant increases in model capacity. We address this limitation by proposing a novel method that leverages feature connectivity to cluster neighboring pixels likely to belong to the same object. We further design two object-centric regularization terms to refine object representations in the latent space, enabling our approach to scale to complex real-world images. Experimental results on simulated, real-world, complex texture and common object images demonstrate a substantial improvement in the quality of discovered objects compared to state-of-the-art methods, as well as the sample efficiency and generalizability of our approach. We also show that the discovered object-centric representations can accurately predict key object properties in downstream tasks, highlighting the potential of our method to advance the field of multi-object representation learning.
We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important remaining open problems in MABs. When arms are selected using a static sampling strategy, the error probability decays exponentially with the number of samples at a rate that can be explicitly derived via Large Deviation techniques. Analyzing the performance of algorithms with adaptive sampling strategies is however much more challenging. In this paper, we establish a connection between the Large Deviation Principle (LDP) satisfied by the empirical proportions of arm draws and that satisfied by the empirical arm rewards. This connection holds for any adaptive algorithm, and is leveraged (i) to improve error probability upper bounds of some existing algorithms, such as the celebrated SR (Successive Rejects) algorithm \cite{audibert2010best}, and (ii) to devise and analyze new algorithms. In particular, we present CR (Continuous Rejects), a truly adaptive algorithm that can reject arms in {\it any} round based on the observed empirical gaps between the rewards of various arms. Applying our Large Deviation results, we prove that CR enjoys better performance guarantees than existing algorithms, including SR. Extensive numerical experiments confirm this observation.
We study private and robust multi-armed bandits (MABs), where the agent receives Huber's contaminated heavy-tailed rewards and meanwhile needs to ensure differential privacy. We consider both the finite $k$-th raw moment and the finite $k$-th central moment settings for heavy-tailed rewards distributions with $k\ge 2$. We first present its minimax lower bound, characterizing the information-theoretic limit of regret with respect to privacy budget, contamination level, and heavy-tailedness. Then, we propose a meta-algorithm that builds on a private and robust mean estimation sub-routine \texttt{PRM} that essentially relies on reward truncation and the Laplace mechanism. For the above two different heavy-tailed settings, we give corresponding schemes of \texttt{PRM}, which enable us to achieve nearly-optimal regrets. Moreover, our two proposed truncation-based or histogram-based \texttt{PRM} schemes achieve the optimal trade-off between estimation accuracy, privacy and robustness. Finally, we support our theoretical results and show the effectiveness of our algorithms with experimental studies.
We study data-driven decision-making problems in the Bayesian framework, where the expectation in the Bayes risk is replaced by a risk-sensitive entropic risk measure with respect to the posterior distribution. We focus on problems where calculating the posterior distribution is intractable, a typical situation in modern applications with large datasets and complex data generating models. We leverage a dual representation of the entropic risk measure to introduce a novel risk-sensitive variational Bayesian (RSVB) framework for jointly computing a risk-sensitive posterior approximation and the corresponding decision rule. Our general framework includes \textit{loss-calibrated} VB (Lacoste-Julien et al. [2011] ) as a special case. We also study the impact of these computational approximations on the predictive performance of the inferred decision rules. We compute the convergence rates of the RSVB approximate posterior and the corresponding optimal value. We illustrate our theoretical findings in parametric and nonparametric settings with the help of three examples.
Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL), though enabling a fast adaptation to learn new skills by exploiting the common structure shared among different tasks, suffers performance degradation in the sparse-reward setting. Current hindsight-based sample transfer approaches can alleviate this issue by transferring relabeled trajectories from other tasks to a new task so as to provide informative experience for the target reward function, but are unfortunately constrained with the unrealistic assumption that tasks differ only in reward functions. In this paper, we propose a doubly robust augmented transfer (DRaT) approach, aiming at addressing the more general sparse reward meta-RL scenario with both dynamics mismatches and varying reward functions across tasks. Specifically, we design a doubly robust augmented estimator for efficient value-function evaluation, which tackles dynamics mismatches with the optimal importance weight of transition distributions achieved by minimizing the theoretically derived upper bound of mean squared error (MSE) between the estimated values of transferred samples and their true values in the target task. Due to its intractability, we then propose an interval-based approximation to this optimal importance weight, which is guaranteed to cover the optimum with a constrained and sample-independent upper bound on the MSE approximation error. Based on our theoretical findings, we finally develop a DRaT algorithm for transferring informative samples across tasks during the training of meta-RL. We implement DRaT on an off-policy meta-RL baseline, and empirically show that it significantly outperforms other hindsight-based approaches on various sparse-reward MuJoCo locomotion tasks with varying dynamics and reward functions.
Convolutions encode equivariance symmetries into neural networks leading to better generalisation performance. However, symmetries provide fixed hard constraints on the functions a network can represent, need to be specified in advance, and can not be adapted. Our goal is to allow flexible symmetry constraints that can automatically be learned from data using gradients. Learning symmetry and associated weight connectivity structures from scratch is difficult for two reasons. First, it requires efficient and flexible parameterisations of layer-wise equivariances. Secondly, symmetries act as constraints and are therefore not encouraged by training losses measuring data fit. To overcome these challenges, we improve parameterisations of soft equivariance and learn the amount of equivariance in layers by optimising the marginal likelihood, estimated using differentiable Laplace approximations. The objective balances data fit and model complexity enabling layer-wise symmetry discovery in deep networks. We demonstrate the ability to automatically learn layer-wise equivariances on image classification tasks, achieving equivalent or improved performance over baselines with hard-coded symmetry.
tl;dr: We curate a 2.2 TB compressible turbulent reacting/non-reacting flow database and demonstrate its utility via benchmarking 3D super-resolution, where we also examine neural scaling behavior of 5 model approaches.
Analysis of compressible turbulent flows is essential for applications related to propulsion, energy generation, and the environment.
Here, we present BLASTNet 2.0, a 2.2 TB network-of-datasets containing 744 full-domain samples from 34 high-fidelity direct numerical simulations, which addresses the current limited availability of 3D high-fidelity reacting and non-reacting compressible turbulent flow simulation data. With this data, we benchmark a total of 49 variations of five deep learning approaches for 3D super-resolution - which can be applied for improving scientific imaging, simulations, turbulence models, as well as in computer vision applications. We perform neural scaling analysis on these models to examine the performance of different machine learning (ML) approaches, including two scientific ML techniques. We demonstrate that (i) predictive performance can scale with model size and cost, (ii) architecture matters significantly, especially for smaller models, and (iii) the benefits of physics-based losses can persist with increasing model size. The outcomes of this benchmark study are anticipated to offer insights that can aid the design of 3D super-resolution models, especially for turbulence models, while this data is expected to foster ML methods for a broad range of flow physics applications. This data is publicly available with download links and browsing tools consolidated at https://blastnet.github.io.
tl;dr: We introduce a causal framework for assessing whether a decision-making process is fair, and whether the conditional treatment effect of the decision on the outcome is affected by the protected attribute.
As society transitions towards an AI-based decision-making infrastructure, an ever-increasing number of decisions once under control of humans are now delegated to automated systems. Even though such developments make various parts of society more efficient, a large body of evidence suggests that a great deal of care needs to be taken to make such automated decision-making systems fair and equitable, namely, taking into account sensitive attributes such as gender, race, and religion. In this paper, we study a specific decision-making task called outcome control in which an automated system aims to optimize an outcome variable $Y$ while being fair and equitable. The interest in such a setting ranges from interventions related to criminal justice and welfare, all the way to clinical decision-making and public health. In this paper, we first analyze through causal lenses the notion of benefit, which captures how much a specific individual would benefit from a positive decision, counterfactually speaking, when contrasted with an alternative, negative one. We introduce the notion of benefit fairness, which can be seen as the minimal fairness requirement in decision-making, and develop an algorithm for satisfying it. We then note that the benefit itself may be influenced by the protected attribute, and propose causal tools which can be used to analyze this. Finally, if some of the variations of the protected attribute in the benefit are considered as discriminatory, the notion of benefit fairness may need to be strengthened, which leads us to articulating a notion of causal benefit fairness. Using this notion, we develop a new optimization procedure capable of maximizing $Y$ while ascertaining causal fairness in the decision process.
tl;dr: We study a notion of counterfactual memorization on common language modeling datasets and show that memorized examples exist in all of them and are not easily captured by more standard text matching based notion of memorization.
Modern neural language models that are widely used in various NLP tasks risk memorizing sensitive information from their training data.
Understanding this memorization is important in real world applications and also from a learning-theoretical perspective. An open question in previous studies of language model memorization is how to filter out ``common'' memorization. In fact, most memorization criteria strongly correlate with the number of occurrences in the training set, capturing memorized familiar phrases, public knowledge, templated texts, or other repeated data.
We formulate a notion of counterfactual memorization which characterizes how a model's predictions change if a particular document is omitted during training.
We identify and study counterfactually-memorized training examples in standard text datasets.
We estimate the influence of each memorized training example on the validation set and on generated texts, showing how this can provide direct evidence of the source of memorization at test time.
535. SituatedGen: Incorporating Geographical and Temporal Contexts into Generative Commonsense Reasoning
tl;dr: We introduce a generative commonsense reasoning dataset to evaluate how well machines reason under contrastive geographical and temporal contexts.
Recently, commonsense reasoning in text generation has attracted much attention. Generative commonsense reasoning is the task that requires machines, given a group of keywords, to compose a single coherent sentence with commonsense plausibility. While existing datasets targeting generative commonsense reasoning focus on everyday scenarios, it is unclear how well machines reason under specific geographical and temporal contexts. We formalize this challenging task as SituatedGen, where machines with commonsense should generate a pair of contrastive sentences given a group of keywords including geographical or temporal entities. We introduce a corresponding English dataset consisting of 8,268 contrastive sentence pairs, which are built upon several existing commonsense reasoning benchmarks with minimal manual labor. Experiments show that state-of-the-art generative language models struggle to generate sentences with commonsense plausibility and still lag far behind human performance. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/yunx-z/situated_gen.
tl;dr: we propose Language-Model-as-an-Examiner, a novel benchmarking method that utilizes an LM as a knowledgeable examiner to construct dataset and evaluate other models.
Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the performance of foundation models on open-ended question answering, which serves as a comprehensive test of a model's ability to understand and generate language in a manner similar to humans.
Most of these works focus on proposing new datasets, however, we see two main issues within previous benchmarking pipelines, namely testing leakage and evaluation automation. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmarking framework, Language-Model-as-an-Examiner, where the LM serves as a knowledgeable examiner that formulates questions based on its knowledge and evaluates responses in a reference-free manner. Our framework allows for effortless extensibility as various LMs can be adopted as the examiner, and the questions can be constantly updated given more diverse trigger topics. For a more comprehensive and equitable evaluation, we devise three strategies: (1) We instruct the LM examiner to generate questions across a multitude of domains to probe for a broad acquisition, and raise follow-up questions to engage in a more in-depth assessment. (2) Upon evaluation, the examiner combines both scoring and ranking measurements, providing a reliable result as it aligns closely with human annotations. (3) We additionally propose a decentralized Peer-examination method to address the biases in a single examiner. Our data and benchmarking results are available at: http://lmexam.xlore.cn.
tl;dr: In this work we analyze threshold-based auto-labeling (TBAL) that is getting widely used in practice for data labeling. Our work provides insights on when machine-labeled data obtained through TBAL can be relied on.
Creating large-scale high-quality labeled datasets is a major bottleneck in supervised machine learning workflows. Threshold-based auto-labeling (TBAL), where validation data obtained from humans is used to find a confidence threshold above which the data is machine-labeled, reduces reliance on manual annotation. TBAL is emerging as a widely-used solution in practice. Given the long shelf-life and diverse usage of the resulting datasets, understanding when the data obtained by such auto-labeling systems can be relied on is crucial. This is the first work to analyze TBAL systems and derive sample complexity bounds on the amount of human-labeled validation data required for guaranteeing the quality of machine-labeled data. Our results provide two crucial insights. First, reasonable chunks of unlabeled data can be automatically and accurately labeled by seemingly bad models. Second, a hidden downside of TBAL systems is potentially prohibitive validation data usage. Together, these insights describe the promise and pitfalls of using such systems.
We validate our theoretical guarantees with extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets.
Modeling interacting dynamical systems, such as fluid dynamics and intermolecular interactions, is a fundamental research problem for understanding and simulating complex real-world systems. Many of these systems can be naturally represented by dynamic graphs, and graph neural network-based approaches have been proposed and shown promising performance. However, most of these approaches assume the underlying dynamics does not change over time, which is unfortunately untrue. For example, a molecular dynamics can be affected by the environment temperature over the time. In this paper, we take an attempt to provide a probabilistic view for time-varying dynamics and propose a model Context-attended Graph ODE (CARE) for modeling time-varying interacting dynamical systems. In our CARE, we explicitly use a context variable to model time-varying environment and construct an encoder to initialize the context variable from historical trajectories. Furthermore, we employ a neural ODE model to depict the dynamic evolution of the context variable inferred from system states. This context variable is incorporated into a coupled ODE to simultaneously drive the evolution of systems. Comprehensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CARE compared with several state-of-the-art approaches.
tl;dr: Introduces PopSign ASL v1.0: a public isolated American Sign Language dataset of ~200,000 examples of 250 signs
PopSign is a smartphone-based bubble-shooter game that helps hearing parents
of deaf infants learn sign language. To help parents practice their ability to sign,
PopSign is integrating sign language recognition as part of its gameplay. For
training the recognizer, we introduce the PopSign ASL v1.0 dataset that collects
examples of 250 isolated American Sign Language (ASL) signs using Pixel 4A
smartphone selfie cameras in a variety of environments. It is the largest publicly
available, isolated sign dataset by number of examples and is the first dataset to
focus on one-handed, smartphone signs. We collected over 210,000 examples
at 1944x2592 resolution made by 47 consenting Deaf adult signers for whom
American Sign Language is their primary language. We manually reviewed 217,866
of these examples, of which 175,023 (approximately 700 per sign) were the sign
intended for the educational game. 39,304 examples were recognizable as a sign
but were not the desired variant or were a different sign. We provide a training set
of 31 signers, a validation set of eight signers, and a test set of eight signers. A
baseline LSTM model for the 250-sign vocabulary achieves 82.1% accuracy (81.9%
class-weighted F1 score) on the validation set and 84.2% (83.9% class-weighted
F1 score) on the test set. Gameplay suggests that accuracy will be sufficient for
creating educational games involving sign language recognition.
tl;dr: Evaluate the capabilities of large language models on the proposed Chinese Medical Exam Dataset (CMExam) from multiple dimensions.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam, sourced from the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination. CMExam consists of 60K+ multiple-choice questions for standardized and objective evaluations, as well as solution explanations for model reasoning evaluation in an open-ended manner. For in-depth analyses of LLMs, we invited medical professionals to label five additional question-wise annotations, including disease groups, clinical departments, medical disciplines, areas of competency, and question difficulty levels. Alongside the dataset, we further conducted thorough experiments with representative LLMs and QA algorithms on CMExam. The results show that GPT-4 had the best accuracy of 61.6% and a weighted F1 score of 0.617. These results highlight a great disparity when compared to human accuracy, which stood at 71.6%. For explanation tasks, while LLMs could generate relevant reasoning and demonstrate improved performance after finetuning, they fall short of a desired standard, indicating ample room for improvement. To the best of our knowledge, CMExam is the first Chinese medical exam dataset to provide comprehensive medical annotations. The experiments and findings of LLM evaluation also provide valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions in developing Chinese medical QA systems and LLM evaluation pipelines.
tl;dr: We introduce a meta-learned regression program that can approximate any target function of general kernel Banach spaces from any finite collection of input/output examples in a feedforward way.
Research in statistical learning has polarized into two general approaches to perform regression analysis: Transductive methods construct estimates directly based on exemplar data using generic relational principles which might suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Conversely, inductive methods can potentially fit highly complex functions at the cost of compute-intensive solution searches. In this work, we leverage the theory of vector-valued Reproducing Kernel Banach Spaces (RKBS) to propose a hybrid approach: We show that transductive regression systems can be meta-learned with gradient descent to form efficient _in-context_ neural approximators of function defined over both finite and infinite-dimensional spaces (operator regression). Once trained, our _Transducer_ can almost instantaneously capture new functional relationships and produce original image estimates, given a few pairs of input and output examples. We demonstrate the benefit of our meta-learned transductive approach to model physical systems influenced by varying external factors with little data at a fraction of the usual deep learning training costs for partial differential equations and climate modeling applications.
tl;dr: We introduce and study learning in a new class of games called "Calibrated Stackelberg Games" (CSGs) where the agents can only form calibrated forecasts about the principal's strategies (as opposed to having full knowledge of them).
In this paper, we introduce a generalization of the standard Stackelberg Games (SGs) framework: _Calibrated Stackelberg Games_. In CSGs, a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent who (contrary to standard SGs) does not have direct access to the principal's action but instead best responds to _calibrated forecasts_ about it. CSG is a powerful modeling tool that goes beyond assuming that agents use ad hoc and highly specified algorithms for interacting in strategic settings to infer the principal's actions and thus more robustly addresses real-life applications that SGs were originally intended to capture. Along with CSGs, we also introduce a stronger notion of calibration, termed _adaptive calibration_, that provides fine-grained any-time calibration guarantees against adversarial sequences. We give a general approach for obtaining adaptive calibration algorithms and specialize them for finite CSGs. In our main technical result, we show that in CSGs, the principal can achieve utility that converges to the optimum Stackelberg value of the game both in _finite_ and _continuous_ settings and that no higher utility is achievable. Two prominent and immediate applications of our results are the settings of learning in Stackelberg Security Games and strategic classification, both against _calibrated_ agents.
tl;dr: We study collaborative normal mean estimation with strategic agents.
We study collaborative normal mean estimation, where $m$ strategic agents collect i.i.d samples from a normal distribution $\mathcal{N}(\mu, \sigma^2)$ at a cost. They all wish to estimate the mean $\mu$. By sharing data with each other, agents can obtain better estimates while keeping the cost of data collection small. To facilitate this collaboration, we wish to design mechanisms that encourage agents to collect a sufficient amount of data and share it truthfully, so that they are all better off than working alone. In naive mechanisms, such as simply pooling and sharing all the data, an individual agent might find it beneficial to under-collect and/or fabricate data, which can lead to poor social outcomes. We design a novel mechanism that overcomes these challenges via two key techniques: first, when sharing the others' data with an agent, the mechanism corrupts this dataset proportional to how much the data reported by the agent differs from the others; second, we design minimax optimal estimators for the corrupted dataset. Our mechanism, which is Nash incentive compatible and individually rational, achieves a social penalty (sum of all agents' estimation errors and data collection costs) that is at most a factor 2 of the global minimum. When applied to high dimensional (non-Gaussian) distributions with bounded variance, this mechanism retains these three properties, but with slightly weaker results. Finally, in two special cases where we restrict the strategy space of the agents, we design mechanisms that essentially achieve the global minimum.
tl;dr: We use Stein's Lemma to compute a smoothed Hessian for interpreting feature interactions in ReLU networks.
Several recent methods for interpretability model feature interactions by looking at the Hessian of a neural network. This poses a challenge for ReLU networks, which are piecewise-linear and thus have a zero Hessian almost everywhere. We propose SmoothHess, a method of estimating second-order interactions through Stein's Lemma. In particular, we estimate the Hessian of the network convolved with a Gaussian through an efficient sampling algorithm, requiring only network gradient calls. SmoothHess is applied post-hoc, requires no modifications to the ReLU network architecture, and the extent of smoothing can be controlled explicitly. We provide a non-asymptotic bound on the sample complexity of our estimation procedure. We validate the superior ability of SmoothHess to capture interactions on benchmark datasets and a real-world medical spirometry dataset.
tl;dr: We present a large-scale open-access multi parameter benchmark dataset for elastic seismic full-waveform inversion
Elastic geophysical properties (such as P- and S-wave velocities) are of great importance to various subsurface applications like CO$_2$ sequestration and energy exploration (e.g., hydrogen and geothermal). Elastic full waveform inversion (FWI) is widely applied for characterizing reservoir properties. In this paper, we introduce $\mathbf{\mathbb{E}^{FWI}}$, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that is specifically designed for elastic FWI. $\mathbf{\mathbb{E}^{FWI}}$ encompasses 8 distinct datasets that cover diverse subsurface geologic structures (flat, curve, faults, etc). The benchmark results produced by three different deep learning methods are provided. In contrast to our previously presented dataset (pressure recordings) for acoustic FWI (referred to as OpenFWI), the seismic dataset in $\mathbf{\mathbb{E}^{FWI}}$ has both vertical and horizontal components. Moreover, the velocity maps in $\mathbf{\mathbb{E}^{FWI}}$ incorporate both P- and S-wave velocities. While the multicomponent data and the added S-wave velocity make the data more realistic, more challenges are introduced regarding the convergence and computational cost of the inversion. We conduct comprehensive numerical experiments to explore the relationship between P-wave and S-wave velocities in seismic data. The relation between P- and S-wave velocities provides crucial insights into the subsurface properties such as lithology, porosity, fluid content, etc. We anticipate that $\mathbf{\mathbb{E}^{FWI}}$ will facilitate future research on multiparameter inversions and stimulate endeavors in several critical research topics of carbon-zero and new energy exploration. All datasets, codes and relevant information can be accessed through our website at https://efwi-lanl.github.io/
tl;dr: We introduce an instance detection benchmark consisting of high-resolution images and multi-view object capture, allowing more realistic training.
Instance detection (InsDet) is a long-lasting problem in robotics and computer vision, aiming to detect object instances (predefined by some visual examples) in a cluttered scene. Despite its practical significance, its advancement is overshadowed by Object Detection, which aims to detect objects belonging to some predefined classes. One major reason is that current InsDet datasets are too small in scale by today's standards. For example, the popular InsDet dataset GMU (published in 2016) has only 23 instances, far less than COCO (80 classes), a well-known object detection dataset published in 2014. We are motivated to introduce a new InsDet dataset and protocol. First, we define a realistic setup for InsDet: training data consists of multi-view instance captures, along with diverse scene images allowing synthesizing training images by pasting instance images on them with free box annotations. Second, we release a real-world database, which contains multi-view capture of 100 object instances, and high-resolution (6k$\times$8k) testing images. Third, we extensively study baseline methods for InsDet on our dataset, analyze their performance and suggest future work. Somewhat surprisingly, using the off-the-shelf class-agnostic segmentation model (Segment Anything Model, SAM) and the self-supervised feature representation DINOv2 performs the best, achieving $>$10 AP better than end-to-end trained InsDet models that repurpose object detectors (e.g., FasterRCNN and RetinaNet).
tl;dr: We establish nearly-tight risk bounds in terms of average smoothness in noiseless and noisy regression
We generalize the notion of average Lipschitz smoothness proposed by Ashlagi et al. (COLT 2021) by extending it to Hölder smoothness. This measure of the "effective smoothness" of a function is sensitive to the underlying distribution and can be dramatically smaller than its classic "worst-case" Hölder constant.
We consider both the realizable and the agnostic (noisy) regression settings, proving upper and lower risk bounds in terms of the average Hölder smoothness; these rates improve upon both previously known rates even in the special case of average Lipschitz smoothness.
Moreover, our lower bound is tight in the realizable setting up to log factors, thus we establish the minimax rate.
From an algorithmic perspective, since our notion of average smoothness is defined with respect to the unknown underlying distribution, the learner does not have an explicit representation of the function class, hence is unable to execute ERM. Nevertheless, we provide distinct learning algorithms that achieve both (nearly) optimal learning rates.
Our results hold in any totally bounded metric space, and are stated in terms of its intrinsic geometry.
Overall, our results show that the classic worst-case notion of Hölder smoothness can be essentially replaced by its average, yielding considerably sharper guarantees.
Current dataset collection methods typically scrape large amounts of data from the web. While this technique is extremely scalable, data collected in this way tends to reinforce stereotypical biases, can contain personally identifiable information, and typically originates from Europe and North America. In this work, we rethink the dataset collection paradigm and introduce GeoDE, a geographically diverse dataset with 61,940 images from 40 classes and 6 world regions, and no personally identifiable information, collected by soliciting images from people across the world. We analyse GeoDE to understand differences in images collected in this manner compared to web-scraping. Despite the smaller size of this dataset, we demonstrate its use as both an evaluation and training dataset, allowing us to highlight shortcomings in current models, as well as demonstrate improved performance even when training on this small dataset. We release the full dataset and code at https://geodiverse-data-collection.cs.princeton.edu/
tl;dr: This paper build the connection between Pareto set learning and hypervolume optimization
This paper presents a novel approach to multiobjective algorithms aimed at modeling the Pareto set using neural networks.
Whereas previous methods mainly focused on identifying a finite number of solutions, our approach allows for the direct modeling of the entire Pareto set.
Furthermore, we establish an equivalence between learning the complete Pareto set and maximizing the associated hypervolume, which enables the convergence analysis of hypervolume (as a new metric) for Pareto set learning.
Specifically, our new analysis framework reveals the connection between the learned Pareto solution and its representation in a polar coordinate system.
We evaluate our proposed approach on various benchmark problems and real-world problems, and the encouraging results make it a potentially viable alternative to existing multiobjective algorithms. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/xzhang2523/hvpsl/tree/master}.
tl;dr: We design a survey, a set of evaluation metrics, and a statistical workflow on how to elicit the moral beliefs encoded in an LLM
This paper presents a case study on the design, administration, post-processing, and evaluation of surveys on large language models (LLMs). It comprises two components:
(1) A statistical method for eliciting beliefs encoded in LLMs. We introduce statistical measures and evaluation metrics that quantify the probability of an LLM "making a choice", the associated uncertainty, and the consistency of that choice.
(2) We apply this method to study what moral beliefs are encoded in different LLMs, especially in ambiguous cases where the right choice is not obvious.
We design a large-scale survey comprising 680 high-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I tell a white lie?") and 687 low-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I stop for a pedestrian on the road?"). Each scenario includes a description, two possible actions, and auxiliary labels indicating violated rules (e.g., "do not kill"). We administer the survey to 28 open- and closed-source LLMs.
We find that (a) in unambiguous scenarios, most models ``choose" actions that align with commonsense. In ambiguous cases, most models express uncertainty.
(b) Some models are uncertain about choosing the commonsense action because their responses are sensitive to the question-wording.
(c) Some models reflect clear preferences in ambiguous scenarios. Specifically, closed-source models tend to agree with each other.
Randomized experiments often need to be stopped prematurely due to the treatment having an unintended harmful effect. Existing methods that determine when to stop an experiment early are typically applied to the data in aggregate and do not account for treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we study the early stopping of experiments for harm on heterogeneous populations. We first establish that current methods often fail to stop experiments when the treatment harms a minority group of participants. We then use causal machine learning to develop CLASH, the first broadly-applicable method for heterogeneous early stopping. We demonstrate CLASH's performance on simulated and real data and show that it yields effective early stopping for both clinical trials and A/B tests.
tl;dr: Introduces swap agnostic learning and shows feasibility via a suprising equivalence to swap variants of omniprediction and multicalibration.
We introduce and study the notion of Swap Agnostic Learning.
The problem can be phrased as a game between a *predictor* and an *adversary*: first, the predictor selects a hypothesis $h$; then, the adversary plays in response, and for each level set of the predictor, selects a loss-minimizing hypothesis $c_v \in \mathcal{C}$; the predictor wins if $h$ competes with the adaptive adversary's loss.
Despite the strength of the adversary, our main result demonstrates the feasibility Swap Agnostic Learning for any convex loss.
Somewhat surprisingly, the result follows by proving an *equivalence* between Swap Agnostic Learning and swap variants of the recent notions Omniprediction (ITCS'22) and Multicalibration (ICML'18).
Beyond this equivalence, we establish further connections to the literature on Outcome Indistinguishability (STOC'20, ITCS'23), revealing a unified notion of OI that captures all existing notions of omniprediction and multicalibration.
In this paper, we examine the long-run behavior of regularized, no-regret learning in finite N-player games. A well-known result in the field states that the empirical frequencies of play under no-regret learning converge to the game’s set of coarse correlated equilibria; however, our understanding of how the players' _actual strategies_ evolve over time is much more limited – and, in many cases, non-existent. This issue is exacerbated further by a series of recent results showing that _only_ strict Nash equilibria are stable and attracting under regularized learning, thus making the relation between learning and _pointwise_ solution concepts particularly elusive. In lieu of this, we take a more general approach and instead seek to characterize the _setwise_ rationality properties of the players' day-to-day trajectory of play. To do so, we focus on one of the most stringent criteria of setwise strategic stability, namely that any unilateral deviation from the set in question incurs a cost to the deviator – a property known as _closedness under better replies_ (club). In so doing, we obtain a remarkable equivalence between strategic and dynamic stability: _a product of pure strategies is closed under better replies if and only if its span is stable and attracting under regularized learning._ In addition, we estimate the rate of convergence to such sets, and we show that methods based on entropic regularization (like the exponential weights algorithm) converge at a geometric rate, while projection-based methods converge within a finite number of iterations, even with bandit, payoff-based feedback.
tl;dr: We provide a simple recipe for designing diffusion-like models with distributions from the exponential family.
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) provide the foundation for the recent breakthroughs in generative modeling.
Their Markovian structure makes it difficult to define DDPMs with distributions other than Gaussian or discrete.
In this paper, we introduce Star-Shaped DDPM (SS-DDPM).
Its *star-shaped diffusion process* allows us to bypass the need to define the transition probabilities or compute posteriors.
We establish duality between star-shaped and specific Markovian diffusions for the exponential family of distributions and derive efficient algorithms for training and sampling from SS-DDPMs.
In the case of Gaussian distributions, SS-DDPM is equivalent to DDPM.
However, SS-DDPMs provide a simple recipe for designing diffusion models with distributions such as Beta, von Mises–Fisher, Dirichlet, Wishart and others, which can be especially useful when data lies on a constrained manifold.
We evaluate the model in different settings and find it competitive even on image data, where Beta SS-DDPM achieves results comparable to a Gaussian DDPM.
Our implementation is available at https://github.com/andrey-okhotin/star-shaped
As a nonlinear dimension reduction technique, the diffusion map (DM) has been widely used.
In DM, kernels play an important role for capturing the nonlinear relationship of data. However, only symmetric kernels can be used now, which prevents the use of DM in directed graphs, trophic networks, and other real-world scenarios where the intrinsic and extrinsic geometries in data are asymmetric. A promising technique is the magnetic transform which converts an asymmetric matrix to a Hermitian one. However, we are facing essential problems, including how diffusion distance could be preserved and how divergence could be avoided during diffusion process. Via theoretical proof, we successfully establish a diffusion representation framework with the magnetic transform, named MagDM. The effectiveness and robustness for dealing data endowed with asymmetric proximity are demonstrated on three synthetic datasets and two trophic networks.
The elusive nature of gradient-based optimization in neural networks is tied to their loss landscape geometry, which is poorly understood. However recent work has brought solid evidence that there is essentially no loss barrier between the local solutions of gradient descent, once accounting for weight-permutations that leave the network's computation unchanged. This raises questions for approximate inference in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs), where we are interested in marginalizing over multiple points in the loss landscape.
In this work, we first extend the formalism of marginalized loss barrier and solution interpolation to BNNs, before proposing a matching algorithm to search for linearly connected solutions. This is achieved by aligning the distributions of two independent approximate Bayesian solutions with respect to permutation matrices. Building on the work of Ainsworth et al. (2023), we frame the problem as a combinatorial optimization one, using an approximation to the sum of bilinear assignment problem. We then experiment on a variety of architectures and datasets, finding nearly zero marginalized loss barriers for linearly connected solutions.
tl;dr: We introduce AVIDa-hIL6, an antigen-variable domain of heavy chain of heavy chain antibody (VHH) interaction dataset produced from an immunized alpaca.
Antibodies have become an important class of therapeutic agents to treat human diseases.
To accelerate therapeutic antibody discovery, computational methods, especially machine learning, have attracted considerable interest for predicting specific interactions between antibody candidates and target antigens such as viruses and bacteria.
However, the publicly available datasets in existing works have notable limitations, such as small sizes and the lack of non-binding samples and exact amino acid sequences.
To overcome these limitations, we have developed AVIDa-hIL6, a large-scale dataset for predicting antigen-antibody interactions in the variable domain of heavy chain of heavy chain antibodies (VHHs), produced from an alpaca immunized with the human interleukin-6 (IL-6) protein, as antigens.
By leveraging the simple structure of VHHs, which facilitates identification of full-length amino acid sequences by DNA sequencing technology, AVIDa-hIL6 contains 573,891 antigen-VHH pairs with amino acid sequences.
All the antigen-VHH pairs have reliable labels for binding or non-binding, as generated by a novel labeling method.
Furthermore, via introduction of artificial mutations, AVIDa-hIL6 contains 30 different mutants in addition to wild-type IL-6 protein.
This characteristic provides opportunities to develop machine learning models for predicting changes in antibody binding by antigen mutations.
We report experimental benchmark results on AVIDa-hIL6 by using machine learning models.
The results indicate that the existing models have potential, but further research is needed to generalize them to predict effective antibodies against unknown mutants.
The dataset is available at https://avida-hil6.cognanous.com.
tl;dr: We provide the first DP algorithm for min s-t cut and multiway k cut.
Finding min $s$-$t$ cuts in graphs is a basic algorithmic tool, with applications in image segmentation, community detection, reinforcement learning, and data clustering. In this problem, we are given two nodes as terminals and the goal is to remove the smallest number of edges from the graph so that these two terminals are disconnected. We study the complexity of differential privacy for the min $s$-$t$ cut problem and show nearly tight lower and upper bounds where we achieve privacy at no cost for running time efficiency. We also develop a differentially private algorithm for the multiway $k$-cut problem, in which we are given $k$ nodes as terminals that we would like to disconnect.
As a function of $k$, we obtain privacy guarantees that are exponentially more efficient than applying the advanced composition theorem to known algorithms for multiway $k$-cut.
Finally, we empirically evaluate the approximation of our differentially private min $s$-$t$ cut algorithm and show that it almost matches the quality of the output of non-private ones.
tl;dr: In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin.
Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes. The dataset contains large number of samples from five racial groups, in addition to information like sex and age (at judgment and first offense). Other attributes in this dataset include neighborhood characteristics obtained from census data, detailed types of offense, charge severity, case decisions, sentence lengths, year of filing etc. We also provide pseudo-identifiers for judge, county and zipcode. The dataset will not only enable researchers to more rigorously study algorithmic fairness in the context of criminal justice, but also relate algorithmic challenges with various systemic issues. We also discuss in detail the process of constructing the dataset and provide a datasheet. The WCLD dataset is available at https://clezdata.github.io/wcld/.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms can perform planning at multiple levels of abstraction. Empirical results have shown that state or temporal abstractions might significantly improve the sample efficiency of algorithms. Yet, we still do not have a complete understanding of the basis of those efficiency gains nor any theoretically grounded design rules. In this paper, we derive a lower bound on the sample complexity for the considered class of goal-conditioned HRL algorithms. The proposed lower bound empowers us to quantify the benefits of hierarchical decomposition and leads to the design of a simple Q-learning-type algorithm that leverages hierarchical decompositions. We empirically validate our theoretical findings by investigating the sample complexity of the proposed hierarchical algorithm on a spectrum of tasks (hierarchical $n$-rooms, Gymnasium's Taxi). The hierarchical $n$-rooms tasks were designed to allow us to dial their complexity over multiple orders of magnitude. Our theory and algorithmic findings provide a step towards answering the foundational question of quantifying the improvement hierarchical decomposition offers over monolithic solutions in reinforcement learning.
tl;dr: We release M-SYNTH, a novel dataset that relies on an in silico, physics-based simulation pipeline for comparatively evaluating the performance of AI software as a medical device for mammographic breast cancer detection.
To generate evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled medical devices, AI models need to be evaluated on a diverse population of patient cases, some of which may not be readily available. We propose an evaluation approach for testing medical imaging AI models that relies on in silico imaging pipelines in which stochastic digital models of human anatomy (in object space) with and without pathology are imaged using a digital replica imaging acquisition system to generate realistic synthetic image datasets. Here, we release M-SYNTH, a dataset of cohorts with four breast fibroglandular density distributions imaged at different exposure levels using Monte Carlo x-ray simulations with the publicly available Virtual Imaging Clinical Trial for Regulatory Evaluation (VICTRE) toolkit. We utilize the synthetic dataset to analyze AI model performance and find that model performance decreases with increasing breast density and increases with higher mass density, as expected. As exposure levels decrease, AI model performance drops with the highest performance achieved at exposure levels lower than the nominal recommended dose for the breast type.
tl;dr: Develops a model of neural scaling where smooth scaling laws average over small emergent changes in model performance on subtasks.
We propose the Quantization Model of neural scaling laws, explaining both the observed power law dropoff of loss with model and data size, and also the sudden emergence of new capabilities with scale. We derive this model from what we call the Quantization Hypothesis,
where network knowledge and skills are "quantized" into discrete chunks (quanta). We show that when quanta are learned in order of decreasing use frequency, then a power law in use frequencies explains observed power law scaling of loss. We validate this prediction on toy datasets, then study how scaling curves decompose for large language models. Using language model gradients, we automatically decompose model behavior into a diverse set of skills (quanta). We tentatively find that the frequency at which these quanta are used in the training distribution roughly follows a power law corresponding with the empirical scaling exponent for language models, a prediction of our theory.
tl;dr: We investigate and compare various behavioral and neural working memory benchmarks between humans and AI.
Working memory (WM), a fundamental cognitive process facilitating the temporary storage, integration, manipulation, and retrieval of information, plays a vital role in reasoning and decision-making tasks. Robust benchmark datasets that capture the multifaceted nature of WM are crucial for the effective development and evaluation of AI WM models. Here, we introduce a comprehensive Working Memory (WorM) benchmark dataset for this purpose. WorM comprises 10 tasks and a total of 1 million trials, assessing 4 functionalities, 3 domains, and 11 behavioral and neural characteristics of WM. We jointly trained and tested state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformers on all these tasks. We also include human behavioral benchmarks as an upper bound for comparison. Our results suggest that AI models replicate some characteristics of WM in the brain, most notably primacy and recency effects, and neural clusters and correlates specialized for different domains and functionalities of WM. In the experiments, we also reveal some limitations in existing models to approximate human behavior. This dataset serves as a valuable resource for communities in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and AI, offering a standardized framework to compare and enhance WM models, investigate WM's neural underpinnings, and develop WM models with human-like capabilities. Our source code and data are available at: https://github.com/ZhangLab-DeepNeuroCogLab/WorM
tl;dr: We show that the variance of Empirical Risk Minimization enjoys the minimax rate in various settings.
It is well known that Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) may attain minimax suboptimal rates in terms of the mean squared error (Birgé and Massart, 1993). In this paper, we prove that, under relatively mild assumptions, the suboptimality of ERM must be due to its bias. Namely, the variance error term of ERM (in terms of the bias and variance decomposition) enjoys the minimax rate. In the fixed design setting, we provide an elementary proof of this result using the probabilistic method. Then, we extend our proof to the random design setting for various models. In addition, we provide a simple proof of Chatterjee’s admissibility theorem (Chatterjee, 2014, Theorem 1.4), which states that in the fixed design setting, ERM cannot be ruled out as an optimal method, and then we extend this result to the random design setting. We also show that our estimates imply stability of ERM, complementing the main result of Caponnetto and Rakhlin (2006) for non-Donsker classes. Finally, we highlight the somewhat irregular nature of the loss landscape of ERM in the non-Donsker regime, by showing that functions can be close to ERM, in terms of $L_2$ distance, while still being far from almost-minimizers of the empirical loss.
tl;dr: We introduce RealTime QA, a dynamic, time-sensitive question answering benchmark that evaluates systems on a regular basis.
We introduce RealTime QA, a dynamic question answering (QA) platform that announces questions and evaluates systems on a regular basis (weekly in this version). RealTime QA inquires about the current world, and QA systems need to answer questions about novel events or information. It therefore challenges static, conventional assumptions in open-domain QA datasets and pursues instantaneous applications. We build strong baseline models upon large pretrained language models, including GPT-3 and T5. Our benchmark is an ongoing effort, and this paper presents real-time evaluation results over the past year. Our experimental results show that GPT-3 can often properly update its generation results, based on newly-retrieved documents, highlighting the importance of up-to-date information retrieval. Nonetheless, we find that GPT-3 tends to return outdated answers when retrieved documents do not provide sufficient information to find an answer. This suggests an important avenue for future research: can an open-domain QA system identify such unanswerable cases and communicate with the user or even the retrieval module to modify the retrieval results? We hope that RealTime QA will spur progress in instantaneous applications of question answering and beyond.
tl;dr: By accounting for various redundant arrangements of units, we characterise all different neural net parameters that can implement any given function, and we show piecewise-linear connectivity properties of these sets (architecture: shallow tanh nets)
Understanding the learning process of artificial neural networks requires clarifying the structure of the parameter space within which learning takes place. A neural network parameter's functional equivalence class is the set of parameters implementing the same input--output function. For many architectures, almost all parameters have a simple and well-documented functional equivalence class. However, there is also a vanishing minority of reducible parameters, with richer functional equivalence classes caused by redundancies among the network's units.
In this paper, we give an algorithmic characterisation of unit redundancies and reducible functional equivalence classes for a single-hidden-layer hyperbolic tangent architecture. We show that such functional equivalence classes are piecewise-linear path-connected sets, and that for parameters with a majority of redundant units, the sets have a diameter of at most 7 linear segments.
Given a set of points, clustering consists of finding a partition of a point set into $k$ clusters such that the center to which a point is assigned is as close as possible. Most commonly, centers are points themselves, which leads to the famous $k$-median and $k$-means objectives. One may also choose centers to be $j$ dimensional subspaces, which gives rise to subspace clustering. In this paper, we consider learning bounds for these problems. That is, given a set of $n$ samples $P$ drawn independently from some unknown, but fixed distribution $\mathcal{D}$, how quickly does a solution computed on $P$ converge to the optimal clustering of $\mathcal{D}$?
We give several near optimal results. In particular,
1. For center-based objectives, we show a convergence rate of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{{k}/{n}}\right)$. This matches the known optimal bounds of [Fefferman, Mitter, and Narayanan, Journal of the Mathematical Society 2016] and [Bartlett, Linder, and Lugosi, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 1998] for $k$-means and extends it to other important objectives such as $k$-median.
2. For subspace clustering with $j$-dimensional subspaces, we show a convergence rate of $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{{(kj^2)}/{n}}\right)$. These are the first provable bounds for most of these problems. For the specific case of projective clustering, which generalizes $k$-means, we show a converge rate of $\Omega\left(\sqrt{{(kj)}/{n}}\right)$ is necessary, thereby proving that the bounds from [Fefferman, Mitter, and Narayanan, Journal of the Mathematical Society 2016] are essentially optimal.
tl;dr: We quantify which distances MPNNs induce, leading to a more fine-grained understanding of their expressivity and separation capabilities.
Numerous recent works have analyzed the expressive power of message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs), primarily utilizing combinatorial techniques such as the $1$-dimensional Weisfeiler--Leman test ($1$-WL) for the graph isomorphism problem. However, the graph isomorphism objective is inherently binary, not giving insights into the degree of similarity between two given graphs. This work resolves this issue by considering continuous extensions of both $1$-WL and MPNNs to graphons. Concretely, we show that the continuous variant of $1$-WL delivers an accurate topological characterization of the expressive power of MPNNs on graphons, revealing which graphs these networks can distinguish and the level of difficulty in separating them. We identify the finest topology where MPNNs separate points and prove a universal approximation theorem. Consequently, we provide a theoretical framework for graph and graphon similarity combining various topological variants of classical characterizations of the $1$-WL. In particular, we characterize the expressive power of MPNNs in terms of the tree distance, which is a graph distance based on the concept of fractional isomorphisms, and substructure counts via tree homomorphisms, showing that these concepts have the same expressive power as the $1$-WL and MPNNs on graphons. Empirically, we validate our theoretical findings by showing that randomly initialized MPNNs, without training, exhibit competitive performance compared to their trained counterparts. Moreover, we evaluate different MPNN architectures based on their ability to preserve graph distances, highlighting the significance of our continuous $1$-WL test in understanding MPNNs' expressivity.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a framework for evaluating and analyzing the risks for histogram binning recalibration.
Recalibrating probabilistic classifiers is vital for enhancing the reliability and accuracy of predictive models. Despite the development of numerous recalibration algorithms, there is still a lack of a comprehensive theory that integrates calibration and sharpness (which is essential for maintaining predictive power). In this paper, we introduce the concept of minimum-risk recalibration within the framework of mean-squared-error (MSE) decomposition, offering a principled approach for evaluating and recalibrating probabilistic classifiers. Using this framework, we analyze the uniform-mass binning (UMB) recalibration method and establish a finite-sample risk upper bound of order $\tilde{O}(B/n + 1/B^2)$ where $B$ is the number of bins and $n$ is the sample size. By balancing calibration and sharpness, we further determine that the optimal number of bins for UMB scales with $n^{1/3}$, resulting in a risk bound of approximately $O(n^{-2/3})$. Additionally, we tackle the challenge of label shift by proposing a two-stage approach that adjusts the recalibration function using limited labeled data from the target domain. Our results show that transferring a calibrated classifier requires significantly fewer target samples compared to recalibrating from scratch. We validate our theoretical findings through numerical simulations, which confirm the tightness of the proposed bounds, the optimal number of bins, and the effectiveness of label shift adaptation.
tl;dr: We propose J-invariant U-Net structure to incorporate global contexts and coarse-and-fine features in self-supervised image denoising.
Although supervised image denoising networks have shown remarkable performance on synthesized noisy images, they often fail in practice due to the difference between real and synthesized noise. Since clean-noisy image pairs from the real world are extremely costly to gather, self-supervised learning, which utilizes noisy input itself as a target, has been studied. To prevent a self-supervised denoising model from learning identical mapping, each output pixel should not be influenced by its corresponding input pixel; This requirement is known as J-invariance. Blind-spot networks (BSNs) have been a prevalent choice to ensure J-invariance in self-supervised image denoising. However, constructing variations of BSNs by injecting additional operations such as downsampling can expose blinded information, thereby violating J-invariance. Consequently, convolutions designed specifically for BSNs have been allowed only, limiting architectural flexibility. To overcome this limitation, we propose PUCA, a novel J-invariant U-Net architecture, for self-supervised denoising. PUCA leverages patch-unshuffle/shuffle to dramatically expand receptive fields while maintaining J-invariance and dilated attention blocks (DABs) for global context incorporation. Experimental results demonstrate that PUCA achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods in self-supervised image denoising.
Multi-vector retrieval models such as ColBERT [Khattab et al., 2020] allow token-level interactions between queries and documents, and hence achieve state of the art on many information retrieval benchmarks. However, their non-linear scoring function cannot be scaled to millions of documents, necessitating a three-stage process for inference: retrieving initial candidates via token retrieval, accessing all token vectors, and scoring the initial candidate documents. The non-linear scoring function is applied over all token vectors of each candidate document, making the inference process complicated and slow. In this paper, we aim to simplify the multi-vector retrieval by rethinking the role of token retrieval. We present XTR, ConteXtualized Token Retriever, which introduces a simple, yet novel, objective function that encourages the model to retrieve the most important document tokens first. The improvement to token retrieval allows XTR to rank candidates only using the retrieved tokens rather than all tokens in the document, and enables a newly designed scoring stage that is two-to-three orders of magnitude cheaper than that of ColBERT. On the popular BEIR benchmark, XTR advances the state-of-the-art by 2.8 nDCG@10 without any distillation. Detailed analysis confirms our decision to revisit the token retrieval stage, as XTR demonstrates much better recall of the token retrieval stage compared to ColBERT.
572. Self-Weighted Contrastive Learning among Multiple Views for Mitigating Representation Degeneration
tl;dr: This paper proposes a simple but effective framework of self-weighted multi-view contrastive learning to mitigate representation degeneration in multi-view contrastive learning.
Recently, numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of contrastive learning (CL), which learns feature representations by pulling in positive samples while pushing away negative samples. Many successes of CL lie in that there exists semantic consistency between data augmentations of the same instance. In multi-view scenarios, however, CL might cause representation degeneration when the collected multiple views inherently have inconsistent semantic information or their representations subsequently do not capture sufficient discriminative information. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework called SEM: SElf-weighted Multi-view contrastive learning with reconstruction regularization. Specifically, SEM is a general framework where we propose to first measure the discrepancy between pairwise representations and then minimize the corresponding self-weighted contrastive loss, and thus making SEM adaptively strengthen the useful pairwise views and also weaken the unreliable pairwise views. Meanwhile, we impose a self-supervised reconstruction term to regularize the hidden features of encoders, to assist CL in accessing sufficient discriminative information of data. Experiments on public multi-view datasets verified that SEM can mitigate representation degeneration in existing CL methods and help them achieve significant performance improvements. Ablation studies also demonstrated the effectiveness of SEM with different options of weighting strategies and reconstruction terms.
tl;dr: We show that DNNs can be trained directly on multi-speaker mixtures to realize unsupervised neural speech separation if the training mixtures are over-determined (i.e., more microphones than speakers).
In reverberant conditions with multiple concurrent speakers, each microphone acquires a mixture signal of multiple speakers at a different location. In over-determined conditions where the microphones out-number speakers, we can narrow down the solutions to speaker images and realize unsupervised speech separation by leveraging each mixture signal as a constraint (i.e., the estimated speaker images at a microphone should add up to the mixture). Equipped with this insight, we propose UNSSOR, an algorithm for $\underline{u}$nsupervised $\underline{n}$eural $\underline{s}$peech $\underline{s}$eparation by leveraging $\underline{o}$ver-determined training mixtu$\underline{r}$es. At each training step, we feed an input mixture to a deep neural network (DNN) to produce an intermediate estimate for each speaker, linearly filter the estimates, and optimize a loss so that, at each microphone, the filtered estimates of all the speakers can add up to the mixture to satisfy the above constraint. We show that this loss can promote unsupervised separation of speakers. The linear filters are computed in each sub-band based on the mixture and DNN estimates through the forward convolutive prediction (FCP) algorithm. To address the frequency permutation problem incurred by using sub-band FCP, a loss term based on minimizing intra-source magnitude scattering is proposed. Although UNSSOR requires over-determined training mixtures, we can train DNNs to achieve under-determined separation (e.g., unsupervised monaural speech separation). Evaluation results on two-speaker separation in reverberant conditions show the effectiveness and potential of UNSSOR.
tl;dr: We investigate the use of attributed prompts to generate training data from large language model for NLP classification tasks.
Large language models (LLMs) have been recently leveraged as training data generators for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While previous research has explored different approaches to training models using generated data, they generally rely on simple class-conditional prompts, which may limit the diversity of the generated data and inherit systematic biases of LLM. Thus, we investigate training data generation with diversely attributed prompts (e.g., specifying attributes like length and style), which have the potential to yield diverse and attributed generated data. Our investigation focuses on datasets with high cardinality and diverse domains, wherein we demonstrate that attributed prompts outperform simple class-conditional prompts in terms of the resulting model's performance. Additionally, we present a comprehensive empirical study on data generation encompassing vital aspects like bias, diversity, and efficiency, and highlight three key observations: firstly, synthetic datasets generated by simple prompts exhibit significant biases, such as regional bias; secondly, attribute diversity plays a pivotal role in enhancing model performance; lastly, attributed prompts achieve the performance of simple class-conditional prompts while utilizing only 5\% of the querying cost of ChatGPT associated with the latter. The data and code are available on {\url{https://github.com/yueyu1030/AttrPrompt}}.
The past few years have seen impressive progress in the development of deep generative models capable of producing high-dimensional, complex, and photo-realistic data. However, current methods for evaluating such models remain incomplete: standard likelihood-based metrics do not always apply and rarely correlate with perceptual fidelity, while sample-based metrics, such as FID, are insensitive to overfitting, i.e., inability to generalize beyond the training set. To address these limitations, we propose a new metric called the Feature Likelihood Score (FLS), a parametric sample-based score that uses density estimation to provide a comprehensive trichotomic evaluation accounting for novelty (i.e., different from the training samples), fidelity, and diversity of generated samples. We empirically demonstrate the ability of FLS to identify specific overfitting problem cases, where previously proposed metrics fail. We also extensively evaluate FLS on various image datasets and model classes, demonstrating its ability to match intuitions of previous metrics like FID while offering a more comprehensive evaluation of generative models.
tl;dr: Importing tools from quantum physics and tensor analysis, we study what makes a data distribution suitable for locally connected neural networks, and develop, based on our theory, an algorithm for enhancing the suitability of data to such models.
The question of what makes a data distribution suitable for deep learning is a fundamental open problem. Focusing on locally connected neural networks (a prevalent family of architectures that includes convolutional and recurrent neural networks as well as local self-attention models), we address this problem by adopting theoretical tools from quantum physics. Our main theoretical result states that a certain locally connected neural network is capable of accurate prediction over a data distribution if and only if the data distribution admits low quantum entanglement under certain canonical partitions of features. As a practical application of this result, we derive a preprocessing method for enhancing the suitability of a data distribution to locally connected neural networks. Experiments with widespread models over various datasets demonstrate our findings. We hope that our use of quantum entanglement will encourage further adoption of tools from physics for formally reasoning about the relation between deep learning and real-world data.
tl;dr: Largest-scale long-term visual object tracking dataset in egocentric videos
Visual object tracking is a key component to many egocentric vision problems. However, the full spectrum of challenges of egocentric tracking faced by an embodied AI is underrepresented in many existing datasets; these tend to focus on relatively short, third-person videos. Egocentric video has several distinguishing characteristics from those commonly found in past datasets: frequent large camera motions and hand interactions with objects commonly lead to occlusions or objects exiting the frame, and object appearance can change rapidly due to widely different points of view, scale, or object states. Embodied tracking is also naturally long-term, and being able to consistently (re-)associate objects to their appearances and disappearances over as long as a lifetime is critical. Previous datasets under-emphasize this re-detection problem, and their "framed" nature has led to adoption of various spatiotemporal priors that we find do not necessarily generalize to egocentric video. We thus introduce EgoTracks, a new dataset for long-term egocentric visual object tracking. Sourced from the Ego4D dataset, this new dataset presents a significant challenge to recent state-of-the-art single-object tracking models, which we find score poorly on traditional tracking metrics for our new dataset, compared to popular benchmarks. We further show improvements that can be made to a STARK tracker to significantly increase its performance on egocentric data, resulting in a baseline model we call EgoSTARK. We publicly release our annotations and benchmark, hoping our dataset leads to further advancements in tracking.
tl;dr: Diffusion models and semi-supervised learners can benefit mutually to achieve SOTA semi-supervised classification and generation results on ImageNet-1K and CIFAR-10 with few labels.
In an effort to further advance semi-supervised generative and classification tasks, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called *dual pseudo training* (DPT), built upon strong semi-supervised learners and diffusion models. DPT operates in three stages: training a classifier on partially labeled data to predict pseudo-labels; training a conditional generative model using these pseudo-labels to generate pseudo images; and retraining the classifier with a mix of real and pseudo images. Empirically, DPT consistently achieves SOTA performance of semi-supervised generation and classification across various settings. In particular, with one or two labels per class, DPT achieves a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score of 3.08 or 2.52 on ImageNet $256\times256$. Besides, DPT outperforms competitive semi-supervised baselines substantially on ImageNet classification tasks, *achieving top-1 accuracies of 59.0 (+2.8), 69.5 (+3.0), and 74.4 (+2.0)* with one, two, or five labels per class, respectively. Notably, our results demonstrate that diffusion can generate realistic images with only a few labels (e.g., $<0.1$%) and generative augmentation remains viable for semi-supervised classification. Our code is available at *https://github.com/ML-GSAI/DPT*.
The success of over-parameterized neural networks trained to near-zero training error has caused great interest in the phenomenon of benign overfitting, where estimators are statistically consistent even though they interpolate noisy training data. While benign overfitting in fixed dimension has been established for some learning methods, current literature suggests that for regression with typical kernel methods and wide neural networks, benign overfitting requires a high-dimensional setting, where the dimension grows with the sample size. In this paper, we show that the smoothness of the estimators, and not the dimension, is the key: benign overfitting is possible if and only if the estimator's derivatives are large enough. We generalize existing inconsistency results to non-interpolating models and more kernels to show that benign overfitting with moderate derivatives is impossible in fixed dimension. Conversely, we show that benign overfitting is possible for regression with a sequence of spiky-smooth kernels with large derivatives. Using neural tangent kernels, we translate our results to wide neural networks. We prove that while infinite-width networks do not overfit benignly with the ReLU activation, this can be fixed by adding small high-frequency fluctuations to the activation function. Our experiments verify that such neural networks, while overfitting, can indeed generalize well even on low-dimensional data sets.
tl;dr: We propose an off-policy estimator with reduced variance compared to IPW and DR methods, by considering only the variations in the outcome instead of the variations in the policies.
Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits is crucial for assessing new policies using existing data without costly experimentation. However, current OPE methods, such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR) estimators, suffer from high variance, particularly in cases of low overlap between target and behaviour policies or large action and context spaces. In this paper, we introduce a new OPE estimator for contextual bandits, the Marginal Ratio (MR) estimator, which focuses on the shift in the marginal distribution of outcomes $Y$ instead of the policies themselves. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we demonstrate the benefits of the MR estimator compared to conventional methods like IPW and DR in terms of variance reduction. Additionally, we establish a connection between the MR estimator and the state-of-the-art Marginalized Inverse Propensity Score (MIPS) estimator, proving that MR achieves lower variance among a generalized family of MIPS estimators. We further illustrate the utility of the MR estimator in causal inference settings, where it exhibits enhanced performance in estimating Average Treatment Effects (ATE). Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets corroborate our theoretical findings and highlight the practical advantages of the MR estimator in OPE for contextual bandits.
tl;dr: We proposed the first model-free algorithm that can achieve minimax regret optimality in the infinite-horizon discounted setting, with the additional benefit of low burn-in time.
A crucial problem in reinforcement learning is learning the optimal policy. We study this in tabular infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes under the online setting. The existing algorithms either fail to achieve regret optimality or have to incur a high memory and computational cost. In addition, existing optimal algorithms all require a long burn-in time in order to achieve optimal sample efficiency, i.e., their optimality is not guaranteed unless sample size surpasses a high threshold. We address both open problems by introducing a model-free algorithm that employs variance reduction and a novel technique that switches the execution policy in a slow-yet-adaptive manner. This is the first regret-optimal model-free algorithm in the discounted setting, with the additional benefit of a low burn-in time.
tl;dr: We propose ChimpACT, a comprehensive dataset for investigating chimpanzee social behavior in a semi-naturalistic and social environment with abundant annotations of instance bounding boxes, body poses, and spatial-temporal action labels.
Understanding the behavior of non-human primates is crucial for improving animal welfare, modeling social behavior, and gaining insights into distinctively human and phylogenetically shared behaviors. However, the lack of datasets on non-human primate behavior hinders in-depth exploration of primate social interactions, posing challenges to research on our closest living relatives. To address these limitations, we present ChimpACT, a comprehensive dataset for quantifying the longitudinal behavior and social relations of chimpanzees within a social group. Spanning from 2015 to 2018, ChimpACT features videos of a group of over 20 chimpanzees residing at the Leipzig Zoo, Germany, with a particular focus on documenting the developmental trajectory of one young male, Azibo. ChimpACT is both comprehensive and challenging, consisting of 163 videos with a cumulative 160,500 frames, each richly annotated with detection, identification, pose estimation, and fine-grained spatiotemporal behavior labels. We benchmark representative methods of three tracks on ChimpACT: (i) tracking and identification, (ii) pose estimation, and (iii) spatiotemporal action detection of the chimpanzees. Our experiments reveal that ChimpACT offers ample opportunities for both devising new methods and adapting existing ones to solve fundamental computer vision tasks applied to chimpanzee groups, such as detection, pose estimation, and behavior analysis, ultimately deepening our comprehension of communication and sociality in non-human primates.
tl;dr: Mine extra knowledge related to the minor classes from both minor and major-class samples
Facial expression data is characterized by a significant imbalance, with most collected data showing happy or neutral expressions and fewer instances of fear or disgust. This imbalance poses challenges to facial expression recognition (FER) models, hindering their ability to fully understand various human emotional states. Existing FER methods typically report overall accuracy on highly imbalanced test sets but exhibit low performance in terms of the mean accuracy across all expression classes. In this paper, our aim is to address the imbalanced FER problem. Existing methods primarily focus on learning knowledge of minor classes solely from minor-class samples. However, we propose a novel approach to extract extra knowledge related to the minor classes from both major and minor class samples. Our motivation stems from the belief that FER resembles a distribution learning task, wherein a sample may contain information about multiple classes. For instance, a sample from the major class surprise might also contain useful features of the minor class fear. Inspired by that, we propose a novel method that leverages re-balanced attention maps to regularize the model, enabling it to extract transformation invariant information about the minor classes from all training samples. Additionally, we introduce re-balanced smooth labels to regulate the cross-entropy loss, guiding the model to pay more attention to the minor classes by utilizing the extra information regarding the label distribution of the imbalanced training data. Extensive experiments on different datasets and backbones show that the two proposed modules work together to regularize the model and achieve state-of-the-art performance under the imbalanced FER task. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh-uaiaaaa.
584. Stabilizing the Optimization of Neural Signed Distance Functions and Finer Shape Representation
We present new insights and a novel paradigm for learning implicit neural representations (INR) of shapes. In particular, we shed light on the popular eikonal loss used for imposing a signed distance function constraint in INR. We show analytically that as the representation power of the network increases, the optimization approaches a partial differential equation (PDE) in the continuum limit that is unstable. We show that this instability can manifest in existing network optimization, leading to irregularities in the reconstructed surface and/or convergence to sub-optimal local minima, and thus fails to capture fine geometric and topological structure. We show analytically how other terms added to the loss, currently used in the literature for other purposes, can actually eliminate these instabilities. However, such terms can over-regularize the surface, preventing the representation of fine shape detail. Based on a similar PDE theory for the continuum limit, we introduce a new regularization term that still counteracts the eikonal instability but without over-regularizing. Furthermore, since stability is now guaranteed in the continuum limit, this stabilization also allows for considering new network structures that are able to represent finer shape detail. We introduce such a structure based on quadratic layers. Experiments on multiple benchmark data sets show that our new regularization and network are able to capture more precise shape details and more accurate topology than existing state-of-the-art.
tl;dr: understanding transformers and their learning dynamics through associative memories
Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable. These models appear to store vast amounts of knowledge from their training data, and to adapt quickly to new information provided in their context or prompt. We study how transformers balance these two types of knowledge by considering a synthetic setup where tokens are generated from either global or context-specific bigram distributions. By a careful empirical analysis of the training process on a simplified two-layer transformer, we illustrate the fast learning of global bigrams and the slower development of an "induction head" mechanism for the in-context bigrams. We highlight the role of weight matrices as associative memories, provide theoretical insights on how gradients enable their learning during training, and study the role of data-distributional properties.
586. Neural Modulation for Flash Memory: An Unsupervised Learning Framework for Improved Reliability
Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the storage density of NAND flash memory, making it a critical component in modern electronic devices. However, with the rise in storage capacity comes an increased likelihood of errors in data storage and retrieval. The growing number of errors poses ongoing challenges for system designers and engineers, in terms of the characterization, modeling, and optimization of NAND-based systems. We present a novel approach for modeling and preventing errors by utilizing the capabilities of generative and unsupervised machine learning methods. As part of our research, we constructed and trained a neural modulator that translates information bits into programming operations on each memory cell in NAND devices. Our modulator, tailored explicitly for flash memory channels, provides a smart writing scheme that reduces programming errors as well as compensates for data degradation over time. Specifically, the modulator is based on an auto-encoder architecture with an additional channel model embedded between the encoder and the decoder. A conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) was used to construct the channel model. Optimized for the end-of-life work-point, the learned memory system outperforms the prior art by up to 56\% in raw bit error rate (RBER) and extends the lifetime of the flash memory block by up to 25\%.
Model selection in the context of bandit optimization is a challenging problem, as it requires balancing exploration and exploitation not only for action selection, but also for model selection. One natural approach is to rely on online learning algorithms that treat different models as experts. Existing methods, however, scale poorly ($\mathrm{poly}M$) with the number of models $M$ in terms of their regret.
Our key insight is that, for model selection in linear bandits, we can emulate full-information feedback to the online learner with a favorable bias-variance trade-off. This allows us to develop ALEXP, which has an exponentially improved ($\log M$) dependence on $M$ for its regret.
ALEXP has anytime guarantees on its regret, and neither requires knowledge of the horizon $n$, nor relies on an initial purely exploratory stage.
Our approach utilizes a novel time-uniform analysis of the Lasso, establishing a new connection between online learning and high-dimensional statistics.
tl;dr: We demonstrate that an appropriate combination of the contrastive loss and score matching serves as an upper bound of the KL divergence between the true data distribution and the model distribution.
The past few years have witnessed great success in the use of diffusion models (DMs) to generate high-fidelity images with the help of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). However, discretization error is an inevitable limitation when utilizing numerical solvers to solve SDEs. To address this limitation, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that an appropriate combination of the contrastive loss and score matching serves as an upper bound of the KL divergence between the true data distribution and the model distribution. To obtain this bound, we utilize a contrastive loss to construct a contrastive sampling chain to fine-tuning the pre-trained DM. In this manner, our method reduces the discretization error and thus yields a smaller gap between the true data distribution and our model distribution. Moreover, the presented method can be applied to fine-tuning various pre-trained DMs, both with or without fast sampling algorithms, contributing to better sample quality or slightly faster sampling speeds. To validate the efficacy of our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments. For example, on CIFAR10, when applied to a pre-trained EDM, our method improves the FID from 2.04 to 1.88 with 35 neural function evaluations (NFEs), and reduces NFEs from 35 to 25 to achieve the same 2.04 FID.
Conditional graphic layout generation, which automatically maps user constraints to high-quality layouts, has attracted widespread attention today. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and data efficiency hinders their practical applications. In this work, we propose LayoutPrompter, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to address the above problems through in-context learning. LayoutPrompter is made up of three key components, namely input-output serialization, dynamic exemplar selection and layout ranking. Specifically, the input-output serialization component meticulously designs the input and output formats for each layout generation task. Dynamic exemplar selection is responsible for selecting the most helpful prompting exemplars for a given input. And a layout ranker is used to pick the highest quality layout from multiple outputs of LLMs. We conduct experiments on all existing layout generation tasks using four public datasets. Despite the simplicity of our approach, experimental results show that LayoutPrompter can compete with or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on these tasks without any model training or fine-tuning. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this versatile and training-free approach. In addition, the ablation studies show that LayoutPrompter is significantly superior to the training-based baseline in a low-data regime, further indicating the data efficiency of LayoutPrompter. Our project is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/tree/main/LayoutPrompter.
tl;dr: One-step differentiation is as easy as autodiff, and as performant as implicit differentiation.
In appropriate frameworks, automatic differentiation is transparent to the user, at the cost of being a significant computational burden when the number of operations is large. For iterative algorithms, implicit differentiation alleviates this issue but requires custom implementation of Jacobian evaluation. In this paper, we study one-step differentiation, also known as Jacobian-free backpropagation, a method as easy as automatic differentiation and as performant as implicit differentiation for fast algorithms (e.g. superlinear optimization methods). We provide a complete theoretical approximation analysis with specific examples (Newton's method, gradient descent) along with its consequences in bilevel optimization. Several numerical examples illustrate the well-foundness of the one-step estimator.
Image classifiers are information-discarding machines, by design. Yet, how these models discard information remains mysterious. We hypothesize that one way for image classifiers to reach high accuracy is to first zoom to the most discriminative region in the image and then extract features from there to predict image labels, discarding the rest of the image. Studying six popular networks ranging from AlexNet to CLIP, we find that proper framing of the input image can lead to the correct classification of 98.91% of ImageNet images. Furthermore, we uncover positional biases in various datasets, especially a strong center bias in two popular datasets: ImageNet-A and ObjectNet. Finally, leveraging our insights into the potential of zooming, we propose a test-time augmentation (TTA) technique that improves classification accuracy by forcing models to explicitly perform zoom-in operations before making predictions.
Our method is more interpretable, accurate, and faster than MEMO, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) TTA method. We introduce ImageNet-Hard, a new benchmark that challenges SOTA classifiers including large vision-language models even when optimal zooming is allowed.
Climate models have been key for assessing the impact of climate change and simulating future climate scenarios. The machine learning (ML) community has taken an increased interest in supporting climate scientists’ efforts on various tasks such as climate model emulation, downscaling, and prediction tasks. Many of those tasks have been addressed on datasets created with single climate models. However, both the climate science and ML communities have suggested that to address those tasks at scale, we need large, consistent, and ML-ready climate model datasets. Here, we introduce ClimateSet, a dataset containing the inputs and outputs of 36 climate models from the Input4MIPs and CMIP6 archives. In addition, we provide a modular dataset pipeline for retrieving and preprocessing additional climate models and scenarios. We showcase the potential of our dataset by using it as a benchmark for ML-based climate model emulation. We gain new insights about the performance and generalization capabilities of the different ML models by analyzing their performance across different climate models. Furthermore, the dataset can be used to train an ML emulator on several climate models instead of just one. Such a “super emulator” can quickly project new climate change scenarios, complementing existing scenarios already provided to policymakers. We believe ClimateSet will create the basis needed for the ML community to tackle climate-related tasks at scale.
tl;dr: Function value minimization algorithm and gradient norm minimization algorithms have a one-to-one correspondence.
In convex optimization, first-order optimization methods efficiently minimizing function values have been a central subject study since Nesterov's seminal work of 1983. Recently, however, Kim and Fessler's OGM-G and Lee et al.'s FISTA-G have been presented as alternatives that efficiently minimize the gradient magnitude instead. In this paper, we present H-duality, which represents a surprising one-to-one correspondence between methods efficiently minimizing function values and methods efficiently minimizing gradient magnitude. In continuous-time formulations, H-duality corresponds to reversing the time dependence of the dissipation/friction term. To the best of our knowledge, H-duality is different from Lagrange/Fenchel duality and is distinct from any previously known duality or symmetry relations. Using H-duality, we obtain a clearer understanding of the symmetry between Nesterov's method and OGM-G, derive a new class of methods efficiently reducing gradient magnitudes of smooth convex functions, and find a new composite minimization method that is simpler and faster than FISTA-G.
tl;dr: use influence functions to find clusters where the model is wrong for the same reasons
We present a method for identifying groups of test examples---slices---on which a model under-performs, a task now known as slice discovery. We formalize coherence---a requirement that erroneous predictions, within a slice, should be wrong for the same reason---as a key property that any slice discovery method should satisfy. We then use influence functions to derive a new slice discovery method, InfEmbed, which satisfies coherence by returning slices whose examples are influenced similarly by the training data. InfEmbed is simple, and consists of applying K-Means clustering to a novel representation we deem influence embeddings. We show InfEmbed outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on 2 benchmarks, and is effective for model debugging across several case studies.
tl;dr: GLEMOS provides comprehensive benchmark data, algorithms, and evaluation testbeds for instantaneous graph learning model selection.
The choice of a graph learning (GL) model (i.e., a GL algorithm and its hyperparameter settings) has a significant impact on the performance of downstream tasks. However, selecting the right GL model becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming as more and more GL models are developed. Accordingly, it is of great significance and practical value to equip users of GL with the ability to perform a near-instantaneous selection of an effective GL model without manual intervention. Despite the recent attempts to tackle this important problem, there has been no comprehensive benchmark environment to evaluate the performance of GL model selection methods. To bridge this gap, we present GLEMOS in this work, a comprehensive benchmark for instantaneous GL model selection that makes the following contributions. (i) GLEMOS provides extensive benchmark data for fundamental GL tasks, i.e., link prediction and node classification, including the performances of 366 models on 457 graphs on these tasks. (ii) GLEMOS designs multiple evaluation settings, and assesses how effectively representative model selection techniques perform in these different settings. (iii) GLEMOS is designed to be easily extended with new models, new graphs, and new performance records. (iv) Based on the experimental results, we discuss the limitations of existing approaches and highlight future research directions. To promote research on this significant problem, we make the benchmark data and code publicly available at https://namyongpark.github.io/glemos.
We present D$^2$CSG, a neural model composed of two dual and complementary network branches, with dropouts, for unsupervised learning of compact constructive solid geometry (CSG) representations of 3D CAD shapes. Our network is trained to reconstruct a 3D shape by a fixed-order assembly of quadric primitives, with both branches producing a union of primitive intersections or inverses. A key difference between D$^2$CSG and all prior neural CSG models is its dedicated residual branch to assemble the potentially complex shape complement, which is subtracted from an overall shape modeled by the cover branch. With the shape complements, our network is provably general, while the weight dropout further improves compactness of the CSG tree by removing redundant primitives. We demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that D$^2$CSG produces compact CSG reconstructions with superior quality and more natural primitives than all existing alternatives, especially over complex and high-genus CAD shapes.
tl;dr: We leverage the Unreal Engine to produce the next generation of dataset for representation learning
Synthetic image datasets offer unmatched advantages for designing and evaluating deep neural networks: they make it possible to (i) render as many data samples as needed, (ii) precisely control each scene and yield granular ground truth labels (and captions), (iii) precisely control distribution shifts between training and testing to isolate variables of interest for sound experimentation.
Despite such promise, the use of synthetic image data is still limited -- and often played down -- mainly due to their lack of realism. Most works therefore rely on datasets of real images, which have often been scraped from public images on the internet, and may have issues with regards to privacy, bias, and copyright, while offering little control over how objects precisely appear.
In this work, we present a path to democratize the use of photorealistic synthetic data: we develop a new generation of interactive environments for representation learning research, that offer both controllability and realism.
We use the Unreal Engine, a powerful game engine well known in the entertainment industry, to produce PUG (Photorealistic Unreal Graphics) environments and datasets for representation learning. Using PUG for evaluation and fine-tuning, we demonstrate the potential of PUG to both enable more rigorous evaluations and to improve model training.
We present a comprehensive solution to learn and improve text-to-image models from human preference feedback.
To begin with, we build ImageReward---the first general-purpose text-to-image human preference reward model---to effectively encode human preferences.
Its training is based on our systematic annotation pipeline including rating and ranking, which collects 137k expert comparisons to date.
In human evaluation, ImageReward outperforms existing scoring models and metrics, making it a promising automatic metric for evaluating text-to-image synthesis.
On top of it, we propose Reward Feedback Learning (ReFL), a direct tuning algorithm to optimize diffusion models against a scorer.
Both automatic and human evaluation support ReFL's advantages over compared methods.
All code and datasets are provided at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/ImageReward}.
tl;dr: A novel model-agnostic, sampling-based approximation technique for any Shapley Interaction Index that satisfies the linearity, symmetry and dummy axiom.
Predominately in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) research, the Shapley value (SV) is applied to determine feature attributions for any black box model. Shapley interaction indices extend the SV to define any-order feature interactions. Defining a unique Shapley interaction index is an open research question and, so far, three definitions have been proposed, which differ by their choice of axioms. Moreover, each definition requires a specific approximation technique. Here, we propose SHAPley Interaction Quantification (SHAP-IQ), an efficient sampling-based approximator to compute Shapley interactions for arbitrary cardinal interaction indices (CII), i.e. interaction indices that satisfy the linearity, symmetry and dummy axiom. SHAP-IQ is based on a novel representation and, in contrast to existing methods, we provide theoretical guarantees for its approximation quality, as well as estimates for the variance of the point estimates. For the special case of SV, our approach reveals a novel representation of the SV and corresponds to Unbiased KernelSHAP with a greatly simplified calculation. We illustrate the computational efficiency and effectiveness by explaining language, image classification and high-dimensional synthetic models.
To ensure secure and dependable mobility in environments shared by humans and robots, social navigation robots should possess the capability to accurately perceive and predict the trajectories of nearby pedestrians. In this paper, we present a novel dataset of pedestrian trajectories, referred to as Social Interactive Trajectory (SiT) dataset, which can be used to train pedestrian detection, tracking, and trajectory prediction models needed to design social navigation robots. Our dataset includes sequential raw data captured by two 3D LiDARs and five cameras covering a 360-degree view, two inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors, and real-time kinematic positioning (RTK), as well as annotations including 2D & 3D boxes, object classes, and object IDs. Thus far, various human trajectory datasets have been introduced to support the development of pedestrian motion forecasting models. Our SiT dataset differs from these datasets in the following two respects. First, whereas the pedestrian trajectory data in other datasets was obtained from static scenes, our data was collected while the robot navigates in a crowded environment, capturing human-robot interactive scenarios in motion. Second, our dataset has been carefully organized to facilitate training and evaluation of end-to-end prediction models encompassing 3D detection, 3D multi-object tracking, and trajectory prediction. This design allows for an end-to-end unified modular approach across different tasks. We have introduced a comprehensive benchmark for assessing models across all aforementioned tasks, and have showcased the performance of multiple baseline models as part of our evaluation. Our dataset provides a strong foundation for future research in pedestrian trajectory prediction, which could expedite the development of safe and agile social navigation robots. The SiT dataset, devkit, and pre-trained models are publicly released at: https://spalaboratory.github.io/SiT
Measuring the nonlinear dependence between random vectors and testing for their statistical independence is a fundamental problem in statistics. One of the most popular dependence measures is the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC), which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing works have focused on either fixed or very high-dimensional covariates. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two scenarios and provide statistical insights into the performance of HSIC when the dimensions grow at different rates. We first show that, under the null hypothesis, the rescaled HSIC converges in distribution to a standard normal distribution. Then we provide a general condition for the HSIC based tests to have nontrivial power in high dimensions. By decomposing this condition, we illustrate how the ability of HSIC to measure nonlinear dependence changes with increasing dimensions. Moreover, we demonstrate that, depending on the sample size, the covariate dimensions and the dependence structures within covariates, the HSIC can capture different types of associations between random vectors. We also conduct extensive numerical studies to validate our theoretical results.
602. A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence
Text-to-image diffusion models have made significant advances in generating and editing high-quality images. As a result, numerous approaches have explored the ability of diffusion model features to understand and process single images for downstream tasks, e.g., classification, semantic segmentation, and stylization. However, significantly less is known about what these features reveal across multiple, different images and objects. In this work, we exploit Stable Diffusion (SD) features for semantic and dense correspondence and discover that with simple post-processing, SD features can perform quantitatively similar to SOTA representations. Interestingly, the qualitative analysis reveals that SD features have very different properties compared to existing representation learning features, such as the recently released DINOv2: while DINOv2 provides sparse but accurate matches, SD features provide high-quality spatial information but sometimes inaccurate semantic matches. We demonstrate that a simple fusion of these two features works surprisingly well, and a zero-shot evaluation using nearest neighbors on these fused features provides a significant performance gain over state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, e.g., SPair-71k, PF-Pascal, and TSS. We also show that these correspondences can enable interesting applications such as instance swapping in two images. Project page: https://sd-complements-dino.github.io/.
tl;dr: We introduce the CityRefer dataset, a new dataset for city-level visual grounding
City-scale 3D point cloud is a promising way to express detailed and complicated outdoor structures. It encompasses both the appearance and geometry features of segmented city components, including cars, streets, and buildings that can be utilized for attractive applications such as user-interactive navigation of autonomous vehicles and drones. However, compared to the extensive text annotations available for images and indoor scenes, the scarcity of text annotations for outdoor scenes poses a significant challenge for achieving these applications. To tackle this problem, we introduce the CityRefer dataset for city-level visual grounding. The dataset consists of 35k natural language descriptions of 3D objects appearing in SensatUrban city scenes and 5k landmarks labels synchronizing with OpenStreetMap. To ensure the quality and accuracy of the dataset, all descriptions and labels in the CityRefer dataset are manually verified. We also have developed a baseline system that can learn encoded language descriptions, 3D object instances, and geographical information about the city's landmarks to perform visual grounding on the CityRefer dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the CityRefer dataset is the largest city-level visual grounding dataset for localizing specific 3D objects.
tl;dr: We discover blind spots of common vision models by exploring the geometry of their level sets
Despite the remarkable success of deep neural networks in a myriad of settings, several works have demonstrated their overwhelming sensitivity to near-imperceptible perturbations, known as adversarial attacks. On the other hand, prior works have also observed that deep networks can be under-sensitive, wherein large-magnitude perturbations in input space do not induce appreciable changes to network activations. In this work, we study in detail the phenomenon of under-sensitivity in vision models such as CNNs and Transformers, and present techniques to study the geometry and extent of “equi-confidence” level sets of such networks. We propose a Level Set Traversal algorithm that iteratively explores regions of high confidence with respect to the input space using orthogonal components of the local gradients. Given a source image, we use this algorithm to identify inputs that lie in the same equi-confidence level set as the source image despite being perceptually similar to arbitrary images from other classes. We further observe that the source image is linearly connected by a high-confidence path to these inputs, uncovering a star-like structure for level sets of deep networks. Furthermore, we attempt to identify and estimate the extent of these connected higher-dimensional regions over which the model maintains a high degree of confidence.
tl;dr: Our work investigates the themes, variations, and characteristics of AI-generated images on Twitter, revealing distinct features, lower variability compared to human images, and a longitudinal shift towards artistically sophisticated content.
Recent progress in generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) has enabled the generation of photo-realistic and artistically-inspiring photos at a single click, catering to millions of users online. To explore how people use gen-AI models such as DALLE and StableDiffusion, it is critical to understand the themes, contents, and variations present in the AI-generated photos. In this work, we introduce TWIGMA (TWItter Generative-ai images with MetadatA), a comprehensive dataset encompassing over 800,000 gen-AI images collected from Jan 2021 to March 2023 on Twitter, with associated metadata (e.g., tweet text, creation date, number of likes). Through a comparative analysis of TWIGMA with natural images and human artwork, we find that gen-AI images possess distinctive characteristics and exhibit, on average, lower variability when compared to their non-gen-AI counterparts. Additionally, we find that the similarity between a gen-AI image and natural images is inversely correlated with the number of likes. Finally, we observe a longitudinal shift in the themes of AI-generated images on Twitter, with users increasingly sharing artistically sophisticated content such as intricate human portraits, whereas their interest in simple subjects such as natural scenes and animals has decreased. Our analyses and findings underscore the significance of TWIGMA as a unique data resource for studying AI-generated images.
606. Gradient Descent with Linearly Correlated Noise: Theory and Applications to Differential Privacy
tl;dr: We study the convergence of gradient descent with linearly correlated noise, and use our insights to design improved methods for differentially private optimization.
We study gradient descent under linearly correlated noise. Our work is motivated by recent practical methods for optimization with differential privacy (DP), such as DP-FTRL, which achieve strong performance in settings where privacy amplification techniques are infeasible (such as in federated learning). These methods inject privacy noise through a matrix factorization mechanism, making the noise *linearly correlated* over iterations. We propose a simplified setting that distills key facets of these methods and isolates the impact of linearly correlated noise. We analyze the behavior of gradient descent in this setting, for both convex and non-convex functions. Our analysis is demonstrably tighter than prior work and recovers multiple important special cases exactly (including anticorrelated perturbed gradient descent). We use our results to develop new, effective matrix factorizations for differentially private optimization, and highlight the benefits of these factorizations theoretically and empirically.
607. Gaussian Partial Information Decomposition: Bias Correction and Application to High-dimensional Data
tl;dr: We present a new bias-corrected estimator of the BROJA-PID for multivariate Gaussian distributions, show that it agrees with ground truth even at high dimensionalities, and use it to characterize inter-areal interactions in neural data
Recent advances in neuroscientific experimental techniques have enabled us to simultaneously record the activity of thousands of neurons across multiple brain regions. This has led to a growing need for computational tools capable of analyzing how task-relevant information is represented and communicated between several brain regions. Partial information decompositions (PIDs) have emerged as one such tool, quantifying how much unique, redundant and synergistic information two or more brain regions carry about a task-relevant message. However, computing PIDs is computationally challenging in practice, and statistical issues such as the bias and variance of estimates remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a new method for efficiently computing and estimating a PID definition on multivariate Gaussian distributions. We show empirically that our method satisfies an intuitive additivity property, and recovers the ground truth in a battery of canonical examples, even at high dimensionality. We also propose and evaluate, for the first time, a method to correct the bias in PID estimates at finite sample sizes. Finally, we demonstrate that our Gaussian PID effectively characterizes inter-areal interactions in the mouse brain, revealing higher redundancy between visual areas when a stimulus is behaviorally relevant.
tl;dr: A new perspective on recovery of tree structure from data.
In this paper we offer a new perspective on the well established agglomerative clustering algorithm, focusing on recovery of hierarchical structure. We recommend a simple variant of the standard algorithm, in which clusters are merged by maximum average dot product and not, for example, by minimum distance or within-cluster variance. We demonstrate that the tree output by this algorithm provides a bona fide estimate of generative hierarchical structure in data, under a generic probabilistic graphical model. The key technical innovations are to understand how hierarchical information in this model translates into tree geometry which can be recovered from data, and to characterise the benefits of simultaneously growing sample size and data dimension. We demonstrate superior tree recovery performance with real data over existing approaches such as UPGMA, Ward's method, and HDBSCAN.
tl;dr: We study the exact optimality conditions, together with an exact optimal mechanism for a family of schemes, for distributed mean estimation problem under communication and privacy constraints.
We study the mean estimation problem under communication and local differential privacy constraints. While previous work has proposed order-optimal algorithms for the same problem (i.e., asymptotically optimal as we spend more bits), exact optimality (in the non-asymptotic setting) still has not been achieved. In this work, we take a step towards characterizing the exact-optimal approach in the presence of shared randomness (a random variable shared between the server and the user) and identify several conditions for exact optimality. We prove that one of the conditions is to utilize a rotationally symmetric shared random codebook. Based on this, we propose a randomization mechanism where the codebook is a randomly rotated simplex -- satisfying the properties of the exact-optimal codebook. The proposed mechanism is based on a $k$-closest encoding which we prove to be exact-optimal for the randomly rotated simplex codebook.
tl;dr: We propose a human-in-the-loop policy learning method called Proxy Value Propagation that aligns human preferences through active human involvement and achieves highly efficiency and safety, without offline pretraining and reward engineering.
Learning from active human involvement enables the human subject to actively intervene and demonstrate to the AI agent during training. The interaction and corrective feedback from human brings safety and AI alignment to the learning process. In this work, we propose a new reward-free active human involvement method called Proxy Value Propagation for policy optimization. Our key insight is that a proxy value function can be designed to express human intents, wherein state- action pairs in the human demonstration are labeled with high values, while those agents’ actions that are intervened receive low values. Through the TD-learning framework, labeled values of demonstrated state-action pairs are further propagated to other unlabeled data generated from agents’ exploration. The proxy value function thus induces a policy that faithfully emulates human behaviors. Human- in-the-loop experiments show the generality and efficiency of our method. With minimal modification to existing reinforcement learning algorithms, our method can learn to solve continuous and discrete control tasks with various human control devices, including the challenging task of driving in Grand Theft Auto V. Demo video and code are available at: https://metadriverse.github.io/pvp.
tl;dr: We introduce the first open-source benchmark leveraging large language models (LLMs) for generative speech recognition error correction, presenting a new dataset, "HyPoradise."
Advancements in deep neural networks have allowed automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to attain human parity on several publicly available clean speech datasets. However, even state-of-the-art ASR systems experience performance degradation when confronted with adverse conditions, as a well-trained acoustic model is sensitive to variations in the speech domain, e.g., background noise. Intuitively, humans address this issue by relying on their linguistic knowledge: the meaning of ambiguous spoken terms is usually inferred from contextual cues thereby reducing the dependency on the auditory system. Inspired by this observation, we introduce the first open-source benchmark to utilize external large language models (LLMs) for ASR error correction, where N-best decoding hypotheses provide informative elements for true transcription prediction. This approach is a paradigm shift from the traditional language model rescoring strategy that can only select one candidate hypothesis as output transcription. The proposed benchmark contains a novel dataset, "HyPoradise" (HP), encompassing more than 316,000 pairs of N-best hypotheses and corresponding accurate transcriptions across prevalent speech domains. Given this dataset, we examine three types of error correction techniques based on LLMs with varying amounts of labeled hypotheses-transcription pairs, which gains significant word error rate (WER) reduction. Experimental evidence demonstrates the proposed technique achieves a breakthrough by surpassing the upper bound of traditional re-ranking based methods. More surprisingly, LLM with reasonable prompt design can even correct those tokens that are missing in N-best list. We make our results publicly accessible for reproducible pipelines with released pre-trained models, thus providing a new paradigm for ASR error correction with LLMs.
In this paper, we present EV-Eye, a first-of-its-kind large scale multimodal eye tracking dataset aimed at inspiring research on high-frequency eye/gaze tracking. EV-Eye utilizes an emerging bio-inspired event camera to capture independent pixel-level intensity changes induced by eye movements, achieving sub-microsecond latency. Our dataset was curated over a two-week period and collected from 48 participants encompassing diverse genders and age groups. It comprises over 1.5 million near-eye grayscale images and 2.7 billion event samples generated by two DAVIS346 event cameras. Additionally, the dataset contains 675 thousands scene images and 2.7 million gaze references captured by Tobii Pro Glasses 3 eye tracker for cross-modality validation. Compared with existing event-based high-frequency eye tracking datasets, our dataset is significantly larger in size, and the gaze references involve more natural eye movement patterns, i.e., fixation, saccade and smooth pursuit. Alongside the event data, we also present a hybrid eye tracking method as benchmark, which leverages both the near-eye grayscale images and event data for robust and high-frequency eye tracking. We show that our method achieves higher accuracy for both pupil and gaze estimation tasks compared to the existing solution.
tl;dr: We show the convergence and implicit bias of GD with any constant stepsize for logistic regression on linearly separable data.
Recent research has observed that in machine learning optimization, gradient descent (GD) often operates at the edge of stability (EoS) [Cohen et al., 2021], where the stepsizes are set to be large, resulting in non-monotonic losses induced by the GD iterates. This paper studies the convergence and implicit bias of constant-stepsize GD for logistic regression on linearly separable data in the EoS regime. Despite the presence of local oscillations, we prove that the logistic loss can be minimized by GD with any constant stepsize over a long time scale. Furthermore, we prove that with any constant stepsize, the GD iterates tend to infinity when projected to a max-margin direction (the hard-margin SVM direction) and converge to a fixed vector that minimizes a strongly convex potential when projected to the orthogonal complement of the max-margin direction. In contrast, we also show that in the EoS regime, GD iterates may diverge catastrophically under the exponential loss, highlighting the superiority of the logistic loss. These theoretical findings are in line with numerical simulations and complement existing theories on the convergence and implicit bias of GD for logistic regression, which are only applicable when the stepsizes are sufficiently small.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel concept of $L_2$-uniform stability and prove a set of sharper exponential generalization bounds for randomized learning algorithms using confidence boosting techniques.
Exponential generalization bounds with near-optimal rates have recently been established for uniformly stable algorithms~\citep{feldman2019high,bousquet2020sharper}. We seek to extend these best known high probability bounds from deterministic learning algorithms to the regime of randomized learning. One simple approach for achieving this goal is to define the stability for the expectation over the algorithm's randomness, which may result in sharper parameter but only leads to guarantees regarding the on-average generalization error. Another natural option is to consider the stability conditioned on the algorithm's randomness, which is way more stringent but may lead to generalization with high probability jointly over the randomness of sample and algorithm. The present paper addresses such a tension between these two alternatives and makes progress towards relaxing it inside a classic framework of confidence-boosting. To this end, we first introduce a novel concept of $L_2$-uniform stability that holds uniformly over data but in second-moment over the algorithm's randomness. Then as a core contribution of this work, we prove a strong exponential bound on the first-moment of generalization error under the notion of $L_2$-uniform stability. As an interesting consequence of the bound, we show that a bagging-based meta algorithm leads to near-optimal generalization with high probability jointly over the randomness of data and algorithm. We further substantialize these generic results to stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to derive sharper exponential bounds for convex or non-convex optimization with natural time-decaying learning rates, which have not been possible to prove with the existing stability-based generalization guarantees.
tl;dr: Fast and scalable polynomial optimization on the torus with kernel sum-of-squares and overparametrized models
We present a novel approach to non-convex optimization with certificates, which handles smooth functions on the hypercube or on the torus. Unlike traditional methods that rely on algebraic properties, our algorithm exploits the regularity of the target function intrinsic in the decay of its Fourier spectrum. By defining a tractable family of models, we allow {\em at the same time} to obtain precise certificates and to leverage the advanced and powerful computational techniques developed to optimize neural networks. In this way the scalability of our approach is naturally enhanced by parallel computing with GPUs. Our approach, when applied to the case of polynomials of moderate dimensions but with thousands of coefficients, outperforms the state-of-the-art optimization methods with certificates, as the ones based on Lasserre's hierarchy, addressing problems intractable for the competitors.
Neural policy learning methods have achieved remarkable results in various control problems, ranging from Atari games to simulated locomotion. However, these methods struggle in long-horizon tasks, especially in open-ended environments with multi-modal observations, such as the popular dungeon-crawler game, NetHack. Intriguingly, the NeurIPS 2021 NetHack Challenge revealed that symbolic agents outperformed neural approaches by over four times in median game score. In this paper, we delve into the reasons behind this performance gap and present an extensive study on neural policy learning for NetHack. To conduct this study, we analyze the winning symbolic agent, extending its codebase to track internal strategy selection in order to generate one of the largest available demonstration datasets. Utilizing this dataset, we examine (i) the advantages of an action hierarchy; (ii) enhancements in neural architecture; and (iii) the integration of reinforcement learning with imitation learning. Our investigations produce a state-of-the-art neural agent that surpasses previous fully neural policies by 127% in offline settings and 25% in online settings on median game score. However, we also demonstrate that mere scaling is insufficient to bridge the performance gap with the best symbolic models or even the top human players.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and other large foundation models have achieved impressive results, but their size exacerbates existing resource consumption and latency challenges. In particular, the large-scale deployment of these models is hindered by the significant resource requirements during inference. In this paper, we study two approaches for mitigating these challenges: employing a cache to store previous queries and learning a model selector to choose from an ensemble of models for query processing.
Theoretically, we provide an optimal algorithm for jointly optimizing both approaches to reduce the inference cost in both offline and online tabular settings.
By combining a caching algorithm, namely Greedy Dual Size with Frequency (GDSF) or Least Expected Cost (LEC), with a model selector, we achieve optimal rates in both offline and online settings. Empirically, simulations show that our caching and model selection algorithm greatly improves over the baselines, with up to $50\times$ improvement over the baseline when the ratio between the maximum cost and minimum cost is $100$. Experiments on real datasets show a $4.3\times$ improvement in FLOPs over the baseline when the ratio for FLOPs is $10$, and a $1.8\times$ improvement in latency when the ratio for average latency is $1.85$.
Existing online learning algorithms for adversarial Markov Decision Processes
achieve $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret after $T$ rounds of interactions even if the loss functions are chosen arbitrarily by an adversary, with the caveat that the transition function has to be fixed.
This is because it has been shown that adversarial transition functions make no-regret learning impossible.
Despite such impossibility results, in this work, we develop algorithms that can handle both adversarial losses and adversarial transitions, with regret increasing smoothly in the degree of maliciousness of the adversary.
More concretely, we first propose an algorithm that enjoys $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T} + C^{P})$ regret where $C^{P}$ measures how adversarial the transition functions are and can be at most $\mathcal{O}(T)$.
While this algorithm itself requires knowledge of $C^{P}$, we further develop a black-box reduction approach that removes this requirement.
Moreover, we also show that further refinements of the algorithm not only maintains the same regret bound, but also simultaneously adapts to easier environments (where losses are generated in a certain stochastically constrained manner as in [Jin et al. 2021]) and achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(U + \sqrt{UC^{L}} + C^{P})$ regret, where $U$ is some standard gap-dependent coefficient and $C^{L}$ is the amount of corruption on losses.
Labeling training data is a critical and expensive step in producing high accuracy ML models, whether training from scratch or fine-tuning.
To make labeling more efficient, two major approaches are programmatic weak supervision (WS) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). More recent works have either explicitly or implicitly used techniques at their intersection, but in various complex and ad hoc ways. In this work, we define a simple, modular design space to study the use of SSL techniques for WS more systematically. Surprisingly, we find that fairly simple methods from our design space match the performance of more complex state-of-the-art methods, averaging a 3 p.p. increase in accuracy/F1-score across 8 standard WS benchmarks. Further, we provide practical guidance on when different components are worth their added complexity and training costs. Contrary to current understanding, we find using SSL is not necessary to obtain the best performance on most WS benchmarks but is more effective when: (1) end models are smaller, and (2) WS provides labels for only a small portion of training examples.
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has enabled novel view synthesis with high fidelity given images and camera poses. Subsequent works even succeeded in eliminating the necessity of pose priors by jointly optimizing NeRF and camera pose. However, these works are limited to relatively simple settings such as photometrically consistent and occluder-free image collections or a sequence of images from a video. So they have difficulty handling unconstrained images with varying illumination and transient occluders. In this paper, we propose **UP-NeRF** (**U**nconstrained **P**ose-prior-free **Ne**ural **R**adiance **F**ields) to optimize NeRF with unconstrained image collections without camera pose prior. We tackle these challenges with surrogate tasks that optimize color-insensitive feature fields and a separate module for transient occluders to block their influence on pose estimation. In addition, we introduce a candidate head to enable more robust pose estimation and transient-aware depth supervision to minimize the effect of incorrect prior. Our experiments verify the superior performance of our method compared to the baselines including BARF and its variants in a challenging internet photo collection, *Phototourism dataset*. The code of UP-NeRF is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/UP-NeRF.
tl;dr: We present a novel benchmark for studying the transfer of different types of knowledge in lifelong robot learning.
Lifelong learning offers a promising paradigm of building a generalist agent that learns and adapts over its lifespan.
Unlike traditional lifelong learning problems in image and text domains, which primarily involve the transfer of declarative knowledge of entities and concepts, lifelong learning in decision-making (LLDM) also necessitates the transfer of procedural knowledge, such as actions and behaviors. To advance research in LLDM, we introduce LIBERO, a novel benchmark of lifelong learning for robot manipulation. Specifically, LIBERO highlights five key research topics in LLDM: 1) how to efficiently transfer declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, or the mixture of both; 2) how to design effective policy architectures and 3) effective algorithms for LLDM; 4) the robustness of a lifelong learner with respect to task ordering; and 5) the effect of model pretraining for LLDM. We develop an extendible procedural generation pipeline that can in principle generate infinitely many tasks. For benchmarking purpose, we create four task suites (130 tasks in total) that we use to investigate the above-mentioned research topics. To support sample-efficient learning, we provide high-quality human-teleoperated demonstration data for all tasks. Our extensive experiments present several insightful or even unexpected discoveries: sequential finetuning outperforms existing lifelong learning methods in forward transfer, no single visual encoder architecture excels at all types of knowledge transfer, and naive supervised pretraining can hinder agents' performance in the subsequent LLDM.
Large-scale driving datasets such as Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes substantially accelerate autonomous driving research, especially for perception tasks such as 3D detection and trajectory forecasting. Since the driving logs in these datasets contain HD maps and detailed object annotations which accurately reflect the real-world complexity of traffic behaviors, we can harvest a massive number of complex traffic scenarios and recreate their digital twins in simulation. Compared to the hand-crafted scenarios often used in existing simulators, data-driven scenarios collected from the real world can facilitate many research opportunities in machine learning and autonomous driving. In this work, we present ScenarioNet, an open-source platform for large-scale traffic scenario modeling and simulation. ScenarioNet defines a unified scenario description format and collects a large-scale repository of real-world traffic scenarios from the heterogeneous data in various driving datasets including Waymo, nuScenes, Lyft L5, and nuPlan datasets. These scenarios can be further replayed and interacted with in multiple views from Bird-Eye-View layout to realistic 3D rendering in MetaDrive simulator. This provides a benchmark for evaluating the safety of autonomous driving stacks in simulation before their real-world deployment. We further demonstrate the strengths of ScenarioNet on large-scale scenario generation, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning in both single-agent and multi-agent settings. Code, demo videos, and website are available at https://github.com/metadriverse/scenarionet
tl;dr: Unified urban knowledge graph dataset for UrbanKG-enhanced urban spatiotemporal prediction is proposed.
Accurate Urban SpatioTemporal Prediction (USTP) is of great importance to the development and operation of the smart city. As an emerging building block, multi-sourced urban data are usually integrated as urban knowledge graphs (UrbanKGs) to provide critical knowledge for urban spatiotemporal prediction models. However, existing UrbanKGs are often tailored for specific downstream prediction tasks and are not publicly available, which limits the potential advancement. This paper presents UUKG, the unified urban knowledge graph dataset for knowledge-enhanced urban spatiotemporal predictions. Specifically, we first construct UrbanKGs consisting of millions of triplets for two metropolises by connecting heterogeneous urban entities such as administrative boroughs, POIs, and road segments.
Moreover, we conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis on constructed UrbanKGs and uncover diverse high-order structural patterns, such as hierarchies and cycles, that can be leveraged to benefit downstream USTP tasks. To validate and facilitate the use of UrbanKGs, we implement and evaluate 15 KG embedding methods on the KG completion task and integrate the learned KG embeddings into 9 spatiotemporal models for five different USTP tasks. The extensive experimental results not only provide benchmarks of knowledge-enhanced USTP models under different task settings but also highlight the potential of state-of-the-art high-order structure-aware UrbanKG embedding methods. We hope the proposed UUKG fosters research on urban knowledge graphs and broad smart city applications. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/UUKG/.
tl;dr: We propose a new environment model learning techniques with better generalization ability on counterfactual data.
An accurate environment dynamics model is crucial for various downstream tasks, such as counterfactual prediction, off-policy evaluation, and offline reinforcement learning.
Currently, these models were learned through empirical risk minimization (ERM) by step-wise fitting of historical transition data.
However, we first show that, particularly in the sequential decision-making setting, this approach may catastrophically fail to predict counterfactual action effects due to the selection bias of behavior policies during data collection.
To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel model-learning objective called adversarial weighted empirical risk minimization (AWRM). AWRM incorporates an adversarial policy that exploits the model to generate a data distribution that weakens the model's prediction accuracy, and subsequently, the model is learned under this adversarial data distribution.
We implement a practical algorithm, GALILEO, for AWRM and evaluate it on two synthetic tasks, three continuous-control tasks, and \textit{a real-world application}. The experiments demonstrate that GALILEO can accurately predict counterfactual actions and improve various downstream tasks, including offline policy evaluation and improvement, as well as online decision-making.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of smart home automation, the potential of IoT devices is vast. In this realm, rules are the main tool utilized for this automation, which are predefined conditions or triggers that establish connections between devices, enabling seamless automation of specific processes. However, one significant challenge researchers face is the lack of comprehensive datasets to explore and advance the field of smart home rule recommendations. These datasets are essential for developing and evaluating intelligent algorithms that can effectively recommend rules for automating processes while preserving the privacy of the users, as it involves personal information about users' daily lives. To bridge this gap, we present the Wyze Rule Dataset, a large-scale dataset designed specifically for smart home rule recommendation research. Wyze Rule encompasses over 1 million rules gathered from a diverse user base of 300,000 individuals from Wyze Labs, offering an extensive and varied collection of real-world data. With a focus on federated learning, our dataset is tailored to address the unique challenges of a cross-device federated learning setting in the recommendation domain, featuring a large-scale number of clients with widely heterogeneous data. To establish a benchmark for comparison and evaluation, we have meticulously implemented multiple baselines in both centralized and federated settings. Researchers can leverage these baselines to gauge the performance and effectiveness of their rule recommendation systems, driving advancements in the domain. The Wyze Rule Dataset is publicly accessible through [HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/datasets/wyzelabs/RuleRecommendation)'s dataset API.
tl;dr: A 3D benchmark for continual reinforcement learning with baseline evaluations of popular methods.
The advancement of continual reinforcement learning (RL) has been facing various obstacles, including standardized metrics and evaluation protocols, demanding computational requirements, and a lack of widely accepted standard benchmarks. In response to these challenges, we present COOM ($\textbf{C}$ontinual D$\textbf{OOM}$), a continual RL benchmark tailored for embodied pixel-based RL. COOM presents a meticulously crafted suite of task sequences set within visually distinct 3D environments, serving as a robust evaluation framework to assess crucial aspects of continual RL, such as catastrophic forgetting, knowledge transfer, and sample-efficient learning. Following an in-depth empirical evaluation of popular continual learning (CL) methods, we pinpoint their limitations, provide valuable insight into the benchmark and highlight unique algorithmic challenges. This makes our work the first to benchmark image-based CRL in 3D environments with embodied perception. The primary objective of the COOM benchmark is to offer the research community a valuable and cost-effective challenge. It seeks to deepen our comprehension of the capabilities and limitations of current and forthcoming CL methods in an RL setting. The code and environments are open-sourced and accessible on GitHub.
tl;dr: Our paper presents a novel "slow-fast" contrastive fusion method to lift 2D predictions to 3D for scalable instance segmentation, achieving significant improvements without requiring an upper bound on the number of objects in the scene.
Instance segmentation in 3D is a challenging task due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets. In this paper, we show that this task can be addressed effectively by leveraging instead 2D pre-trained models for instance segmentation. We propose a novel approach to lift 2D segments to 3D and fuse them by means of a neural field representation, which encourages multi-view consistency across frames. The core of our approach is a slow-fast clustering objective function, which is scalable and well-suited for scenes with a large number of objects. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require an upper bound on the number of objects or object tracking across frames. To demonstrate the scalability of the slow-fast clustering, we create a new semi-realistic dataset called the Messy Rooms dataset, which features scenes with up to 500 objects per scene. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on challenging scenes from the ScanNet, Hypersim, and Replica datasets, as well as on our newly created Messy Rooms dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of our slow-fast clustering method.
tl;dr: A zero-shot architecture using fine-grained visual prompting for referring expression comprehension and object grounding.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities in image-level visual perception. However, these models have shown limited performance in instance-level tasks that demand precise localization and recognition. Previous works have suggested that incorporating visual prompts, such as colorful boxes or circles, can improve the ability of models to recognize objects of interest. Nonetheless, compared to language prompting, visual prompting designs are rarely explored. Existing approaches, which employ coarse visual cues such as colorful boxes or circles, often result in sub-optimal performance due to the inclusion of irrelevant and noisy pixels. In this paper, we carefully study the visual prompting designs by exploring more fine-grained markings, such as segmentation masks and their variations. In addition, we introduce a new zero-shot framework that leverages pixel-level annotations acquired from a generalist segmentation model for fine-grained visual prompting. Consequently, our investigation reveals that a straightforward application of blur outside the target mask, referred to as the Blur Reverse Mask, exhibits exceptional effectiveness. This proposed prompting strategy leverages the precise mask annotations to reduce focus on weakly related regions while retaining spatial coherence between the target and the surrounding background. Our **F**ine-**G**rained **V**isual **P**rompting (**FGVP**) demonstrates superior performance in zero-shot comprehension of referring expressions on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks. It outperforms prior methods by an average margin of 3.0\% to 4.6\%, with a maximum improvement of 12.5\% on the RefCOCO+ testA subset. The part detection experiments conducted on the PACO dataset further validate the preponderance of FGVP over existing visual prompting techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/ylingfeng/FGVP.
A room’s acoustic properties are a product of the room’s geometry, the objects within the room, and their specific positions. A room’s acoustic properties can be characterized by its impulse response (RIR) between a source and listener location, or roughly inferred from recordings of natural signals present in the room. Variations in the positions of objects in a room can effect measurable changes in the room’s acoustic properties, as characterized by the RIR. Existing datasets of RIRs either do not systematically vary positions of objects in an environment, or they consist of only simulated RIRs. We present SoundCam, the largest dataset of unique RIRs from in-the-wild rooms publicly released to date. It includes 5,000 10-channel real-world measurements of room impulse responses and 2,000 10-channel recordings of music in three different rooms, including a controlled acoustic lab, an in-the-wild living room, and a conference room, with different humans in positions throughout each room. We show that these measurements can be used for interesting tasks, such as detecting and identifying humans, and tracking their positions.
Road traffic forecasting plays a critical role in smart city initiatives and has experienced significant advancements thanks to the power of deep learning in capturing non-linear patterns of traffic data. However, the promising results achieved on current public datasets may not be applicable to practical scenarios due to limitations within these datasets. First, the limited sizes of them may not reflect the real-world scale of traffic networks. Second, the temporal coverage of these datasets is typically short, posing hurdles in studying long-term patterns and acquiring sufficient samples for training deep models. Third, these datasets often lack adequate metadata for sensors, which compromises the reliability and interpretability of the data. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce the LargeST benchmark dataset. It encompasses a total number of 8,600 sensors in California with a 5-year time coverage and includes comprehensive metadata. Using LargeST, we perform in-depth data analysis to extract data insights, benchmark well-known baselines in terms of their performance and efficiency, and identify challenges as well as opportunities for future research. We release the datasets and baseline implementations at: https://github.com/liuxu77/LargeST.
We introduce a transformation framework that can be utilized to develop online algorithms with low $\epsilon$-approximate regret in the random-order model from offline approximation algorithms. We first give a general reduction theorem that transforms an offline approximation algorithm with low average sensitivity to an online algorithm with low $\epsilon$-approximate regret. We then demonstrate that offline approximation algorithms can be transformed into a low-sensitivity version using a coreset construction method. To showcase the versatility of our approach, we apply it to various problems, including online $(k,z)$-clustering, online matrix approximation, and online regression, and successfully achieve polylogarithmic $\epsilon$-approximate regret for each problem. Moreover, we show that in all three cases, our algorithm also enjoys low inconsistency, which may be desired in some online applications.
tl;dr: A benchmark for factuality evaluation of large language models
Assessing factuality of text generated by large language models (LLMs) is an emerging yet crucial research area, aimed at alerting users to potential errors and guiding the development of more reliable LLMs. Nonetheless, the evaluators assessing factuality necessitate suitable evaluation themselves to gauge progress and foster advancements. This direction remains under-explored, resulting in substantial impediments to the progress of factuality evaluators. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a benchmark for Factuality Evaluation of large Language Models, referred to as FELM. In this benchmark, we collect responses generated from LLMs and annotate factuality labels in a fine-grained manner. Contrary to previous studies that primarily concentrate on the factuality of world knowledge (e.g. information from Wikipedia), FELM focuses on factuality across diverse domains, spanning from world knowledge to math and reasoning. Our annotation is based on text segments, which can help pinpoint specific factual errors. The factuality annotations are further supplemented by predefined error types and reference links that either support or contradict the statement. In our experiments, we investigate the performance of several LLM-based factuality evaluators on FELM, including both vanilla LLMs and those augmented with retrieval mechanisms and chain-of-thought processes. Our findings reveal that while retrieval aids factuality evaluation, current LLMs are far from satisfactory to faithfully detect factual errors.
tl;dr: A benchmark to test models' capability to compose the correct attributes to the correct objects in the presence of hard distractors, and a light weight adaption to improve this capability in pre-trained models.
Compositional reasoning is a hallmark of human visual intelligence. Yet, despite the size of large vision-language models, they struggle to represent simple compositions by combining objects with their attributes. To measure this lack of compositional capability, we design Cola, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark to Compose Objects Localized with Attributes. To solve Cola, a model must retrieve images with the correct configuration of attributes and objects and avoid choosing a distractor image with the same objects and attributes but in the wrong configuration. Cola contains about 1.2k composed queries of 168 objects and 197 attributes on around 30K images. Our human evaluation finds that Cola is 83.33% accurate, similar to contemporary compositionality benchmarks. Using Cola as a testbed, we explore empirical modeling designs to adapt pre-trained vision-language models to reason compositionally. We explore 6 adaptation strategies on 2 seminal vision-language models, using compositionality-centric test benchmarks - Cola and CREPE. We find the optimal adaptation strategy is to train a multi-modal attention layer that jointly attends over the frozen pre-trained image and language features. Surprisingly, training multimodal layers on CLIP performs better than tuning a larger FLAVA model with already pre-trained multimodal layers. Furthermore, our adaptation strategy improves CLIP and FLAVA to comparable levels, suggesting that training multimodal layers using contrastive attribute-object data is key, as opposed to using them pre-trained. Lastly, we show that Cola is harder than a closely related contemporary benchmark, CREPE, since simpler fine-tuning strategies without multimodal layers suffice on CREPE, but not on Cola. However, we still see a significant gap between our best adaptation and human accuracy, suggesting considerable room for further research.
Project page: https://cs-people.bu.edu/array/research/cola/
tl;dr: We use the embedding spaces of small language models (e.g. BERT) to identify and correct errors in the few-shot predictions of larger language models.
Recent work has shown that language models' (LMs) prompt-based learning capabilities make them well suited for automating data labeling in domains where manual annotation is expensive. The challenge is that while writing an initial prompt is cheap, improving a prompt is costly---practitioners often require significant labeled data in order to evaluate the impact of prompt modifications. Our work asks whether it is possible to improve prompt-based learning _without_ additional labeled data. We approach this problem by attempting to modify the predictions of a prompt, rather than the prompt itself. Our intuition is that accurate predictions should also be consistent: samples which are similar under some feature representation should receive the same prompt prediction. We propose Embroid, a method which computes multiple representations of a dataset under different embedding functions, and uses the consistency between the LM predictions for neighboring samples to identify mispredictions. Embroid then uses these neighborhoods to create additional predictions for each sample, and combines these predictions with a simple latent variable graphical model in order to generate a final corrected prediction. In addition to providing a theoretical analysis of Embroid, we conduct a rigorous empirical evaluation across six different LMs and up to 95 different tasks. We find that (1) Embroid substantially improves performance over original prompts (e.g., by an average of 7.3 points on GPT-JT), (2) also realizes improvements for more sophisticated prompting strategies (e.g., chain-of-thought), and (3) can be specialized to domains like law through the embedding functions.
tl;dr: We extend Continuous Query Decomposition with neural score adaptation layers to improve the interactions between atomic sub-query scores in complex query answering.
Answering complex queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task where a model needs to answer complex logical queries in the presence of missing knowledge. Prior work in the literature has proposed to address this problem by designing architectures trained end-to-end for the complex query answering task with a reasoning process that is hard to interpret while requiring data and resource-intensive training. Other lines of research have proposed re-using simple neural link predictors to answer complex queries, reducing the amount of training data by orders of magnitude while providing interpretable answers. The neural link predictor used in such approaches is not explicitly optimised for the complex query answering task, implying that its scores are not calibrated to interact together. We propose to address these problems via CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$, a parameter-efficient score \emph{adaptation} model optimised to re-calibrate neural link prediction scores for the complex query answering task. While the neural link predictor is frozen, the adaptation component -- which only increases the number of model parameters by $0.03\%$ -- is trained on the downstream complex query answering task. Furthermore, the calibration component enables us to support reasoning over queries that include atomic negations, which was previously impossible with link predictors. In our experiments, CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$ produces significantly more accurate results than current state-of-the-art methods, improving from $34.4$ to $35.1$ Mean Reciprocal Rank values averaged across all datasets and query types while using $\leq 30\%$ of the available training query types. We further show that CQD$^{\mathcal{A}}$ is data-efficient, achieving competitive results with only $1\%$ of the complex training queries and robust in out-of-domain evaluations. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/EdinburghNLP/adaptive-cqd.
Link prediction attempts to predict whether an unseen edge exists based on only a portion of the graph. A flurry of methods has been created in recent years that attempt to make use of graph neural networks (GNNs) for this task. Furthermore, new and diverse datasets have also been created to better evaluate the effectiveness of these new models. However, multiple limitations currently exist that hinders our ability to properly evaluate these new methods. This includes, but is not limited to: (1) The underreporting of performance on multiple baselines, (2) A lack of a unified data split and evaluation metric on some datasets, (3) An unrealistic evaluation setting that produces negative samples that are easy to classify. To overcome these challenges we first conduct a fair comparison across prominent methods and datasets, utilizing the same dataset settings and hyperparameter settings. We then create a new real-world evaluation setting that samples difficult negative samples via multiple heuristics. The new evaluation setting helps promote new challenges and opportunities in link prediction by aligning the evaluation with real-world situations.
tl;dr: Objaverse-XL is a new massive scale 3D object dataset enabling broad generalization and generative modeling in 3D
Natural language processing and 2D vision models have attained remarkable proficiency on many tasks primarily by escalating the scale of training data. However, 3D vision tasks have not seen the same progress, in part due to the challenges of acquiring high-quality 3D data. In this work, we present Objaverse-XL, a dataset of over 10 million 3D objects. Our compilation comprises deduplicated 3D objects from a diverse set of sources, including manually designed objects, photogrammetry scans of landmarks and everyday items, and professional scans of historic and antique artifacts. Representing the largest scale and diversity in the realm of 3D datasets, Objaverse-XL enables significant new possibilities for 3D vision. Our experiments demonstrate the vast improvements enabled with the scale provided by Objaverse-XL. We show that by training Zero123 on novel view synthesis, utilizing over 100 million multi-view rendered images, we achieve strong zero-shot generalization abilities. We hope that releasing Objaverse-XL will enable further innovations in the field of 3D vision at scale.
tl;dr: We discover a new notion of linear connectivity, Layerwise Linear Feature Connectivity (LLFC), which significantly extends Linear Mode Connectivity (LMC) to features in all layers.
Recent work has revealed many intriguing empirical phenomena in neural network training, despite the poorly understood and highly complex loss landscapes and training dynamics. One of these phenomena, Linear Mode Connectivity (LMC), has gained considerable attention due to the intriguing observation that different solutions can be connected by a linear path in the parameter space while maintaining near-constant training and test losses. In this work, we introduce a stronger notion of linear connectivity, Layerwise Linear Feature Connectivity (LLFC), which says that the feature maps of every layer in different trained networks are also linearly connected. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence for LLFC across a wide range of settings, demonstrating that whenever two trained networks satisfy LMC (via either spawning or permutation methods), they also satisfy LLFC in nearly all the layers. Furthermore, we delve deeper into the underlying factors contributing to LLFC, which reveal new insights into the permutation approaches. The study of LLFC transcends and advances our understanding of LMC by adopting a feature-learning perspective.
tl;dr: We introduce ClimateLearn, an open-source PyTorch library that vastly simplifies the training and evaluation of machine learning models for data-driven climate science.
Modeling weather and climate is an essential endeavor to understand the near- and long-term impacts of climate change, as well as to inform technology and policymaking for adaptation and mitigation efforts. In recent years, there has been a surging interest in applying data-driven methods based on machine learning for solving core problems such as weather forecasting and climate downscaling. Despite promising results, much of this progress has been impaired due to the lack of large-scale, open-source efforts for reproducibility, resulting in the use of inconsistent or underspecified datasets, training setups, and evaluations by both domain scientists and artificial intelligence researchers. We introduce ClimateLearn, an open-source PyTorch library that vastly simplifies the training and evaluation of machine learning models for data-driven climate science. ClimateLearn consists of holistic pipelines for dataset processing (e.g., ERA5, CMIP6, PRISM), implementing state-of-the-art deep learning models (e.g., Transformers, ResNets), and quantitative and qualitative evaluation for standard weather and climate modeling tasks. We supplement these functionalities with extensive documentation, contribution guides, and quickstart tutorials to expand access and promote community growth. We have also performed comprehensive forecasting and downscaling experiments to showcase the capabilities and key features of our library. To our knowledge, ClimateLearn is the first large-scale, open-source effort for bridging research in weather and climate modeling with modern machine learning systems. Our library is available publicly at https://github.com/aditya-grover/climate-learn.
tl;dr: SELF-ALIGN minimizes human supervision for training AI-assistants by using synthetic prompts and human principles to guide learning, improving response quality.
Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. However, this dependence can significantly constrain the true potential of AI-assistant agents due to the high cost of obtaining human supervision and the related issues on quality, reliability, diversity, self-consistency, and undesirable biases. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called SELF-ALIGN, which combines principle-driven reasoning and the generative power of LLMs for the self-alignment of AI agents with minimal human supervision. Our approach encompasses four stages: first, we use an LLM to generate synthetic prompts, and a topic-guided method to augment the prompt diversity; second, we use a small set of human-written principles for AI models to follow, and guide the LLM through in-context learning from demonstrations (of principles application) to produce helpful, ethical, and reliable responses to user's queries; third, we fine-tune the original LLM with the high-quality self-aligned responses so that the resulting model can generate desirable responses for each query directly without the principle set and the demonstrations anymore; and finally, we offer a refinement step to address the issues of overly-brief or indirect responses. Applying SELF-ALIGN to the LLaMA-65b base language model, we develop an AI assistant named Dromedary. With fewer than 300 lines of human annotations (including < 200 seed prompts, 16 generic principles, and 5 exemplars for in-context learning). Dromedary significantly surpasses the performance of several state-of-the-art AI systems, including Text-Davinci-003 and Alpaca, on benchmark datasets with various settings.
Despite the progress of image segmentation for accurate visual entity segmentation, completing the diverse requirements of image editing applications for different-level region-of-interest selections remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose a new task, All-Inclusive Multi-Level Segmentation (AIMS), which segments visual regions into three levels: part, entity, and relation (two entities with some semantic relationships). We also build a unified AIMS model through multi-dataset multi-task training to address the two major challenges of annotation inconsistency and task correlation. Specifically, we propose task complementarity, association, and prompt mask encoder for three-level predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capacity of our method compared to other state-of-the-art methods on a single dataset or the concurrent work on segment anything. We will make our code and training model publicly available.
tl;dr: We show new algorithms and lower bounds for the private continual release of the number of distinct elements in turnstile streams
Privacy is a central challenge for systems that learn from sensitive data sets, especially when a system's outputs must be continuously updated to reflect changing data. We consider the achievable error for differentially private continual release of a basic statistic---the number of distinct items---in a stream where items may be both inserted and deleted (the turnstile model). With only insertions, existing algorithms have additive error just polylogarithmic in the length of the stream $T$. We uncover a much richer landscape in the turnstile model, even without considering memory restrictions. We show that every differentially private mechanism that handles insertions and deletions has worst-case additive error at least $T^{1/4}$ even under a relatively weak, event-level privacy definition.
Then, we identify a parameter of the input stream, its maximum flippancy, that is low for natural data streams and for which we give tight parameterized error guarantees. Specifically, the maximum flippancy is the largest number of times that the contribution of a single
item to the distinct elements count changes over the course of the stream. We present an item-level differentially private mechanism that, for all turnstile streams with maximum flippancy $w$, continually outputs the number of distinct elements with an $O(\sqrt{w} \cdot \mathsf{poly}\log T)$ additive error, without requiring prior knowledge of $w$. We prove that this is the best achievable error bound that depends only on $w$, for a large range of values of $w$. When $w$ is small, the error of our mechanism is similar to the polylogarithmic in $T$ error in the insertion-only setting, bypassing the hardness in the turnstile model.
tl;dr: If a neural network is group equivariant, does it have to be layerwise equivariant? We investigate the question theoretically and empirically.
Many data symmetries can be described in terms of group equivariance and
the most common way of encoding group equivariances in neural networks is by building linear layers that are group equivariant.
In this work we investigate whether equivariance of a network implies that all layers are equivariant.
On the theoretical side we find cases where equivariance implies layerwise equivariance, but also
demonstrate that this is not the case generally.
Nevertheless, we conjecture that CNNs that are trained to be equivariant will exhibit layerwise equivariance and explain how this conjecture is a weaker version of the recent permutation conjecture by Entezari et al.\ [2022].
We perform quantitative experiments with VGG-nets on CIFAR10 and qualitative experiments with ResNets on ImageNet to illustrate and support our theoretical findings.
These experiments are not only of interest for understanding how group equivariance is encoded in ReLU-networks, but they also give a new perspective on Entezari et al.'s permutation conjecture as we find that it
is typically easier to merge a network with a group-transformed version of itself than merging two different networks.
tl;dr: We prove the approximate symmetry and relaxed triangle inequality of KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions. We also demonstrate the applications of our theorems.
Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is one of the most important measures to calculate the difference between probability distributions. In this paper, we theoretically study several properties of KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions. Firstly, for any two $n$-dimensional Gaussian distributions $\mathcal{N}_1$ and $\mathcal{N}_2$, we prove that when $KL(\mathcal{N}_2||\mathcal{N}_1)\leq \varepsilon\ (\varepsilon>0)$ the supremum of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_2)$ is $(1/2)\left((-W_{0}(-e^{-(1+2\varepsilon)}))^{-1}+\log(-W_{0}(-e^{-(1+2\varepsilon)})) -1 \right)$, where $W_0$ is the principal branch of Lambert $W$ function. For small $\varepsilon$, the supremum is $\varepsilon + 2\varepsilon^{1.5} + O(\varepsilon^2)$. This quantifies the approximate symmetry of small KL divergence between Gaussian distributions. We further derive the infimum of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_2)$ when $KL(\mathcal{N}_2||\mathcal{N}_1)\geq M\ (M>0)$. We give the conditions when the supremum and infimum can be attained. Secondly, for any three $n$-dimensional Gaussian distributions $\mathcal{N}_1$, $\mathcal{N}_2$, and $\mathcal{N}_3$, we theoretically show that an upper bound of $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_3)$ is $3\varepsilon_1+3\varepsilon_2+2\sqrt{\varepsilon_1\varepsilon_2}+o(\varepsilon_1)+o(\varepsilon_2)$ when $KL(\mathcal{N}_1||\mathcal{N}_2)\leq \varepsilon_1$ and $KL(\mathcal{N}_2||\mathcal{N}_3)\leq \varepsilon_2$ ($\varepsilon_1,\varepsilon_2\ge 0$). This reveals that KL divergence between Gaussian distributions follows a relaxed triangle inequality. Note that, all these bounds in the theorems presented in this work are independent of the dimension $n$. Finally, we discuss several applications of our theories in deep learning, reinforcement learning, and sample complexity research.
tl;dr: We justify the use of softmax in L2D with probability estimation by studying the cause of invalid probability estimators and then propose an asymmetric softmax that can induce both consistent loss and a valid probability estimator for L2D.
Enabling machine learning classifiers to defer their decision to a downstream expert when the expert is more accurate will ensure improved safety and performance. This objective can be achieved with the learning-to-defer framework which aims to jointly learn how to classify and how to defer to the expert. In recent studies, it has been theoretically shown that popular estimators for learning to defer parameterized with softmax provide unbounded estimates for the likelihood of deferring which makes them uncalibrated. However, it remains unknown whether this is due to the widely used softmax parameterization and if we can find a softmax-based estimator that is both statistically consistent and possesses a valid probability estimator. In this work, we first show that the cause of the miscalibrated and unbounded estimator in prior literature is due to the symmetric nature of the surrogate losses used and not due to softmax. We then propose a novel statistically consistent asymmetric softmax-based surrogate loss that can produce valid estimates without the issue of unboundedness. We further analyze the non-asymptotic properties of our proposed method and empirically validate its performance and calibration on benchmark datasets.
tl;dr: We prove and characterise a saddle-to-saddle dynamics of gradient flow with vanishing initialisation over 2-layer diagonal linear networks.
In this paper we fully describe the trajectory of gradient flow over $2$-layer diagonal linear networks for the regression setting in the limit of vanishing initialisation. We show that the limiting flow successively jumps from a saddle of the training loss to another until reaching the minimum $\ell_1$-norm solution. We explicitly characterise the visited saddles as well as the jump times through a recursive algorithm reminiscent of the LARS algorithm used for computing the Lasso path. Starting from the zero vector, coordinates are successively activated until the minimum $\ell_1$-norm solution is recovered, revealing an incremental learning. Our proof leverages a convenient arc-length time-reparametrisation which enables to keep track of the transitions between the jumps. Our analysis requires negligible assumptions on the data, applies to both under and overparametrised settings and covers complex cases where there is no monotonicity of the number of active coordinates. We provide numerical experiments to support our findings.
tl;dr: We describe the scaling laws that show that bigger language models can better predict brain activity.
Representations from transformer-based unidirectional language models are known to be effective at predicting brain responses to natural language. However, most studies comparing language models to brains have used GPT-2 or similarly sized language models. Here we tested whether larger open-source models such as those from the OPT and LLaMA families are better at predicting brain responses recorded using fMRI. Mirroring scaling results from other contexts, we found that brain prediction performance scales logarithmically with model size from 125M to 30B parameter models, with ~15% increased encoding performance as measured by correlation with a held-out test set across 3 subjects. Similar log-linear behavior was observed when scaling the size of the fMRI training set. We also characterized scaling for acoustic encoding models that use HuBERT, WavLM, and Whisper, and we found comparable improvements with model size. A noise ceiling analysis of these large, high-performance encoding models showed that performance is nearing the theoretical maximum for brain areas such as the precuneus and higher auditory cortex. These results suggest that increasing scale in both models and data will yield incredibly effective models of language processing in the brain, enabling better scientific understanding as well as applications such as decoding.
648. Path Regularization: A Convexity and Sparsity Inducing Regularization for Parallel ReLU Networks
tl;dr: We introduce a convex analytic framework to unveil a hidden convex optimization landscape for training path regularized deep neural networks.
Understanding the fundamental principles behind the success of deep neural networks is one of the most important open questions in the current literature. To this end, we study the training problem of deep neural networks and introduce an analytic approach to unveil hidden convexity in the optimization landscape. We consider a deep parallel ReLU network architecture, which also includes standard deep networks and ResNets as its special cases. We then show that pathwise regularized training problems can be represented as an exact convex optimization problem. We further prove that the equivalent convex problem is regularized via a group sparsity inducing norm. Thus, a path regularized parallel ReLU network can be viewed as a parsimonious convex model in high dimensions. More importantly, since the original training problem may not be trainable in polynomial-time, we propose an approximate algorithm with a fully polynomial-time complexity in all data dimensions. Then, we prove strong global optimality guarantees for this algorithm. We also provide experiments corroborating our theory.
3D object detection in point clouds is important for autonomous driving systems. A primary challenge in 3D object detection stems from the sparse distribution of points within the 3D scene. Existing high-performance methods typically employ 3D sparse convolutional neural networks with small kernels to extract features. To reduce computational costs, these methods resort to submanifold sparse convolutions, which prevent the information exchange among spatially disconnected features. Some recent approaches have attempted to address this problem by introducing large-kernel convolutions or self-attention mechanisms, but they either achieve limited accuracy improvements or incur excessive computational costs. We propose HEDNet, a hierarchical encoder-decoder network for 3D object detection, which leverages encoder-decoder blocks to capture long-range dependencies among features in the spatial space, particularly for large and distant objects. We conducted extensive experiments on the Waymo Open and nuScenes datasets. HEDNet achieved superior detection accuracy on both datasets than previous state-of-the-art methods with competitive efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zhanggang001/HEDNet.
tl;dr: A point-based 3D representation and rendering method that can learn scene surface geometry using point cloud from scratch
Learning accurate and parsimonious point cloud representations of scene surfaces from scratch remains a challenge in 3D representation learning. Existing point-based methods often suffer from the vanishing gradient problem or require a large number of points to accurately model scene geometry and texture. To address these limitations, we propose Proximity Attention Point Rendering (PAPR), a novel method that consists of a point-based scene representation and a differentiable renderer. Our scene representation uses a point cloud where each point is characterized by its spatial position, foreground score, and view-independent feature vector. The renderer selects the relevant points for each ray and produces accurate colours using their associated features. PAPR effectively learns point cloud positions to represent the correct scene geometry, even when the initialization drastically differs from the target geometry. Notably, our method captures fine texture details while using only a parsimonious set of points. We also demonstrate four practical applications of our method: geometry editing, object manipulation, texture transfer, and exposure control. More results and code are available on our project website at https://zvict.github.io/papr/.
tl;dr: Black-box variational inference with projected or proximal SGD converges at a 1/√T rate for log-smooth and log-concave targets, and 1/T if strongly log-concave.
Black-box variational inference is widely used in situations where there is no proof that its stochastic optimization succeeds. We suggest this is due to a theoretical gap in existing stochastic optimization proofs—namely the challenge of gradient estimators with unusual noise bounds, and a composite non-smooth objective. For dense Gaussian variational families, we observe that existing gradient estimators based on reparameterization satisfy a quadratic noise bound and give novel convergence guarantees for proximal and projected stochastic gradient descent using this bound. This provides rigorous guarantees that methods similar to those used in practice converge on realistic inference problems.
tl;dr: This work presents a collection of graph-based Neuroimaging benchmark datasets along with a tool named NeuroGraph, for fMRI preprocessing
Machine learning provides a valuable tool for analyzing high-dimensional functional neuroimaging data, and is proving effective in predicting various neurological conditions, psychiatric disorders, and cognitive patterns. In functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research, interactions between brain regions are commonly modeled using graph-based representations. The potency of graph machine learning methods has been established across myriad domains, marking a transformative step in data interpretation and predictive modeling. Yet, despite their promise, the transposition of these techniques to the neuroimaging domain has been challenging due to the expansive number of potential preprocessing pipelines and the large parameter search space for graph-based dataset construction. In this paper, we introduce NeuroGraph, a collection of graph-based neuroimaging datasets, and demonstrated its utility for predicting multiple categories of behavioral and cognitive traits. We delve deeply into the dataset generation search space by crafting 35 datasets that encompass static and dynamic brain connectivity, running in excess of 15 baseline methods for benchmarking. Additionally, we provide generic frameworks for learning on both static and dynamic graphs. Our extensive experiments lead to several key observations. Notably, using correlation vectors as node features, incorporating larger number of regions of interest, and employing sparser graphs lead to improved performance. To foster further advancements in graph-based data driven neuroimaging analysis, we offer a comprehensive open-source Python package that includes the benchmark datasets, baseline implementations, model training, and standard evaluation.
tl;dr: This work introduces the first small-loss and gradual-variation regret bounds for online portfolio selection, marking the first instances of data-dependent bounds for online convex optimization with non-Lipschitz, non-smooth losses.
This work introduces the first small-loss and gradual-variation regret bounds for online portfolio selection, marking the first instances of data-dependent bounds for online convex optimization with non-Lipschitz, non-smooth losses.
The algorithms we propose exhibit sublinear regret rates in the worst cases and achieve logarithmic regrets when the data is "easy," with per-round time almost linear in the number of investment alternatives.
The regret bounds are derived using novel smoothness characterizations of the logarithmic loss, a local norm-based analysis of following the regularized leader (FTRL) with self-concordant regularizers, which are not necessarily barriers, and an implicit variant of optimistic FTRL with the log-barrier.
The development of foundation vision models has pushed the general visual recognition to a high level, but cannot well address the fine-grained recognition in specialized domain such as invasive species classification. Identifying and managing invasive species has strong social and ecological value. Currently, most invasive species datasets are limited in scale and cover a narrow range of species, which restricts the development of deep-learning based invasion biometrics systems. To fill the gap of this area, we introduced Species196, a large-scale semi-supervised dataset of 196-category invasive species. It collects over 19K images with expert-level accurate annotations (Species196-L), and 1.2M unlabeled images of invasive species (Species196-U). The dataset provides four experimental settings for benchmarking the existing models and algorithms, namely, supervised learning, semi-supervised learning and self-supervised pretraining. To facilitate future research on these four learning paradigms, we conduct an empirical study of the representative methods on the introduced dataset. The dataset will be made publicly available at https://species-dataset.github.io/.
tl;dr: We introduce a multimodal dataset and benchmark dedicated to the 3D estimation of the lower body human poses, derived from smart textile-based wearable knee sleeves with goal to monitor joint angles and ensure joint health.
The kinematics of human movements and locomotion are closely linked to the activation and contractions of muscles. To investigate this, we present a multimodal dataset with benchmarks collected using a novel pair of Intelligent Knee Sleeves (Texavie MarsWear Knee Sleeves) for human pose estimation. Our system utilizes synchronized datasets that comprise time-series data from the Knee Sleeves and the corresponding ground truth labels from visualized motion capture camera system. We employ these to generate 3D human models solely based on the wearable data of individuals performing different activities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this camera-free system and machine learning algorithms in the assessment of various movements and exercises, including extension to unseen exercises and individuals. The results show an average error of 7.21 degrees across all eight lower body joints when compared to the ground truth, indicating the effectiveness and reliability of the Knee Sleeve system for the prediction of different lower body joints beyond knees. The results enable human pose estimation in a seamless manner without being limited by visual occlusion or the field of view of cameras. Our results show the potential of multimodal wearable sensing in a variety of applications from home fitness to sports, healthcare, and physical rehabilitation focusing on pose and movement estimation.
tl;dr: We propose a large-scale 3D expressive whole-body human motion dataset
In this paper, we present Motion-X, a large-scale 3D expressive whole-body motion dataset. Existing motion datasets predominantly contain body-only poses, lacking facial expressions, hand gestures, and fine-grained pose descriptions. Moreover, they are primarily collected from limited laboratory scenes with textual descriptions manually labeled, which greatly limits their scalability. To overcome these limitations, we develop a whole-body motion and text annotation pipeline, which can automatically annotate motion from either single- or multi-view videos and provide comprehensive semantic labels for each video and fine-grained whole-body pose descriptions for each frame. This pipeline is of high precision, cost-effective, and scalable for further research. Based on it, we construct Motion-X, which comprises 15.6M precise 3D whole-body pose annotations (i.e., SMPL-X) covering 81.1K motion sequences from massive scenes. Besides, Motion-X provides 15.6M frame-level whole-body pose descriptions and 81.1K sequence-level semantic labels. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the annotation pipeline and the significant benefit of Motion-X in enhancing expressive, diverse, and natural motion generation, as well as 3D whole-body human mesh recovery.
tl;dr: We propose a new pre-training objective for autoregressive LMs and show that models trained this way are better in perplexity and many other metrics
Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, predicting the next token from the preceding ones. However, this ignores that the full sequence is available during training.
In this paper, we introduce ``Meet in the Middle'' (MIM) a new pre-training paradigm that improves data
efficiency by training in two directions, left-to-right and right-to-left, and encouraging the respective models
to agree on their token distribution for each position. While the primary outcome is an improved left-to-right LM,
we also obtain secondary benefits in the infilling task. There, we leverage the two pre-trained directions to propose an infilling procedure that builds the completion simultaneously from both sides. We conduct extensive experiments on both programming and natural languages and show that MIM significantly surpasses existing pre-training paradigms, in both left-to-right generation as well as infilling.
Code and models available at https://github.com/microsoft/Meet-in-the-Middle
We present WineSensed, a large multimodal wine dataset for studying the relations between visual perception, language, and flavor. The dataset encompasses 897k images of wine labels and 824k reviews of wines curated from the Vivino platform. It has over 350k unique vintages, annotated with year, region, rating, alcohol percentage, price, and grape composition. We obtained fine-grained flavor annotations on a subset by conducting a wine-tasting experiment with 256 participants who were asked to rank wines based on their similarity in flavor, resulting in more than 5k pairwise flavor distances. We propose a low-dimensional concept embedding algorithm that combines human experience with automatic machine similarity kernels. We demonstrate that this shared concept embedding space improves upon separate embedding spaces for coarse flavor classification (alcohol percentage, country, grape, price, rating) and representing human perception of flavor.
tl;dr: Use diffusion models augmented by physics-based simulation to breed soft robots
Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in silico shows promise for applications in physical soft robotics and virtual character creation; such approaches, however, require developing new learning algorithms that can reason about function atop pure structure. In this paper, we present DiffuseBot, a physics-augmented diffusion model that generates soft robot morphologies capable of excelling in a wide spectrum of tasks. \name bridges the gap between virtually generated content and physical utility by (i) augmenting the diffusion process with a physical dynamical simulation which provides a certificate of performance, and (ii) introducing a co-design procedure that jointly optimizes physical design and control by leveraging information about physical sensitivities from differentiable simulation. We showcase a range of simulated and fabricated robots along with their capabilities. Check our website: https://diffusebot.github.io/
tl;dr: We present InstructBLIP, an instruction tuning framework towards general-purpose vision-language models. InstructBLIP achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot and finetuning with various instruction following abilities. All models are released.
Large-scale pre-training and instruction tuning have been successful at creating general-purpose language models with broad competence. However, building general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the rich input distributions and task diversity resulting from the additional visual input. Although vision-language pretraining has been widely studied, vision-language instruction tuning remains under-explored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive study on vision-language instruction tuning based on the pretrained BLIP-2 models. We gather 26 publicly available datasets, covering a wide variety of tasks and capabilities, and transform them into instruction tuning format. Additionally, we introduce an instruction-aware Query Transformer, which extracts informative features tailored to the given instruction. Trained on 13 held-in datasets, InstructBLIP attains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all 13 held-out datasets, substantially outperforming BLIP-2 and larger Flamingo models. Our models also lead to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned on individual downstream tasks (e.g., 90.7% accuracy on ScienceQA questions with image contexts). Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate the advantages of InstructBLIP over concurrent multimodal models. All InstructBLIP models are open-source.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a new loss-function for energy-based modelling which can be evaluated without computing scores. We describe strong theoretical properties of the loss and demonstrate its efficacy for learning positive data distributions.
Energy-based models are a simple yet powerful class of probabilistic models, but their widespread adoption has been limited by the computational burden of training them. We propose a novel loss function called Energy Discrepancy (ED) which does not rely on the computation of scores or expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo. We show that energy discrepancy approaches the explicit score matching and negative log-likelihood loss under different limits, effectively interpolating between both. Consequently, minimum energy discrepancy estimation overcomes the problem of nearsightedness encountered in score-based estimation methods, while also enjoying theoretical guarantees. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that ED learns low-dimensional data distributions faster and more accurately than explicit score matching or contrastive divergence. For high-dimensional image data, we describe how the manifold hypothesis puts limitations on our approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of energy discrepancy by training the energy-based model as a prior of a variational decoder model.
Language-based colorization produces plausible and visually pleasing colors under the guidance of user-friendly natural language descriptions. Previous methods implicitly assume that users provide comprehensive color descriptions for most of the objects in the image, which leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a unified model to perform language-based colorization with any-level descriptions. We leverage the pretrained cross-modality generative model for its robust language understanding and rich color priors to handle the inherent ambiguity of any-level descriptions. We further design modules to align with input conditions to preserve local spatial structures and prevent the ghosting effect. With the proposed novel sampling strategy, our model achieves instance-aware colorization in diverse and complex scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our advantages of effectively handling any-level descriptions and outperforming both language-based and automatic colorization methods. The code and pretrained models
are available at: https://github.com/changzheng123/L-CAD.
In many unpaired image domain translation problems, e.g., style transfer or super-resolution, it is important to keep the translated image similar to its respective input image. We propose the extremal transport (ET) which is a mathematical formalization of the theoretically best possible unpaired translation between a pair of domains w.r.t. the given similarity function. Inspired by the recent advances in neural optimal transport (OT), we propose a scalable algorithm to approximate ET maps as a limit of partial OT maps. We test our algorithm on toy examples and on the unpaired image-to-image translation task. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/milenagazdieva/ExtremalNeuralOptimalTransport
tl;dr: We develop a general dynamic programming framework that can find optimal decision trees for any separable objective or constraint
Global optimization of decision trees has shown to be promising in terms of accuracy, size, and consequently human comprehensibility.
However, many of the methods used rely on general-purpose solvers for which scalability remains an issue.
Dynamic programming methods have been shown to scale much better because they exploit the tree structure by solving subtrees as independent subproblems. However, this only works when an objective can be optimized separately for subtrees.
We explore this relationship in detail and show necessary and sufficient conditions for such separability and generalize previous dynamic programming approaches into a framework that can optimize any combination of separable objectives and constraints.
Experiments on five application domains show the general applicability of this framework, while outperforming the scalability of general-purpose solvers by a large margin.
In visual-based Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents often struggle to generalize well to environmental variations in the state space that were not observed during training. The variations can arise in both task-irrelevant features, such as background noise, and task-relevant features, such as robot configurations, that are related to the optimal decisions. To achieve generalization in both situations, agents are required to accurately understand the impact of changed features on the decisions, i.e., establishing the true associations between changed features and decisions in the policy model. However, due to the inherent correlations among features in the state space, the associations between features and decisions become entangled, making it difficult for the policy to distinguish them. To this end, we propose Saliency-Guided Features Decorrelation (SGFD) to eliminate these correlations through sample reweighting. Concretely, SGFD consists of two core techniques: Random Fourier Functions (RFF) and the saliency map. RFF is utilized to estimate the complex non-linear correlations in high-dimensional images, while the saliency map is designed to identify the changed features. Under the guidance of the saliency map, SGFD employs sample reweighting to minimize the estimated correlations related to changed features, thereby achieving decorrelation in visual RL tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that SGFD can generalize well on a wide range of test environments and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in handling both task-irrelevant variations and task-relevant variations.
tl;dr: We minimize the energy functional of quantum systems by following a projected Wasserstein gradient flow in the space of distributions, which results in faster convergence compared to the conventional Quantum Variational Monte Carlo.
Solving the quantum many-body Schrödinger equation is a fundamental and challenging problem in the fields of quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and material sciences. One of the common computational approaches to this problem is Quantum Variational Monte Carlo (QVMC), in which ground-state solutions are obtained by minimizing the energy of the system within a restricted family of parameterized wave functions. Deep learning methods partially address the limitations of traditional QVMC by representing a rich family of wave functions in terms of neural networks. However, the optimization objective in QVMC remains notoriously hard to minimize and requires second-order optimization methods such as natural gradient. In this paper, we first reformulate energy functional minimization in the space of Born distributions corresponding to particle-permutation (anti-)symmetric wave functions, rather than the space of wave functions. We then interpret QVMC as the Fisher--Rao gradient flow in this distributional space, followed by a projection step onto the variational manifold. This perspective provides us with a principled framework to derive new QMC algorithms, by endowing the distributional space with better metrics, and following the projected gradient flow induced by those metrics. More specifically, we propose ``Wasserstein Quantum Monte Carlo'' (WQMC), which uses the gradient flow induced by the Wasserstein metrics, rather than Fisher--Rao metric, and corresponds to *transporting* the probability mass, rather than *teleporting* it. We demonstrate empirically that the dynamics of WQMC results in faster convergence to the ground state of molecular systems.
tl;dr: This work is the first attempt to study the binarized spectral compressive imaging reconstruction problem
Existing deep learning models for hyperspectral image (HSI) reconstruction achieve good performance but require powerful hardwares with enormous memory and computational resources. Consequently, these methods can hardly be deployed on resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Binarized Spectral-Redistribution Network (BiSRNet), for efficient and practical HSI restoration from compressed measurement in snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) systems. Firstly, we redesign a compact and easy-to-deploy base model to be binarized. Then we present the basic unit, Binarized Spectral-Redistribution Convolution (BiSR-Conv). BiSR-Conv can adaptively redistribute the HSI representations before binarizing activation and uses a scalable hyperbolic tangent function to closer approximate the Sign function in backpropagation. Based on our BiSR-Conv, we customize four binarized convolutional modules to address the dimension mismatch and propagate full-precision information throughout the whole network. Finally, our BiSRNet is derived by using the proposed techniques to binarize the base model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments manifest that our proposed BiSRNet outperforms state-of-the-art binarization algorithms. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/BiSCI
tl;dr: Options (i.e., closed-form policies) provably improves the sample complexity in offline RL by temporal abstraction and the reduction of the state space
The options framework yields empirical success in long-horizon planning problems of reinforcement learning (RL). Recent works show that options help improve the sample efficiency in online RL. However, these results are no longer applicable to scenarios where exploring the environment online is risky, e.g., automated driving and healthcare. In this paper, we provide the first analysis of the sample complexity for offline RL with options, where the agent learns from a dataset without further interaction with the environment. We derive a novel information-theoretic lower bound, which generalizes the one for offline learning with actions. We propose the PEssimistic Value Iteration for Learning with Options (PEVIO) algorithm and establish near-optimal suboptimality bounds for two popular data-collection procedures, where the first one collects state-option transitions and the second one collects state-action transitions. We show that compared to offline RL with actions, using options not only enjoys a faster finite-time convergence rate (to the optimal value) but also attains a better performance when either the options are carefully designed or the offline data is limited. Based on these results, we analyze the pros and cons of the data-collection procedures.
tl;dr: We study the solution of adversarial training in linear regression, presenting connections with Lasso, square-root Lasso, ridge regression, and minimum-norm interpolators.
State-of-the-art machine learning models can be vulnerable to very small input perturbations that are adversarially constructed. Adversarial training is an effective approach to defend against it. Formulated as a min-max problem, it searches for the best solution when the training data were corrupted by the worst-case attacks. Linear models are among the simple models where vulnerabilities can be observed and are the focus of our study. In this case, adversarial training leads to a convex optimization problem which can be formulated as the minimization of a finite sum. We provide a comparative analysis between the solution of adversarial training in linear regression and other regularization methods. Our main findings are that: (A) Adversarial training yields the minimum-norm interpolating solution in the overparameterized regime (more parameters than data), as long as the maximum disturbance radius is smaller than a threshold. And, conversely, the minimum-norm interpolator is the solution to adversarial training with a given radius. (B) Adversarial training can be equivalent to parameter shrinking methods (ridge regression and Lasso). This happens in the underparametrized region, for an appropriate choice of adversarial radius and zero-mean symmetrically distributed covariates. (C) For $\ell_\infty$-adversarial training---as in square-root Lasso---the choice of adversarial radius for optimal bounds does not depend on the additive noise variance. We confirm our theoretical findings with numerical examples.
We study the problem of locally private mean estimation of high-dimensional vectors in the Euclidean ball. Existing algorithms for this problem either incur sub-optimal error or have high communication and/or run-time complexity. We propose a new algorithmic framework, namely ProjUnit, for private mean estimation that yields algorithms that are computationally efficient, have low communication complexity, and incur optimal error up to a $1+o(1)$-factor. Our framework is deceptively simple: each randomizer projects its input to a random low-dimensional subspace and then runs an optimal algorithm such a PrivUnitG in the lower dimensional space. We analyze the error of the algorithm in terms of properties of the random projection ensemble, and study two instantiations. We conduct several experiments for private mean estimation and private federated learning which demonstrate that our algorithms obtain nearly the same utility as optimal algorithms while having significantly lower communication and computational cost.
tl;dr: We propose a new and more efficient diffusion model specifically tailored for antibody generation. Generated samples are confirmed to bind in-Vitro.
We introduce AbDiffuser, an equivariant and physics-informed diffusion model for the joint generation of antibody 3D structures and sequences. AbDiffuser is built on top of a new representation of protein structure, relies on a novel architecture for aligned proteins, and utilizes strong diffusion priors to improve the denoising process. Our approach improves protein diffusion by taking advantage of domain knowledge and physics-based constraints; handles sequence-length changes; and reduces memory complexity by an order of magnitude, enabling backbone and side chain generation. We validate AbDiffuser in silico and in vitro. Numerical experiments showcase the ability of AbDiffuser to generate antibodies that closely track the sequence and structural properties of a reference set. Laboratory experiments confirm that all 16 HER2 antibodies discovered were expressed at high levels and that 57.1% of the selected designs were tight binders.
tl;dr: We introduce a method to allow language take notes at any point while reading, leading to improved reasoning and memorization abilities.
Large language models have been shown to struggle with multi-step reasoning, and do not retain previous reasoning steps for future use. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent chain-of-thought or scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think and write down its thoughts. This allows the model to perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context and even integrate previous reasoning steps, thus enhancing its memory with useful information and enabling multi-step reasoning. Experiments across a wide variety of tasks demonstrate that our method can outperform chain-of-thought and scratchpad methods by taking Self-Notes that interleave the input text.
tl;dr: We train a neural network to estimate a cost function for Generalized Bayesian Inference, improving parameter fitting for (misspecified) scientific simulator models.
Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference for simulators with implicit likelihoods. But when we are primarily interested in the quality of predictive simulations, or when the model cannot exactly reproduce the observed data (i.e., is misspecified), targeting the Bayesian posterior may be overly restrictive. Generalized Bayesian Inference (GBI) aims to robustify inference for (misspecified) simulator models, replacing the likelihood-function with a cost function that evaluates the goodness of parameters relative to data. However, GBI methods generally require running multiple simulations to estimate the cost function at each parameter value during inference, making the approach computationally infeasible for even moderately complex simulators. Here, we propose amortized cost estimation (ACE) for GBI to address this challenge: We train a neural network to approximate the cost function, which we define as the expected distance between simulations produced by a parameter and observed data. The trained network can then be used with MCMC to infer GBI posteriors for any observation without running additional simulations. We show that, on several benchmark tasks, ACE accurately predicts cost and provides predictive simulations that are closer to synthetic observations than other SBI methods, especially for misspecified simulators. Finally, we apply ACE to infer parameters of the Hodgkin-Huxley model given real intracellular recordings from the Allen Cell Types Database. ACE identifies better data-matching parameters while being an order of magnitude more simulation-efficient than a standard SBI method. In summary, ACE combines the strengths of SBI methods and GBI to perform robust and simulation-amortized inference for scientific simulators.
We study the distributed tracking model, also known as distributed functional monitoring. This model involves $k$ sites each receiving a stream of items and communicating with the central server. The server's task is to track a function of all items received thus far continuously, with minimum communication cost. For count tracking, it is known that there is a $\sqrt{k}$ gap in communication between deterministic and randomized algorithms. However, existing randomized algorithms assume an "oblivious adversary" who constructs the entire input streams before the algorithm starts. Here we consider adaptive adversaries who can choose new items based on previous answers from the algorithm. Deterministic algorithms are trivially robust to adaptive adversaries, while randomized ones may not. Therefore, we investigate whether the $\sqrt{k}$ advantage of randomized algorithms is from randomness itself or the oblivious adversary assumption. We provide an affirmative answer to this question by giving a robust algorithm with optimal communication. Existing robustification techniques do not yield optimal bounds due to the inherent challenges of the distributed nature of the problem. To address this, we extend the differential privacy framework by introducing "partial differential privacy" and proving a new generalization theorem. This theorem may have broader applications beyond robust count tracking, making it of independent interest.
We study the problem of agnostic PAC reinforcement learning (RL): given a policy class $\Pi$, how many rounds of interaction with an unknown MDP (with a potentially large state and action space) are required to learn an $\epsilon$-suboptimal policy with respect to \(\Pi\)? Towards that end, we introduce a new complexity measure, called the \emph{spanning capacity}, that depends solely on the set \(\Pi\) and is independent of the MDP dynamics. With a generative model, we show that the spanning capacity characterizes PAC learnability for every policy class $\Pi$. However, for online RL, the situation is more subtle. We show there exists a policy class $\Pi$ with a bounded spanning capacity that requires a superpolynomial number of samples to learn. This reveals a surprising separation for agnostic learnability between generative access and online access models (as well as between deterministic/stochastic MDPs under online access). On the positive side, we identify an additional \emph{sunflower} structure which in conjunction with bounded spanning capacity enables statistically efficient online RL via a new algorithm called POPLER, which takes inspiration from classical importance sampling methods as well as recent developments for reachable-state identification and policy evaluation in reward-free exploration.
tl;dr: We propose SyMat, a novel deep generative model for periodic material generation.
We consider the problem of generating periodic materials with deep models. While symmetry-aware molecule generation has been studied extensively, periodic materials possess different symmetries, which have not been completely captured by existing methods.
In this work, we propose SyMat, a novel material generation approach that can capture physical symmetries of periodic material structures. SyMat generates atom types and lattices of materials through generating atom type sets, lattice lengths and lattice angles with a variational auto-encoder model. In addition, SyMat employs a score-based diffusion model to generate atom coordinates of materials, in which a novel symmetry-aware probabilistic model is used in the coordinate diffusion process. We show that SyMat is theoretically invariant to all symmetry transformations on materials and demonstrate that SyMat achieves promising performance on random generation and property optimization tasks. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS).
Large datasets are often affected by cell-wise outliers in the form of missing or erroneous data. However, discarding any samples containing outliers may result in a dataset that is too small to accurately estimate the covariance matrix. Moreover, the robust procedures designed to address this problem require the invertibility of the covariance operator and thus are not effective on high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose an unbiased estimator for the covariance in the presence of missing values that does not require any imputation step and still achieves near minimax statistical accuracy with the operator norm. We also advocate for its use in combination with cell-wise outlier detection methods to tackle cell-wise contamination in a high-dimensional and low-rank setting, where state-of-the-art methods may suffer from numerical instability and long computation times. To complement our theoretical findings, we conducted an experimental study which demonstrates the superiority of our approach over the state of the art both in low and high dimension settings.
The success of deep learning relies heavily on large and diverse datasets, but the storage, preprocessing, and training of such data present significant challenges. To address these challenges, dataset distillation techniques have been proposed to obtain smaller synthetic datasets that capture the essential information of the originals. In this paper, we introduce a Sparse Parameterization for Epitomic datasEt Distillation (SPEED) framework, which leverages the concept of dictionary learning and sparse coding to distill epitomes that represent pivotal information of the dataset. SPEED prioritizes proper parameterization of the synthetic dataset and introduces techniques to capture spatial redundancy within and between synthetic images. We propose Spatial-Agnostic Epitomic Tokens (SAETs) and Sparse Coding Matrices (SCMs) to efficiently represent and select significant features. Additionally, we build a Feature-Recurrent Network (FReeNet) to generate hierarchical features with high compression and storage efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of SPEED in handling high-resolution datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and downstream applications. Our framework is compatible with a variety of dataset matching approaches, generally enhancing their performance. This work highlights the importance of proper parameterization in epitomic dataset distillation and opens avenues for efficient representation learning. Source code is available at https://github.com/MIV-XJTU/SPEED.
tl;dr: We show that chain-of-thought explanations can systematically misrepresent the real reasons influencing for model predictions.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT explanations as the LLM's process for solving a task. This level of transparency into LLMs' predictions would yield significant safety benefits. However, we find that CoT explanations can systematically misrepresent the true reason for a model's prediction. We demonstrate that CoT explanations can be heavily influenced by adding biasing features to model inputs—e.g., by reordering the multiple-choice options in a few-shot prompt to make the answer always "(A)"—which models systematically fail to mention in their explanations. When we bias models toward incorrect answers, they frequently generate CoT explanations rationalizing those answers. This causes accuracy to drop by as much as 36% on a suite of 13 tasks from BIG-Bench Hard, when testing with GPT-3.5 from OpenAI and Claude 1.0 from Anthropic. On a social-bias task, model explanations justify giving answers in line with stereotypes without mentioning the influence of these social biases. Our findings indicate that CoT explanations can be plausible yet misleading, which risks increasing our trust in LLMs without guaranteeing their safety. Building more transparent and explainable systems will require either improving CoT faithfulness through targeted efforts or abandoning CoT in favor of alternative methods.
tl;dr: We propose a differentiable random partition model to be integrated into modern gradient-based optimization pipelines.
Partitioning a set of elements into an unknown number of mutually exclusive subsets is essential in many machine learning problems.
However, assigning elements, such as samples in a dataset or neurons in a network layer, to an unknown and discrete number of subsets is inherently non-differentiable, prohibiting end-to-end gradient-based optimization of parameters.
We overcome this limitation by proposing a novel two-step method for inferring partitions, which allows its usage in variational inference tasks.
This new approach enables reparameterized gradients with respect to the parameters of the new random partition model.
Our method works by inferring the number of elements per subset and, second, by filling these subsets in a learned order.
We highlight the versatility of our general-purpose approach on three different challenging experiments: variational clustering, inference of shared and independent generative factors under weak supervision, and multitask learning.
tl;dr: We show that the popular OMP algorithm can be derived from information-theoretic principles modulo a normalization factor. We then use this insight to design a computationally simple sparse-coding based explainable AI algorithm.
Information Pursuit (IP) is a classical active testing algorithm for predicting an output by sequentially and greedily querying the input in order of information gain. However, IP is computationally intensive since it involves estimating mutual information in high-dimensional spaces. This paper explores Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) as an alternative to IP for greedily selecting the queries. OMP is a classical signal processing algorithm for sequentially encoding a signal in terms of dictionary atoms chosen in order of correlation gain. In each iteration, OMP selects the atom that is most correlated with the signal residual (the signal minus its reconstruction thus far). Our first contribution is to establish a fundamental connection between IP and OMP, where we prove that IP with random projections of dictionary atoms as queries ``almost'' reduces to OMP, with the difference being that IP selects atoms in order of normalized correlation gain. We call this version IP-OMP and present simulations indicating that this difference does not have any appreciable effect on the sparse code recovery rate of IP-OMP compared to that of OMP for random Gaussian dictionaries. Inspired by this connection, our second contribution is to explore the utility of IP-OMP for generating explainable predictions, an area in which IP has recently gained traction. More specifically, we propose a simple explainable AI algorithm which encodes an image as a sparse combination of semantically meaningful dictionary atoms that are defined as text embeddings of interpretable concepts. The final prediction is made using the weights of this sparse combination, which serve as an explanation. Empirically, our proposed algorithm is not only competitive with existing explainability methods but also computationally less expensive.
The implicit bias towards solutions with favorable properties is believed to be a key reason why neural networks trained by gradient-based optimization can generalize well. While the implicit bias of gradient flow has been widely studied for homogeneous neural networks (including ReLU and leaky ReLU networks), the implicit bias of gradient descent is currently only understood for smooth neural networks. Therefore, implicit bias in non-smooth neural networks trained by gradient descent remains an open question. In this paper, we aim to answer this question by studying the implicit bias of gradient descent for training two-layer fully connected (leaky) ReLU neural networks. We showed that when the training data are nearly-orthogonal, for leaky ReLU activation function, gradient descent will find a network with a stable rank that converges to $1$, whereas for ReLU activation function, gradient descent will find a neural network with a stable rank that is upper bounded by a constant. Additionally, we show that gradient descent will find a neural network such that all the training data points have the same normalized margin asymptotically. Experiments on both synthetic and real data backup our theoretical findings.
Learning causal structures from interventional data is a fundamental problem with broad applications across various fields. While many previous works have focused on recovering the entire causal graph, in practice, there are scenarios where learning only part of the causal graph suffices. This is called \emph{targeted} causal discovery. In our work, we focus on two such well-motivated problems: subset search and causal matching. We aim to minimize the number of interventions in both cases.
Towards this, we introduce the \emph{Meek separator}, which is a subset of vertices that, when intervened, decomposes the remaining unoriented edges into smaller connected components. We then present an efficient algorithm to find Meek separators that are of small sizes. Such a procedure is helpful in designing various divide-and-conquer-based approaches. In particular, we propose two randomized algorithms that achieve logarithmic approximation for subset search and causal matching, respectively. Our results provide the first known average-case provable guarantees for both problems. We believe that this opens up possibilities to design near-optimal methods for many other targeted causal structure learning problems arising from various applications.
tl;dr: We propose a new method dubbed Chase, which can effectively transfer the promise of unstructured sparse training into the hardware-friendly channel sparsity with comparable or even better performance on common GPU device.
Sparse training has received an upsurging interest in machine learning due to its tantalizing saving potential for both the entire training process as well as the inference. Dynamic sparse training (DST) as a leading approach can train deep neural networks at high sparsity from scratch to match the performance of their dense counterparts. However, most if not all DST prior arts demonstrate their effectiveness on unstructured sparsity with highly irregular sparse patterns, which receives limited support in common hardware. This limitation hinders the usage of DST in practice. In this paper, we propose Channel-aware dynamic sparse (Chase), that for the first time seamlessly translates the promise of unstructured dynamic sparsity to GPU-friendly channel-level sparsity (not fine-grained N:M or group sparsity) during one end-to-end training process, without any ad-hoc operations. The resulting small sparse networks can be directly accelerated by commodity hardware, without using any particularly sparsity-aware hardware accelerators. This appealing outcome is partially motivated by a hidden phenomenon of dynamic sparsity: off-the-shelf unstructured DST implicitly involves biased parameter reallocation across channels, with a large fraction of channels (up to 60%) being sparser than others. By progressively identifying and removing these channels during training, our approach transfers unstructured sparsity to channel-wise sparsity. Our experimental results demonstrate that Chase achieves 1.7x inference throughput speedup on common GPU devices without compromising accuracy with ResNet-50 on ImageNet. We release our code in https://github.com/luuyin/chase.
tl;dr: We develop a new contrastive learning method for discovering hierarchical achievements that can be seamlessly integrated with model-free RL algorithms.
Discovering achievements with a hierarchical structure in procedurally generated environments presents a significant challenge.
This requires an agent to possess a broad range of abilities, including generalization and long-term reasoning. Many prior methods have been built upon model-based or hierarchical approaches, with the belief that an explicit module for long-term planning would be advantageous for learning hierarchical dependencies. However, these methods demand an excessive number of environment interactions or large model sizes, limiting their practicality. In this work, we demonstrate that proximal policy optimization (PPO), a simple yet versatile model-free algorithm, outperforms previous methods when optimized with recent implementation practices. Moreover, we find that the PPO agent can predict the next achievement to be unlocked to some extent, albeit with limited confidence. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel contrastive learning method, called achievement distillation, which strengthens the agent's ability to predict the next achievement. Our method exhibits a strong capacity for discovering hierarchical achievements and shows state-of-the-art performance on the challenging Crafter environment in a sample-efficient manner while utilizing fewer model parameters.
Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance is a powerful tool for comparing and aligning probability distributions supported on different metric spaces. Recently, GW has become the main modeling technique for aligning heterogeneous data for a wide range of graph learning tasks. However, the GW distance is known to be highly sensitive to outliers, which can result in large inaccuracies if the outliers are given the same weight as other samples in the objective function. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a new and robust version of the GW distance called RGW. RGW features optimistically perturbed marginal constraints within a Kullback-Leibler divergence-based ambiguity set. To make the benefits of RGW more accessible in practice, we develop a computationally efficient and theoretically provable procedure using Bregman proximal alternating linearized minimization algorithm. Through extensive experimentation, we validate our theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of RGW on real-world graph learning tasks, such as subgraph matching and partial shape correspondence.
tl;dr: We improve the regret bound for oracle-efficient adversarial contextual bandits.
We present an oracle-efficient relaxation
for the adversarial contextual bandits problem,
where the contexts are sequentially drawn i.i.d from a known distribution and the cost sequence is chosen by an online adversary.
Our algorithm has a regret bound of $O(T^{\frac{2}{3}}(K\log(|\Pi|))^{\frac{1}{3}})$ and makes at most $O(K)$ calls per round to an offline optimization oracle,
where $K$ denotes the number of actions, $T$ denotes the number of rounds and $\Pi$ denotes
the set of policies.
This is the first result to improve the prior best bound of $O((TK)^{\frac{2}{3}}(\log(|\Pi|))^{\frac{1}{3}})$ as obtained by
Syrgkanis et al.
at NeurIPS 2016, and the first to match the original bound of
Langford and Zhang at NeurIPS 2007
which was obtained for the stochastic case.
tl;dr: We show that machine learning methods can solve a highly challenging problem in mathematics for which there is no theoretical understanding, and use this to give the first sketch of the classification of an important class of 8-dimensional shapes.
Algebraic varieties are the geometric shapes defined by systems of polynomial equations; they are ubiquitous across mathematics and science. Amongst these algebraic varieties are Q-Fano varieties: positively curved shapes which have Q-factorial terminal singularities. Q-Fano varieties are of fundamental importance in geometry as they are `atomic pieces’ of more complex shapes – the process of breaking a shape into simpler pieces in this sense is called the Minimal Model Programme.
Despite their importance, the classification of Q-Fano varieties remains unknown. In this paper we demonstrate that machine learning can be used to understand this classification. We focus on eight-dimensional positively-curved algebraic varieties that have toric symmetry and Picard rank two, and develop a neural network classifier that predicts with 95% accuracy whether or not such an algebraic variety is Q-Fano. We use this to give a first sketch of the landscape of Q-Fano varieties in dimension eight.
How the neural network is able to detect Q-Fano varieties with such accuracy remains mysterious, and hints at some deep mathematical theory waiting to be uncovered. Furthermore, when visualised using the quantum period, an invariant that has played an important role in recent theoretical developments, we observe that the classification as revealed by ML appears to fall within a bounded region, and is stratified by the Fano index. This suggests that it may be possible to state and prove conjectures on completeness in the future.
Inspired by the ML analysis, we formulate and prove a new global combinatorial criterion for a positively curved toric variety of Picard rank two to have terminal singularities. Together with the first sketch of the landscape of Q-Fano varieties in higher dimensions, this gives strong new evidence that machine learning can be an essential tool in developing mathematical conjectures and accelerating theoretical discovery.
The matrix completion problem involves reconstructing a low-rank matrix by using a given set of revealed (and potentially noisy) entries. Although existing methods address the completion of the entire matrix, the accuracy of the completed entries can vary significantly across the matrix, due to differences in the sampling distribution. For instance, users may rate movies primarily from their country or favorite genres, leading to inaccurate predictions for the majority of completed entries.
We propose a novel formulation of the problem as Partial Matrix Completion, where the objective is to complete a substantial subset of the entries with high confidence. Our algorithm efficiently handles the unknown and arbitrarily complex nature of the sampling distribution, ensuring high accuracy for all completed entries and sufficient coverage across the matrix. Additionally, we introduce an online version of the problem and present a low-regret efficient algorithm based on iterative gradient updates. Finally, we conduct a preliminary empirical evaluation of our methods.
We study a two-stage scenario for learning to defer with multiple experts, which is crucial in practice for many applications. In this scenario, a predictor is derived in a first stage by training with a common loss function such as cross-entropy. In the second stage, a deferral function is learned to assign the most suitable expert to each input. We design a new family of surrogate loss functions for this scenario both in the score-based and the predictor-rejector settings and prove that they are supported by $H$-consistency bounds, which implies their Bayes-consistency. Moreover, we show that, for a constant cost function, our two-stage surrogate losses are realizable $H$-consistent. While the main focus of this work is a theoretical analysis, we also report the results of several experiments on CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets.
The theory of Koopman operators allows to deploy non-parametric machine learning algorithms to predict and analyze complex dynamical systems.
Estimators such as principal component regression (PCR) or reduced rank regression (RRR) in kernel spaces can be shown to provably learn Koopman operators from finite empirical observations of the system's time evolution.
Scaling these approaches to very long trajectories is a challenge and requires introducing suitable approximations to make computations feasible.
In this paper, we boost the efficiency of
different kernel-based Koopman operator estimators using random projections (sketching).
We derive, implement and test the new ``sketched'' estimators with extensive experiments on synthetic and large-scale molecular dynamics datasets.
Further, we establish non asymptotic error bounds giving a sharp characterization of the trade-offs between statistical learning rates and computational efficiency.
Our empirical and theoretical analysis shows that the proposed estimators provide a sound and efficient way to learn large scale dynamical systems.
In particular our experiments indicate that the proposed estimators retain the same accuracy of PCR or RRR, while being much faster.
tl;dr: Improving the practical performance of convergent stochastic Polyak step sizes and line searches, and extend them to bi-level optimization
The popularity of bi-level optimization (BO) in deep learning has spurred a growing interest in studying gradient-based BO algorithms.
However, existing algorithms involve two coupled learning rates that can be affected by approximation errors when computing hypergradients, making careful fine-tuning necessary to ensure fast convergence. To alleviate this issue, we investigate the use of recently proposed adaptive step-size methods, namely stochastic line search (SLS) and stochastic Polyak step size (SPS), for computing both the upper and lower-level learning rates. First, we revisit the use of SLS and SPS in single-level optimization without the additional interpolation condition that is typically assumed in prior works. For such settings, we investigate new variants of SLS and SPS that improve upon existing suggestions in the literature and are simpler to implement. Importantly, these two variants can be seen as special instances of general family of methods with an envelope-type step-size. This unified envelope strategy allows for the extension of the algorithms and their convergence guarantees to BO settings. Finally, our extensive experiments demonstrate that the new algorithms, which are available in both SGD and Adam versions, can find large learning rates with minimal tuning and converge faster than corresponding vanilla SGD or Adam BO algorithms that require fine-tuning.
tl;dr: A novel and efficient Single-Cell RNA-Seq pre-training model.
Advances in high-throughput sequencing technology have led to significant progress in measuring gene expressions at the single-cell level. The amount of publicly available single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data is already surpassing 50M records for humans with each record measuring 20,000 genes. This highlights the need for unsupervised representation learning to fully ingest these data, yet classical transformer architectures are prohibitive to train on such data in terms of both computation and memory. To address this challenge, we propose a novel asymmetric encoder-decoder transformer for scRNA-seq data, called xTrimoGene$^\alpha$ (or xTrimoGene for short), which leverages the sparse characteristic of the data to scale up the pre-training. This scalable design of xTrimoGene reduces FLOPs by one to two orders of magnitude compared to classical transformers while maintaining high accuracy, enabling us to train the largest transformer models over the largest scRNA-seq dataset today. Our experiments also show that the performance of xTrimoGene improves as we scale up the model sizes, and it also leads to SOTA performance over various downstream tasks, such as cell type annotation, perturb-seq effect prediction, and drug combination prediction.
xTrimoGene model is now available for use as a service via the following link: https://api.biomap.com/xTrimoGene/apply.
tl;dr: We propose the novel Geometric Harmonization for self-supervised long-tailed learning, which overcomes the intrinsic limitation of the contrastive learning, i.e., sample-level uniformity, and progressively approaches the category-level uniformity.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) as an effective paradigm of representation learning has achieved tremendous success on various curated datasets in diverse scenarios. Nevertheless, when facing the long-tailed distribution in real-world applications, it is still hard for existing methods to capture transferable and robust representation. The attribution is that the vanilla SSL methods that pursue the sample-level uniformity easily leads to representation learning disparity, where head classes with the huge sample number dominate the feature regime but tail classes with the small sample number passively collapse. To address this problem, we propose a novel Geometric Harmonization (GH) method to encourage the category-level uniformity in representation learning, which is more benign to the minority and almost does not hurt the majority under long-tailed distribution. Specially, GH measures the population statistics of the embedding space on top of self-supervised learning, and then infer an fine-grained instance-wise calibration to constrain the space expansion of head classes and avoid the passive collapse of tail classes. Our proposal does not alter the setting of SSL and can be easily integrated into existing methods in a low-cost manner. Extensive results on a range of benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of \methodspace with high tolerance to the distribution skewness.
tl;dr: Propose a principled framework for learing world models at multiple time scales/temporal abstractions.
Intelligent agents use internal world models to reason and make predictions about different courses of their actions at many scales. Devising learning paradigms and architectures that allow machines to learn world models that operate at multiple levels of temporal abstractions while dealing with complex uncertainty predictions is a major technical hurdle. In this work, we propose a probabilistic formalism to learn multi-time scale world models which we call the Multi Time Scale State Space (MTS3) model. Our model uses a computationally efficient inference scheme on multiple time scales for highly accurate long-horizon predictions and uncertainty estimates over several seconds into the future. Our experiments, which focus on action conditional long horizon future predictions, show that MTS3 outperforms recent methods on several system identification benchmarks including complex simulated and real-world dynamical systems.
The field of text-conditioned image generation has made unparalleled progress with the recent advent of latent diffusion models. While revolutionary, as the complexity of given text input increases, the current state of art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that accurately convey the semantics of the given prompt. Furthermore, such misalignments are often left undetected by pretrained multi-modal models such as CLIP. To address these problems, in this paper, we explore a simple yet effective decompositional approach towards both evaluation and improvement of text-to-image alignment. In particular, we first introduce a Decompositional-Alignment-Score which given a complex caption decomposes it into a set of disjoint assertions. The alignment of each assertion with generated images is then measured using a VQA model. Finally, alignment scores for different assertions are combined aposteriori to give the final text-to-image alignment score. Experimental analysis reveals that the proposed alignment metric shows a significantly higher correlation with human ratings as opposed to traditional CLIP, BLIP scores. Furthermore, we also find that the assertion level alignment scores also provide useful feedback which can then be used in a simple iterative procedure to gradually increase the expressivity of different assertions in the final image outputs. Human user studies indicate that the proposed approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art by 8.7% in overall text-to-image alignment accuracy.
tl;dr: Large language models can impersonate different personas and it affects their performance in bandit, reasoning and vision and language tasks.
In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to assume different personas before solving vision and language tasks. We do this by prefixing the prompt with a persona that is associated either with a social identity or domain expertise. In a multi-armed bandit task, we find that LLMs pretending to be children of different ages recover human-like developmental stages of exploration. In a language-based reasoning task, we find that LLMs impersonating domain experts perform better than LLMs impersonating non-domain experts. Finally, we test whether LLMs' impersonations are complementary to visual information when describing different categories. We find that impersonation can improve performance: an LLM prompted to be a bird expert describes birds better than one prompted to be a car expert. However, impersonation can also uncover LLMs' biases: an LLM prompted to be a man describes cars better than one prompted to be a woman. These findings demonstrate that LLMs are capable of taking on diverse roles and that this in-context impersonation can be used to uncover their strengths and hidden biases. Our code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/in-context-impersonation.
tl;dr: Novel, computationally efficient variants of SVGD that exhibit provably fast convergence in the finite-particle regime..
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based variational inference algorithm with impressive empirical performance across various domains. Although the population (i.e, infinite-particle) limit dynamics of SVGD is well characterized, its behavior in the finite-particle regime is far less understood. To this end, our work introduces the notion of *virtual particles* to develop novel stochastic approximations of population-limit SVGD dynamics in the space of probability measures, that are exactly realizable using finite particles. As a result, we design two computationally efficient variants of SVGD, namely VP-SVGD and GB-SVGD, with provably fast finite-particle convergence rates. Our algorithms can be viewed as specific random-batch approximations of SVGD, which are computationally more efficient than ordinary SVGD. We show that the $n$ particles output by VP-SVGD and GB-SVGD, run for $T$ steps with batch-size $K$, are at-least as good as i.i.d samples from a distribution whose Kernel Stein Discrepancy to the target is at most $O(\tfrac{d^{1/3}}{(KT)^{1/6}})$ under standard assumptions. Our results also hold under a mild growth condition on the potential function, which is much weaker than the isoperimetric (e.g. Poincare Inequality) or information-transport conditions (e.g. Talagrand's Inequality $\mathsf{T}_1$) generally considered in prior works. As a corollary, we analyze the convergence of the empirical measure (of the particles output by VP-SVGD and GB-SVGD) to the target distribution and demonstrate a **double exponential improvement** over the best known finite-particle analysis of SVGD. Beyond this, our results present the **first known oracle complexities for this setting with polynomial dimension dependence**, thereby completely eliminating the curse of dimensionality exhibited by previously known finite-particle rates.
699. Visual Explanations of Image-Text Representations via Multi-Modal Information Bottleneck Attribution
tl;dr: This paper presents an attribution method for identifying critical features of image-text representations in vision-language pretrained models using the information bottleneck principle.
Vision-language pretrained models have seen remarkable success, but their application to safety-critical settings is limited by their lack of interpretability. To improve the interpretability of vision-language models such as CLIP, we propose a multi-modal information bottleneck (M2IB) approach that learns latent representations that compress irrelevant information while preserving relevant visual and textual features. We demonstrate how M2IB can be applied to attribution analysis of vision-language pretrained models, increasing attribution accuracy and improving the interpretability of such models when applied to safety-critical domains such as healthcare. Crucially, unlike commonly used unimodal attribution methods, M2IB does not require ground truth labels, making it possible to audit representations of vision-language pretrained models when multiple modalities but no ground-truth data is available. Using CLIP as an example, we demonstrate the effectiveness of M2IB attribution and show that it outperforms gradient-based, perturbation-based, and attention-based attribution methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
This study considers a novel problem setting, referred to as \textit{bandit task assignment}, that incorporates the processing time of each task in the bandit setting. In this problem setting, a player sequentially chooses a set of tasks to start so that the set of processing tasks satisfies a given combinatorial constraint. The reward and processing time for each task follow unknown distributions, values of which are revealed only after the task has been completed. The problem generalizes the stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit problem and the budget-constrained bandit problem. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm based on upper confidence bounds~(UCB) combined with a phased-update approach. The proposed algorithm admits a gap-dependent regret upper bound of $O(MN(1/\Delta){\log T})$ and a gap-free regret upper bound of $\tilde{O}( \sqrt{MNT} )$, where $N$ is the number of the tasks, $M$ is the maximum number of tasks run at the same time, $T$ is the time horizon, and $\Delta$ is the gap between expected per-round rewards of the optimal and best suboptimal sets of tasks. These regret bounds nearly match lower bounds.
tl;dr: We incorporate diffusion models to the Slot Attention framework and achieve better segmentation and generation results
Object-centric learning aims to represent visual data with a set of object entities (a.k.a. slots), providing structured representations that enable systematic generalization.
Leveraging advanced architectures like Transformers, recent approaches have made significant progress in unsupervised object discovery.
In addition, slot-based representations hold great potential for generative modeling, such as controllable image generation and object manipulation in image editing.
However, current slot-based methods often produce blurry images and distorted objects, exhibiting poor generative modeling capabilities.
In this paper, we focus on improving slot-to-image decoding, a crucial aspect for high-quality visual generation.
We introduce SlotDiffusion -- an object-centric Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) designed for both image and video data.
Thanks to the powerful modeling capacity of LDMs, SlotDiffusion surpasses previous slot models in unsupervised object segmentation and visual generation across six datasets.
Furthermore, our learned object features can be utilized by existing object-centric dynamics models, improving video prediction quality and downstream temporal reasoning tasks.
Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of SlotDiffusion to unconstrained real-world datasets such as PASCAL VOC and COCO, when integrated with self-supervised pre-trained image encoders.
tl;dr: We prove results that tease out conditions under which the model symmetry is optimal for a given data symmetry in (approximate) group equivariant machine learning methods..
The explicit incorporation of task-specific inductive biases through symmetry has emerged as a general design precept in the development of high-performance machine learning models. For example, group equivariant neural networks have demonstrated impressive performance across various domains and applications such as protein and drug design. A prevalent intuition about such models is that the integration of relevant symmetry results in enhanced generalization. Moreover, it is posited that when the data and/or the model exhibits only approximate or partial symmetry, the optimal or best-performing model is one where the model symmetry aligns with the data symmetry. In this paper, we conduct a formal unified investigation of these intuitions. To begin, we present quantitative bounds that demonstrate how models capturing task-specific symmetries lead to improved generalization. Utilizing this quantification, we examine the more general question of dealing with approximate/partial symmetries. We establish, for a given symmetry group, a quantitative comparison between the approximate equivariance of the model and that of the data distribution, precisely connecting model equivariance error and data equivariance error. Our result delineates the conditions under which the model equivariance error is optimal, thereby yielding the best-performing model for the given task and data.
tl;dr: R-divergence is proposed to estimate the discrepancy between two probability distributions for specific supervised or unsupervised machine learning models.
Real-life data are often non-IID due to complex distributions and interactions, and the sensitivity to the distribution of samples can differ among learning models. Accordingly, a key question for any supervised or unsupervised model is whether the probability distributions of two given datasets can be considered identical. To address this question, we introduce R-divergence, designed to assess model-oriented distribution discrepancies. The core insight is that two distributions are likely identical if their optimal hypothesis yields the same expected risk for each distribution. To estimate the distribution discrepancy between two datasets, R-divergence learns a minimum hypothesis on the mixed data and then gauges the empirical risk difference between them. We evaluate the test power across various unsupervised and supervised tasks and find that R-divergence achieves state-of-the-art performance. To demonstrate the practicality of R-divergence, we employ R-divergence to train robust neural networks on samples with noisy labels.
tl;dr: We propose a foundation model for modeling intracranial recordings, providing a large-scale, off-the-shelf model for medicine.
We propose a foundation model named Brant for modeling intracranial recordings, which learns powerful representations of intracranial neural signals by pre-training, providing a large-scale, off-the-shelf model for medicine. Brant is the largest model in the field of brain signals and is pre-trained on a large corpus of intracranial data collected by us. The design of Brant is to capture long-term temporal dependency and spatial correlation from neural signals, combining the information in both time and frequency domains. As a foundation model, Brant achieves SOTA performance on various downstream tasks (i.e. neural signal forecasting, frequency-phase forecasting, imputation and seizure detection), showing the generalization ability to a broad range of tasks. The low-resource label analysis and representation visualization further illustrate the effectiveness of our pre-training strategy. In addition, we explore the effect of model size to show that a larger model with a higher capacity can lead to performance improvements on our dataset. The source code and pre-trained weights are available at: https://zju-brainnet.github.io/Brant.github.io/.
tl;dr: A new take on OT technology in the context of causal inference, alleviating two issues that impede the effectiveness of backdoor adjustment approaches.
Estimating individual treatment effects from observational data is challenging due to treatment selection bias. Prevalent methods mainly mitigate this issue by aligning different treatment groups in the latent space, the core of which is the calculation of distribution discrepancy. However, two issues that are often overlooked can render these methods invalid:
(1) mini-batch sampling effects (MSE), where the calculated discrepancy is erroneous in non-ideal mini-batches with outcome imbalance and outliers;
(2) unobserved confounder effects (UCE), where the unobserved confounders are not considered in the discrepancy calculation.
Both of these issues invalidate the calculated discrepancy, mislead the training of estimators, and thus impede the handling of treatment selection bias.
To tackle these issues, we propose Entire Space CounterFactual Regression (ESCFR), which is a new take on optimal transport technology in the context of causality.
Specifically, based on the canonical optimal transport framework, we propose a relaxed mass-preserving regularizer to address the MSE issue and design a proximal factual outcome regularizer to handle the UCE issue.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that ESCFR estimates distribution discrepancy accurately, handles the treatment selection bias effectively, and outperforms prevalent competitors significantly.
706. Spuriosity Didn’t Kill the Classifier: Using Invariant Predictions to Harness Spurious Features
tl;dr: We show that spurious features can be *safely* harnessed in the test domain *without labels*, using only invariant-feature pseudo-labels, and propose an algorithm for doing so.
To avoid failures on out-of-distribution data, recent works have sought to extract features that have an invariant or stable relationship with the label across domains, discarding "spurious" or unstable features whose relationship with the label changes across domains. However, unstable features often carry complementary information that could boost performance if used correctly in the test domain. In this work, we show how this can be done without test-domain labels. In particular, we prove that pseudo-labels based on stable features provide sufficient guidance for doing so, provided that stable and unstable features are conditionally independent given the label. Based on this theoretical insight, we propose Stable Feature Boosting (SFB), an algorithm for: (i) learning a predictor that separates stable and conditionally-independent unstable features; and (ii) using the stable-feature predictions to adapt the unstable-feature predictions in the test domain. Theoretically, we prove that SFB can learn an asymptotically-optimal predictor without test-domain labels. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SFB on real and synthetic data.
tl;dr: Reducing peak variance by up to 4x while retaining the space and time efficiency of the binary mechanism.
In privacy under continual observation we study how to release differentially private estimates based on a dataset that evolves over time. The problem of releasing private prefix sums of $x_1, x_2, x_3,\dots\in${$0,1$} (where the value of each $x_i$ is to be private) is particularly well-studied, and a generalized form is used in state-of-the-art methods for private stochastic gradient descent (SGD).
The seminal binary mechanism privately releases the first $t$ prefix sums with noise of variance polylogarithmic in $t$. Recently, Henzinger et al. and Denisov et al. showed that it is possible to improve on the binary mechanism in two ways: The variance of the noise can be reduced by a (large) constant factor, and also made more even across time steps. However, their algorithms for generating the noise distribution are not as efficient as one would like in terms of computation time and (in particular) space.
We address the efficiency problem by presenting a simple alternative to the binary mechanism in which 1) generating the noise takes constant average time per value, 2) the variance is reduced by a factor about 4 compared to the binary mechanism, and 3) the noise distribution at each step is identical. Empirically, a simple Python implementation of our approach outperforms the running time of the approach of Henzinger et al., as well as an attempt to improve their algorithm using high-performance algorithms for multiplication with Toeplitz matrices.
tl;dr: We introduce a flexible approach for principled exploration of complex plasticity rules in large recurrent spiking networks, enabling more robust predictions and thus deeper insights into the plasticity mechanisms underlying brain function.
There is substantial experimental evidence that learning and memory-related behaviours rely on local synaptic changes, but the search for distinct plasticity rules has been driven by human intuition, with limited success for multiple, co-active plasticity rules in biological networks. More recently, automated meta-learning approaches have been used in simplified settings, such as rate networks and small feed-forward spiking networks. Here, we develop a simulation-based inference (SBI) method for sequentially filtering plasticity rules through an increasingly fine mesh of constraints that can be modified on-the-fly. This method, _filter SBI_, allows us to infer entire families of complex and co-active plasticity rules in spiking networks. We first consider flexibly parameterized doublet (Hebbian) rules, and find that the set of inferred rules contains solutions that extend and refine -and also reject- predictions from mean-field theory. Next, we expand the search space of plasticity rules by modelling them as multi-layer perceptrons that combine several plasticity-relevant factors, such as weight, voltage, triplets and co-dependency. Out of the millions of possible rules, we identify thousands of unique rule combinations that satisfy biological constraints like plausible activity and weight dynamics. The resulting rules can be used as a starting point for further investigations into specific network computations, and already suggest refinements and predictions for classical experimental approaches on plasticity. This flexible approach for principled exploration of complex plasticity rules in large recurrent spiking networks presents the most advanced search tool to date for enabling robust predictions and deep insights into the plasticity mechanisms underlying brain function.
tl;dr: We introduce new scaling laws for deriving compute-optimal model shapes and implement this in ViT. We demonstrate that scaled-down architectures trained at their optimal shapes for the right amount of compute, are comparable to fully-scaled models.
Scaling laws have been recently employed to derive compute-optimal model size (number of parameters) for a given compute duration. We advance and refine such methods to infer compute-optimal model shapes, such as width and depth, and successfully implement this in vision transformers. Our shape-optimized vision transformer, SoViT, achieves results competitive with models that exceed twice its size, despite being pre-trained with an equivalent amount of compute. For example, SoViT-400m/14 achieves 90.3% fine-tuning accuracy on ILSRCV2012, surpassing the much larger ViT-g/14 and approaching ViT-G/14 under identical settings, with also less than half the inference cost. We conduct a thorough evaluation across multiple tasks, such as image classification, captioning, VQA and zero-shot transfer, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model across a broad range of domains and identifying limitations. Overall, our findings challenge the prevailing approach of blindly scaling up vision models and pave a path for a more informed scaling.
tl;dr: We propose Markovian sliced Wasserstein, a family metrics on the space of probability measures that impose the first-order Markov structure on projecting directions.
Sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance suffers from redundant projections due to independent uniform random projecting directions. To partially overcome the issue, max K sliced Wasserstein (Max-K-SW) distance ($K\geq 1$), seeks the best discriminative orthogonal projecting directions. Despite being able to reduce the number of projections, the metricity of the Max-K-SW cannot be guaranteed in practice due to the non-optimality of the optimization. Moreover, the orthogonality constraint is also computationally expensive and might not be effective. To address the problem, we introduce a new family of SW distances, named Markovian sliced Wasserstein (MSW) distance, which imposes a first-order Markov structure on projecting directions. We discuss various members of the MSW by specifying the Markov structure including the prior distribution, the transition distribution, and the burning and thinning technique. Moreover, we investigate the theoretical properties of MSW including topological properties (metricity, weak convergence, and connection to other distances), statistical properties (sample complexity, and Monte Carlo estimation error), and computational properties (computational complexity and memory complexity). Finally, we compare MSW distances with previous SW variants in various applications such as gradient flows, color transfer, and deep generative modeling to demonstrate the favorable performance of the MSW.
This paper focuses on the data-insufficiency problem in multi-task learning within an episodic training setup. Specifically, we explore the potential of heterogeneous information across tasks and meta-knowledge among episodes to effectively tackle each task with limited data. Existing meta-learning methods often fail to take advantage of crucial heterogeneous information in a single episode, while multi-task learning models neglect reusing experience from earlier episodes. To address the problem of insufficient data, we develop Heterogeneous Neural Processes (HNPs) for the episodic multi-task setup. Within the framework of hierarchical Bayes, HNPs effectively capitalize on prior experiences as meta-knowledge and capture task-relatedness among heterogeneous tasks, mitigating data-insufficiency. Meanwhile, transformer-structured inference modules are designed to enable efficient inferences toward meta-knowledge and task-relatedness. In this way, HNPs can learn more powerful functional priors for adapting to novel heterogeneous tasks in each meta-test episode. Experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed HNPs over typical baselines, and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of the designed inference modules.
Reasoning system dynamics is one of the most important analytical approaches for many scientific studies. With the initial state of a system as input, the recent graph neural networks (GNNs)-based methods are capable of predicting the future state distant in time with high accuracy. Although these methods have diverse designs in modeling the coordinates and interacting forces of the system, we show that they actually share a common paradigm that learns the integration of the velocity over the interval between the initial and terminal coordinates. However, their integrand is constant w.r.t. time. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach to predict the integration based on several velocity estimations with Newton–Cotes formulas and prove its effectiveness theoretically. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks empirically demonstrate consistent and significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: We highlight and overcome fundamental limitations and pitfalls in adversarial training against graph structure perturbations and propose a new global attack aware of node-level perturbations constraints.
Despite its success in the image domain, adversarial training did not (yet) stand out as an effective defense for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) against graph structure perturbations. In the pursuit of fixing adversarial training (1) we show and overcome fundamental theoretical as well as practical limitations of the adopted graph learning setting in prior work; (2) we reveal that flexible GNNs based on learnable graph diffusion are able to adjust to adversarial perturbations, while the learned message passing scheme is naturally interpretable; (3) we introduce the first attack for structure perturbations that, while targeting multiple nodes at once, is capable of handling global (graph-level) as well as local (node-level) constraints. Including these contributions, we demonstrate that adversarial training is a state-of-the-art defense against adversarial structure perturbations.
714. Partial Counterfactual Identification of Continuous Outcomes with a Curvature Sensitivity Model
Counterfactual inference aims to answer retrospective "what if" questions and thus belongs to the most fine-grained type of inference in Pearl's causality ladder. Existing methods for counterfactual inference with continuous outcomes aim at point identification and thus make strong and unnatural assumptions about the underlying structural causal model. In this paper, we relax these assumptions and aim at partial counterfactual identification of continuous outcomes, i.e., when the counterfactual query resides in an ignorance interval with informative bounds. We prove that, in general, the ignorance interval of the counterfactual queries has non-informative bounds, already when functions of structural causal models are continuously differentiable. As a remedy, we propose a novel sensitivity model called Curvature Sensitivity Model. This allows us to obtain informative bounds by bounding the curvature of level sets of the functions. We further show that existing point counterfactual identification methods are special cases of our Curvature Sensitivity Model when the bound of the curvature is set to zero. We then propose an implementation of our Curvature Sensitivity Model in the form of a novel deep generative model, which we call Augmented Pseudo-Invertible Decoder. Our implementation employs (i) residual normalizing flows with (ii) variational augmentations. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our Augmented Pseudo-Invertible Decoder. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first partial identification model for Markovian structural causal models with continuous outcomes.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel metric to compare the computations of two RNNs (or more generally, two systems that evolve over time) at the level of their dynamics.
How can we tell whether two neural networks utilize the same internal processes for a particular computation? This question is pertinent for multiple subfields of neuroscience and machine learning, including neuroAI, mechanistic interpretability, and brain-machine interfaces. Standard approaches for comparing neural networks focus on the spatial geometry of latent states. Yet in recurrent networks, computations are implemented at the level of dynamics, and two networks performing the same computation with equivalent dynamics need not exhibit the same geometry. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel similarity metric that compares two systems at the level of their dynamics, called Dynamical Similarity Analysis (DSA). Our method incorporates two components: Using recent advances in data-driven dynamical systems theory, we learn a high-dimensional linear system that accurately captures core features of the original nonlinear dynamics. Next, we compare different systems passed through this embedding using a novel extension of Procrustes Analysis that accounts for how vector fields change under orthogonal transformation. In four case studies, we demonstrate that our method disentangles conjugate and non-conjugate recurrent neural networks (RNNs), while geometric methods fall short. We additionally show that our method can distinguish learning rules in an unsupervised manner. Our method opens the door to comparative analyses of the essential temporal structure of computation in neural circuits.
Tensor rematerialization allows the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) under limited memory budgets by checkpointing the models and recomputing the evicted tensors as needed. However, the existing tensor rematerialization techniques overlook the memory system in deep learning frameworks and implicitly assume that free memory blocks at different addresses are identical. Under this flawed assumption, discontiguous tensors are evicted, among which some are not used to allocate the new tensor. This leads to severe memory fragmentation and increases the cost of potential rematerializations.
To address this issue, we propose to evict tensors within a sliding window to ensure all evictions are contiguous and are immediately used. Furthermore, we proposed cheap tensor partitioning and recomputable in-place to further reduce the rematerialization cost by optimizing the tensor allocation.
We named our method \name/ as it is a co-optimization of tensor allocation and tensor rematerialization. We evaluated \name/ on eight representative DNNs. The experimental results demonstrate that \name/ achieves up to $2\times$ memory saving and hugely reduces compute overhead, search latency, and memory fragmentation compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
tl;dr: A task-aware framework for world model learning in model-based reinforcement learning.
Aligning the world model with the environment for the agent’s specific task is crucial in model-based reinforcement learning. While value-equivalent models may achieve better task awareness than maximum-likelihood models, they sacrifice a large amount of semantic information and face implementation issues. To combine the benefits of both types of models, we propose Task-aware Environment Modeling Pipeline with bi-level Optimization (TEMPO), a bi-level model learning framework that introduces an additional level of optimization on top of a maximum-likelihood model by incorporating a meta weighter network that weights each training sample. The meta weighter in the upper level learns to generate novel sample weights by minimizing a proposed task-aware model loss. The model in the lower level focuses on important samples while maintaining rich semantic information in state representations. We evaluate TEMPO on a variety of continuous and discrete control tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite and Atari video games. Our results demonstrate that TEMPO achieves state-of-the-art performance regarding asymptotic performance, training stability, and convergence speed.
tl;dr: We provide generalization bounds for a class of neural ODEs and of deep residual networks.
Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) are a popular family of continuous-depth deep learning models. In this work, we consider a large family of parameterized ODEs with continuous-in-time parameters, which include time-dependent neural ODEs. We derive a generalization bound for this class by a Lipschitz-based argument. By leveraging the analogy between neural ODEs and deep residual networks, our approach yields in particular a generalization bound for a class of deep residual networks. The bound involves the magnitude of the difference between successive weight matrices. We illustrate numerically how this quantity affects the generalization capability of neural networks.
Dealing with distribution shifts is one of the central challenges for modern machine learning. One fundamental situation is the covariate shift, where the input distributions of data change from the training to testing stages while the input-conditional output distribution remains unchanged. In this paper, we initiate the study of a more challenging scenario --- continuous covariate shift --- in which the test data appear sequentially, and their distributions can shift continuously. Our goal is to adaptively train the predictor such that its prediction risk accumulated over time can be minimized. Starting with the importance-weighted learning, we theoretically show the method works effectively if the time-varying density ratios of test and train inputs can be accurately estimated. However, existing density ratio estimation methods would fail due to data scarcity at each time step. To this end, we propose an online density ratio estimation method that can appropriately reuse historical information. Our method is proven to perform well by enjoying a dynamic regret bound, which finally leads to an excess risk guarantee for the predictor. Empirical results also validate the effectiveness.
720. Towards Data-Algorithm Dependent Generalization: a Case Study on Overparameterized Linear Regression
tl;dr: We present a novel generalization analysis on overparameterized linear regression, which takes both data-factor and algorithm-factor into consideration.
One of the major open problems in machine learning is to characterize generalization in the overparameterized regime, where most traditional generalization bounds become inconsistent even for overparameterized linear regression. In many scenarios, this failure can be attributed to obscuring the crucial interplay between the training algorithm and the underlying data distribution. This paper demonstrate that the generalization behavior of overparameterized model should be analyzed in a both data-relevant and algorithm-relevant manner. To make a formal characterization, We introduce a notion called data-algorithm compatibility, which considers the generalization behavior of the entire data-dependent training trajectory, instead of traditional last-iterate analysis. We validate our claim by studying the setting of solving overparameterized linear regression with gradient descent. Specifically, we perform a data-dependent trajectory analysis and derive a sufficient condition for compatibility in such a setting. Our theoretical results demonstrate that if we take early stopping iterates into consideration, generalization can hold with significantly weaker restrictions on the problem instance than the previous last-iterate analysis.
tl;dr: We introduce a Text2Level system that is able to take text prompts and generate Mario levels. The language model can also be used to mutate existing levels in an open-ended fashion
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is a technique to generate complex and diverse environments in an automated way. However, while generating content with PCG methods is often straightforward, generating meaningful content that reflects specific intentions and constraints remains challenging. Furthermore, many PCG algorithms lack the ability to generate content in an open-ended manner. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be incredibly effective in many diverse domains. These trained LLMs can be fine-tuned, re-using information and accelerating training for new tasks. Here, we introduce MarioGPT, a fine-tuned GPT2 model trained to generate tile-based game levels, in our case Super Mario Bros levels. MarioGPT can not only generate diverse levels, but can be text-prompted for controllable level generation, addressing one of the key challenges of current PCG techniques. As far as we know, MarioGPT is the first text-to-level model and combined with novelty search it enables the generation of diverse levels with varying play-style dynamics (i.e. player paths) and the open-ended discovery of an increasingly diverse range of content.
Code available at https://github.com/shyamsn97/mario-gpt.
tl;dr: We use intrinsic dimensionality value, obtained by Persistent Homology Dimension estimation, as a scoring function, separating generated and natural texts.
Rapidly increasing quality of AI-generated content makes it difficult to distinguish between human and AI-generated texts, which may lead to undesirable consequences for society. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to study the properties of human texts that are invariant over text domains and various proficiency of human writers, can be easily calculated for any language, and can robustly separate natural and AI-generated texts regardless of the generation model and sampling method. In this work, we propose such an invariant of human texts, namely the intrinsic dimensionality of the manifold underlying the set of embeddings of a given text sample. We show that the average intrinsic dimensionality of fluent texts in natural language is hovering around the value $9$ for several alphabet-based languages and around $7$ for Chinese, while the average intrinsic dimensionality of AI-generated texts for each language is $\approx 1.5$ lower, with a clear statistical separation between human-generated and AI-generated distributions. This property allows us to build a score-based artificial text detector. The proposed detector's accuracy is stable over text domains, generator models, and human writer proficiency levels, outperforming SOTA detectors in model-agnostic and cross-domain scenarios by a significant margin.
Evaluating the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) is an essential task for practical GNN model deployment and serving, as deployed GNNs face significant performance uncertainty when inferring on unseen and unlabeled test graphs, due to mismatched training-test graph distributions. In this paper, we study a *new* problem, **GNN model evaluation**, that aims to assess the performance of a specific GNN model trained on labeled and observed graphs, by precisely estimating its performance (e.g., node classification accuracy) on unseen graphs without labels. Concretely, we propose a two-stage GNN model evaluation framework, including (1) DiscGraph set construction and (2) GNNEvaluator training and inference. The DiscGraph set captures wide-range and diverse graph data distribution discrepancies through a discrepancy measurement function, which exploits the GNN outputs of latent node embeddings and node class predictions. Under the effective training supervision from the DiscGraph set, GNNEvaluator learns to precisely estimate node classification accuracy of the to-be-evaluated GNN model and makes an accurate inference for evaluating GNN model performance. Extensive experiments on real-world unseen and unlabeled test graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for GNN model evaluation.
tl;dr: We investigate simple spectral methods towards the entry-wise estimation of low-rank matrices arising in reinforcement learning.
We study matrix estimation problems arising in reinforcement learning with low-rank structure. In low-rank bandits, the matrix to be recovered specifies the expected arm rewards, and for low-rank Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), it characterizes the transition kernel of the MDP. In both cases, each entry of the matrix carries important information, and we seek estimation methods with low entry-wise prediction error. Importantly, these methods further need to accommodate for inherent correlations in the available data (e.g. for MDPs, the data consists of system trajectories). We investigate the performance of simple spectral-based matrix estimation approaches: we show that they efficiently recover the singular subspaces of the matrix and exhibit nearly-minimal entry-wise prediction error. These new results on low-rank matrix estimation make it possible to devise reinforcement learning algorithms that fully exploit the underlying low-rank structure. We provide two examples of such algorithms: a regret minimization algorithm for low-rank bandit problems, and a best policy identification algorithm for low-rank MDPs. Both algorithms yield state-of-the-art performance guarantees.
tl;dr: We examine if there exist ordered collections of skills in training data that are associated with how language models learn, and if this can be used to inform more a effective training data selection procedure.
The quality of training data impacts the performance of pre-trained large language models (LMs). Given a fixed budget of tokens, we study how to best select data that leads to good downstream model performance across tasks. We develop a new framework based on a simple hypothesis: just as humans acquire interdependent skills in a deliberate order, language models also follow a natural order when learning a set of skills from their training data. If such an order exists, it can be utilized for improved understanding of LMs and for data-efficient training. Using this intuition, our framework formalizes the notion of a skill and of an ordered set of skills in terms of the associated data. First, using both synthetic and real data, we demonstrate that these ordered skill sets exist, and that their existence enables more advanced skills to be learned with less data when we train on their prerequisite skills. Second, using our proposed framework, we introduce an online data sampling algorithm, Skill-It, over mixtures of skills for both continual pre-training and fine-tuning regimes, where the objective is to efficiently learn multiple skills in the former and an individual skill in the latter. On the LEGO synthetic in the continual pre-training setting, Skill-It obtains 37.5 points higher accuracy than random sampling. On the Natural Instructions dataset in the fine-tuning setting, Skill-It reduces the validation loss on the target skill by 13.6% versus training on data associated with the target skill itself.
We apply our skills framework on the RedPajama dataset to continually pre-train a 3B-parameter LM, achieving higher accuracy on the LM Evaluation Harness with 1B tokens than the baseline approach of sampling uniformly over data sources with 3B tokens.
tl;dr: We provide the first differentially private approximate near neighbor data structure with low error even for high-dimensional datasets.
Range counting (e.g., counting the number of data points falling into a given query ball) under differential privacy has been studied extensively. However, the current algorithms for this problem are subject to the following dichotomy. One class of algorithms suffers from an additive error that is a fixed polynomial in the number of points. Another class of algorithms allows for polylogarithmic additive error, but the error grows exponentially in the dimension. To achieve the latter, the problem is relaxed to allow a “fuzzy” definition of the range boundary, e.g., a count of the points in a ball of radius $r$ might also include points in a ball of radius $cr$ for some $c>1$. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm that offers a sweet spot between these two classes. The algorithm has an additive error that is an arbitrary small power of the data set size, depending on how fuzzy the range boundary is, as well as a small ($1+o(1)$) multiplicative error. Crucially, the amount of noise added has no dependence on the dimension. Our algorithm introduces a variant of Locality-Sensitive Hashing, utilizing it in a novel manner.
tl;dr: Our framework, built on a natural integration of language models (LMs) and random walks (RWs), is straightforward, powerful and data-efficient.
Graphs are widely used to model interconnected entities and improve downstream predictions in various real-world applications. However, real-world graphs nowadays are often associated with complex attributes on multiple types of nodes and even links that are hard to model uniformly, while the widely used graph neural networks (GNNs) often require sufficient training toward specific downstream predictions to achieve strong performance. In this work, we take a fundamentally different approach than GNNs, to simultaneously achieve deep joint modeling of complex attributes and flexible structures of real-world graphs and obtain unsupervised generic graph representations that are not limited to specific downstream predictions. Our framework, built on a natural integration of language models (LMs) and random walks (RWs), is straightforward, powerful and data-efficient. Specifically, we first perform attributed RWs on the graph and design an automated program to compose roughly meaningful textual sequences directly from the attributed RWs; then we fine-tune an LM using the RW-based textual sequences and extract embedding vectors from the LM, which encapsulates both attribute semantics and graph structures. In our experiments, we evaluate the learned node embeddings towards different downstream prediction tasks on multiple real-world attributed graph datasets and observe significant improvements over a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art unsupervised node embedding methods. We believe this work opens a door for more sophisticated technical designs and empirical evaluations toward the leverage of LMs for the modeling of real-world graphs.
tl;dr: We study the connection between gradient-based (online) meta-learning and convex optimisation in the single task setting.
We study the connection between gradient-based meta-learning and convex optimisation. We observe that gradient descent with momentum is a special case of meta-gradients, and building on recent results in optimisation, we prove convergence rates for meta learning in the single task setting. While a meta-learned update rule can yield faster convergence up to constant factor, it is not sufficient for acceleration. Instead, some form of optimism is required. We show that optimism in meta-learning can be captured through the recently proposed Bootstrapped Meta-Gradient (Flennerhag et. al., 2022) method, providing deeper insight into its underlying mechanics.
tl;dr: GPT4 out-performs RL agents on an open-world survival game by studying LaTeX source code of the academic paper about the game
Open-world survival games pose significant challenges for AI algorithms due to their multi-tasking, deep exploration, and goal prioritization requirements. Despite reinforcement learning (RL) being popular for solving games, its high sample complexity limits its effectiveness in complex open-world games like Crafter or Minecraft. We propose a novel approach, SPRING, to read Crafter's original academic paper and use the knowledge learned to reason and play the game through a large language model (LLM).
Prompted with the LaTeX source as game context and a description of the agent's current observation, our SPRING framework employs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with game-related questions as nodes and dependencies as edges. We identify the optimal action to take in the environment by traversing the DAG and calculating LLM responses for each node in topological order, with the LLM's answer to final node directly translating to environment actions.
In our experiments, we study the quality of in-context "reasoning" induced by different forms of prompts under the setting of the Crafter environment. Our experiments suggest that LLMs, when prompted with consistent chain-of-thought, have great potential in completing sophisticated high-level trajectories. Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4 outperforms all state-of-the-art RL baselines, trained for 1M steps, without any training.
Finally, we show the potential of Crafter as a test bed for LLMs. Code at github.com/holmeswww/SPRING
tl;dr: We present plasticity injection, an intervention that can be used for careful analysis of the plasticity loss phenomenon in deep RL and dynamically growing a network for computational efficiency.
A growing body of evidence suggests that neural networks employed in deep reinforcement learning (RL) gradually lose their plasticity, the ability to learn from new data; however, the analysis and mitigation of this phenomenon is hampered by the complex relationship between plasticity, exploration, and performance in RL. This paper introduces plasticity injection, a minimalistic intervention that increases the network plasticity without changing the number of trainable parameters or biasing the predictions. The applications of this intervention are two-fold: first, as a diagnostic tool — if injection increases the performance, we may conclude that an agent's network was losing its plasticity. This tool allows us to identify a subset of Atari environments where the lack of plasticity causes performance plateaus, motivating future studies on understanding and combating plasticity loss. Second, plasticity injection can be used to improve the computational efficiency of RL training if the agent has to re-learn from scratch due to exhausted plasticity or by growing the agent's network dynamically without compromising performance. The results on Atari show that plasticity injection attains stronger performance compared to alternative methods while being computationally efficient.
731. Adversarial Examples Might be Avoidable: The Role of Data Concentration in Adversarial Robustness
tl;dr: Adversarial examples are provably avoidable when data distributions are concentrated
The susceptibility of modern machine learning classifiers to adversarial examples has motivated theoretical results suggesting that these might be unavoidable. However, these results can be too general to be applicable to natural data distributions. Indeed, humans are quite robust for tasks involving vision. This apparent conflict motivates a deeper dive into the question: Are adversarial examples truly unavoidable?
In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that a key property of the data distribution -- concentration on small-volume subsets of the input space -- determines whether a robust classifier exists. We further demonstrate that, for a data distribution concentrated on a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces, exploiting data structure naturally leads to classifiers that enjoy good robustness guarantees, improving upon methods for provable certification in certain regimes.
tl;dr: We propose a novel causal sensitivity model that generalizes various sensitivity models from the literature and allows us to perform sensitivity analysis in a variety of causal inference settings.
Causal inference from observational data is crucial for many disciplines such as medicine and economics. However, sharp bounds for causal effects under relaxations of the unconfoundedness assumption (causal sensitivity analysis) are subject to ongoing research. So far, works with sharp bounds are restricted to fairly simple settings (e.g., a single binary treatment). In this paper, we propose a unified framework for causal sensitivity analysis under unobserved confounding in various settings. For this, we propose a flexible generalization of the marginal sensitivity model (MSM) and then derive sharp bounds for a large class of causal effects. This includes (conditional) average treatment effects, effects for mediation analysis and path analysis, and distributional effects. Furthermore, our sensitivity model is applicable to discrete, continuous, and time-varying treatments. It allows us to interpret the partial identification problem under unobserved confounding as a distribution shift in the latent confounders while evaluating the causal effect of interest. In the special case of a single binary treatment, our bounds for (conditional) average treatment effects coincide with recent optimality results for causal sensitivity analysis. Finally, we propose a scalable algorithm to estimate our sharp bounds from observational data.
tl;dr: We introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI.
Embodied AI is a crucial frontier in robotics, capable of planning and executing action sequences for robots to accomplish long-horizon tasks in physical environments.
In this work, we introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI, empowering embodied agents with multi-modal understanding and execution capabilities. To achieve this, we have made the following efforts: (i) We craft a large-scale embodied planning dataset, termed EgoCOT. The dataset consists of carefully selected videos from the Ego4D dataset, along with corresponding high-quality language instructions. Specifically, we generate a sequence of sub-goals with the "Chain of Thoughts" mode for effective embodied planning.
(ii) We introduce an efficient training approach to EmbodiedGPT for high-quality plan generation, by adapting a 7B large language model (LLM) to the EgoCOT dataset via prefix tuning. (iii) We introduce a paradigm for extracting task-related features from LLM-generated planning queries to form a closed loop between high-level planning and low-level control.
Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of EmbodiedGPT on embodied tasks, including embodied planning, embodied control, visual captioning, and visual question answering.
Notably, EmbodiedGPT significantly enhances the success rate of the embodied control task by extracting more effective features. It has achieved a remarkable 1.6 times increase in success rate on the Franka Kitchen benchmark and a 1.3 times increase on the Meta-World benchmark, compared to the BLIP-2 baseline fine-tuned with the Ego4D dataset.
tl;dr: We develop Quantum-circuit Alternating Controlled Koopman learning for accelerating quantum optimization
Quantum optimization, a key application of quantum computing, has traditionally been stymied by the linearly increasing complexity of gradient calculations with an increasing number of parameters. This work bridges the gap between Koopman operator theory, which has found utility in applications because it allows for a linear representation of nonlinear dynamical systems, and natural gradient methods in quantum optimization, leading to a significant acceleration of gradient-based quantum optimization. We present Quantum-circuit Alternating Controlled Koopman learning (QuACK), a novel framework that leverages an alternating algorithm for efficient prediction of gradient dynamics on quantum computers. We demonstrate QuACK's remarkable ability to accelerate gradient-based optimization across a range of applications in quantum optimization and machine learning. In fact, our empirical studies, spanning quantum chemistry, quantum condensed matter, quantum machine learning, and noisy environments, have shown accelerations of more than 200x speedup in the overparameterized regime, 10x speedup in the smooth regime, and 3x speedup in the non-smooth regime. With QuACK, we offer a robust advancement that harnesses the advantage of gradient-based quantum optimization for practical benefits.
We study the Combinatorial Group Testing (CGT) problem in a novel game-theoretic framework, with a solution concept of Adversarial Equilibrium (AE). In this new framework, we have $n$ selfish agents corresponding to the elements of the universe $[n] =\{0,1,\ldots,n-1\}$ and a hidden set $K \subseteq [n]$ of active agents of size $|K| = k \ll n$. In each round of the game, each active agent decides if it is present in a query $Q \subseteq [n]$, and all agents receive feedback on $Q \cap K$. The goal of each active agent is to assure that its id could be learned from the feedback as early as possible.
We present a comprehensive set of results in this new game, where we design and analyze adaptive algorithmic strategies of agents which are AE's. In particular, if $k$ is known to the agents, then we design adaptive AE strategies with provably near optimal learning time of $O(k \log(n/k))$. In the case of unknown $k$, we design an adaptive AE strategies with learning time of order $n^k$, and we prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n)$ on the learning time of any such algorithmic strategies. This shows a strong separations between the two models of known and unknown $k$, as well as between the classic CGT, i.e., without selfish agents, and our game theoretic CGT model.
tl;dr: We propose ERDiff, a method for neural distribution alignment, which preserves the trial-based spatio-temporal structure of latent dynamics with diffusion model.
In the field of behavior-related brain computation, it is necessary to align raw neural signals against the drastic domain shift among them. A foundational framework within neuroscience research posits that trial-based neural population activities rely on low-dimensional latent dynamics, thus focusing on the latter greatly facilitates the alignment procedure. Despite this field's progress, existing methods ignore the intrinsic spatio-temporal structure during the alignment phase. Hence, their solutions usually lead to poor quality in latent dynamics structures and overall performance. To tackle this problem, we propose an alignment method ERDiff, which leverages the expressivity of the diffusion model to preserve the spatio-temporal structure of latent dynamics. Specifically, the latent dynamics structures of the source domain are first extracted by a diffusion model. Then, under the guidance of this diffusion model, such structures are well-recovered through a maximum likelihood alignment procedure in the target domain. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a synthetic dataset. Then, when applied to neural recordings from the non-human primate motor cortex, under both cross-day and inter-subject settings, our method consistently manifests its capability of preserving the spatio-temporal structure of latent dynamics and outperforms existing approaches in alignment goodness-of-fit and neural decoding performance.
tl;dr: We cast sequential decision making as a text-conditioned video generation problem and propose UniPi which can generalize to combinatorial and multi-task environments and be able to utilize broad internet-scale text-video datasets.
A goal of artificial intelligence is to construct an agent that can solve a wide variety of tasks. Recent progress in text-guided image synthesis has yielded models with an impressive ability to generate complex novel images, exhibiting combinatorial generalization across domains. Motivated by this success, we investigate whether such tools can be used to construct more general-purpose agents. Specifically, we cast the sequential decision making problem as a text-conditioned video generation problem, where, given a text-encoded specification of a desired goal, a planner synthesizes a set of future frames depicting its planned actions in the future, after which control actions are extracted from the generated video. By leveraging text as the underlying goal specification, we are able to naturally and combinatorially generalize to novel goals. The proposed policy-as-video formulation can further represent environments with different state and action spaces in a unified space of images, which, for example, enables learning and generalization across a variety of robot manipulation tasks. Finally, by leveraging pretrained language embeddings and widely available videos from the internet, the approach enables knowledge transfer through predicting highly realistic video plans for real robots.
ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning problems, model-based RP PGMs may experience chaotic and non-smooth optimization landscapes with exploding gradient variance, which leads to slow convergence. This is in contrast to the conventional belief that reparameterization methods have low gradient estimation variance in problems such as training deep generative models. To comprehend this phenomenon, we conduct a theoretical examination of model-based RP PGMs and search for solutions to the optimization difficulties. Specifically, we analyze the convergence of the model-based RP PGMs and pinpoint the smoothness of function approximators as a major factor that affects the quality of gradient estimation. Based on our analysis, we propose a spectral normalization method to mitigate the exploding variance issue caused by long model unrolls. Our experimental results demonstrate that proper normalization significantly reduces the gradient variance of model-based RP PGMs. As a result, the performance of the proposed method is comparable or superior to other gradient estimators, such as the Likelihood Ratio (LR) gradient estimator. Our code is available at https://github.com/agentification/RP_PGM.
tl;dr: We introduce the task of 3D-VQA where questions query the object parts, 3D poses and occlusions, and create a dataset Super-CLEVR-3D. A modular model with 3D generative scene parsing is proposed to solve the task.
Despite rapid progress in Visual question answering (\textit{VQA}), existing datasets and models mainly focus on testing reasoning in 2D. However, it is important that VQA models also understand the 3D structure of visual scenes, for example to support tasks like navigation or manipulation. This includes an understanding of the 3D object pose, their parts and occlusions. In this work, we introduce the task of 3D-aware VQA, which focuses on challenging questions that require a compositional reasoning over the 3D structure of visual scenes. We address 3D-aware VQA from both the dataset and the model perspective. First, we introduce Super-CLEVR-3D, a compositional reasoning dataset that contains questions about object parts, their 3D poses, and occlusions. Second, we propose PO3D-VQA, a 3D-aware VQA model that marries two powerful ideas: probabilistic neural symbolic program execution for reasoning and deep neural networks with 3D generative representations of objects for robust visual recognition. Our experimental results show our model PO3D-VQA outperforms existing methods significantly, but we still observe a significant performance gap compared to 2D VQA benchmarks, indicating that 3D-aware VQA remains an important open research area.
Estimating the generalization performance is practically challenging on out-of-distribution (OOD) data without ground-truth labels. While previous methods emphasize the connection between distribution difference and OOD accuracy, we show that a large domain gap not necessarily leads to a low test accuracy. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the perspective of feature separability empirically and theoretically. Specifically, we propose a dataset-level score based upon feature dispersion to estimate the test accuracy under distribution shift. Our method is inspired by desirable properties of features in representation learning: high inter-class dispersion and high intra-class compactness. Our analysis shows that inter-class dispersion is strongly correlated with the model accuracy, while intra-class compactness does not reflect the generalization performance on OOD data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in both prediction performance and computational efficiency.
tl;dr: We propose the first efficient Laplace approximation for heteroscedastic neural networks, show it scales to image data, and derive its posterior predictive.
Flexibly quantifying both irreducible aleatoric and model-dependent epistemic uncertainties plays an important role for complex regression problems. While deep neural networks in principle can provide this flexibility and learn heteroscedastic aleatoric uncertainties through non-linear functions, recent works highlight that maximizing the log likelihood objective parameterized by mean and variance can lead to compromised mean fits since the gradient are scaled by the predictive variance, and propose adjustments in line with this premise.
We instead propose to use the natural parametrization of the Gaussian, which has been shown to be more stable for heteroscedastic regression based on non-linear feature maps and Gaussian processes. Further, we emphasize the significance of principled regularization of the network parameters and prediction. We therefore propose an efficient Laplace approximation for heteroscedastic neural networks that allows automatic regularization through empirical Bayes and provides epistemic uncertainties, both of which improve generalization.
We showcase on a range of regression problems—including a new heteroscedastic image regression benchmark—that our methods are scalable, improve over previous approaches for heteroscedastic regression, and provide epistemic uncertainty without requiring hyperparameter tuning.
tl;dr: Models that are highly aligned with human representations are better at few-shot learning and are more robust to domain shift and adversarial examples
Should we care whether AI systems have representations of the world that are similar to those of humans? We provide an information-theoretic analysis that suggests that there should be a U-shaped relationship between the degree of representational alignment with humans and performance on few-shot learning tasks. We confirm this prediction empirically, finding such a relationship in an analysis of the performance of 491 computer vision models. We also show that highly-aligned models are more robust to both natural adversarial attacks and domain shifts. Our results suggest that human-alignment is often a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for models to make effective use of limited data, be robust, and generalize well.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient deep learning option due to their unique spike-based event-driven (i.e., spike-driven) paradigm. In this paper, we incorporate the spike-driven paradigm into Transformer by the proposed Spike-driven Transformer with four unique properties: (1) Event-driven, no calculation is triggered when the input of Transformer is zero; (2) Binary spike communication, all matrix multiplications associated with the spike matrix can be transformed into sparse additions; (3) Self-attention with linear complexity at both token and channel dimensions; (4) The operations between spike-form Query, Key, and Value are mask and addition. Together, there are only sparse addition operations in the Spike-driven Transformer. To this end, we design a novel Spike-Driven Self-Attention (SDSA), which exploits only mask and addition operations without any multiplication, and thus having up to $87.2\times$ lower computation energy than vanilla self-attention. Especially in SDSA, the matrix multiplication between Query, Key, and Value is designed as the mask operation. In addition, we rearrange all residual connections in the vanilla Transformer before the activation functions to ensure that all neurons transmit binary spike signals. It is shown that the Spike-driven Transformer can achieve 77.1\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, which is the state-of-the-art result in the SNN field.
tl;dr: We learn geometry-aware subspaces in vision-language models that separate representations of the content of an image/text from its appearance
Latent image representations arising from vision-language models have proved immensely useful for a variety of downstream tasks. However, their utility is limited by their entanglement with respect to different visual attributes. For instance, recent work has shown that CLIP image representations are often biased toward specific visual properties (such as objects or actions) in an unpredictable manner. In this paper, we propose to separate representations of the different visual modalities in CLIP’s joint vision-language space by leveraging the association between parts of speech and specific visual modes of variation (e.g. nouns relate to objects, adjectives describe appearance). This is achieved by formulating an appropriate component analysis model that learns subspaces capturing variability corresponding to a specific part of speech, while jointly minimising variability to the rest. Such a subspace yields disentangled representations of the different visual properties of an image or text in closed form while respecting the underlying geometry of the manifold on which the representations lie. What’s more, we show the proposed model additionally facilitates learning subspaces corresponding to specific visual appearances (e.g. artists’ painting styles), which enables the selective removal of entire visual themes from CLIP-based text-to-image synthesis. We validate the model both qualitatively, by visualising the subspace projections with a text-to-image model and by preventing the imitation of artists’ styles, and quantitatively, through class invariance metrics and improvements to baseline zero-shot classification.
tl;dr: We show that the (d − 1)-dimensional WL test is complete for point clouds in d-dimensional Euclidean space, for any d ≥ 2.
The Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test is a fundamental iterative algorithm for checking the isomorphism of graphs. It has also been observed that it underlies the design of several graph neural network architectures, whose capabilities and performance can be understood in terms of the expressive power of this test. Motivated by recent developments in machine learning applications to datasets involving three-dimensional objects, we study when the WL test is {\em complete} for clouds of Euclidean points represented by complete distance graphs, i.e., when it can distinguish, up to isometry, any arbitrary such cloud. Our main result states that the $(d-1)$-dimensional WL test is complete for point clouds in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, for any $d\ge 2$, and only three iterations of the test suffice. Our result is tight for $d = 2, 3$. We also observe that the $d$-dimensional WL test only requires one iteration to achieve completeness.
Wasserstein distributionally robust estimators have emerged as powerful models for prediction and decision-making under uncertainty. These estimators provide attractive generalization guarantees: the robust objective obtained from the training distribution is an exact upper bound on the true risk with high probability. However, existing guarantees either suffer from the curse of dimensionality, are restricted to specific settings, or lead to spurious error terms. In this paper, we show that these generalization guarantees actually hold on general classes of models, do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, and can even cover distribution shifts at testing. We also prove that these results carry over to the newly-introduced regularized versions of Wasserstein distributionally robust problems.
This paper presents a theoretical analysis of linear interpolation as a principled method for stabilizing (large-scale) neural network training. We argue that instabilities in the optimization process are often caused by the nonmonotonicity of the loss landscape and show how linear interpolation can help by leveraging the theory of nonexpansive operators. We construct a new optimization scheme called relaxed approximate proximal point (RAPP), which is the first explicit method to achieve last iterate convergence rates for the full range of cohypomonotone problems. The construction extends to constrained and regularized settings. By replacing the inner optimizer in RAPP we rediscover the family of Lookahead algorithms for which we establish convergence in cohypomonotone problems even when the base optimizer is taken to be gradient descent ascent. The range of cohypomonotone problems in which Lookahead converges is further expanded by exploiting that Lookahead inherits the properties of the base optimizer. We corroborate the results with experiments on generative adversarial networks which demonstrates the benefits of the linear interpolation present in both RAPP and Lookahead.
tl;dr: TL;DR: We give algorithms for approximating $\ell_p$ sensitivities and related summary statistics, with both theoretical guarantees and numerical experiments.
Recent works in dimensionality reduction for regression tasks have introduced the notion of sensitivity, an estimate of the importance of a specific datapoint in a dataset, offering provable guarantees on the quality of the approximation after removing low-sensitivity datapoints via subsampling. However, fast algorithms for approximating sensitivities, which we show is equivalent to approximate regression, are known for only the $\ell_2$ setting, in which they are popularly termed leverage scores. In this work, we provide the first efficient algorithms for approximating $\ell_p$ sensitivities and other summary statistics of a given matrix. In particular, for a given $n \times d$ matrix, we compute $\alpha$-approximation to its $\ell_1$ sensitivities at the cost of $n/\alpha$ sensitivity computations. For estimating the total $\ell_p$ sensitivity (i.e. the sum of $\ell_p$ sensitivities), we provide an algorithm based on importance sampling of $\ell_p$ Lewis weights, which computes a constant factor approximation at the cost of roughly $\sqrt{d}$ sensitivity computations, with no polynomial dependence on $n$. Furthermore, we estimate the maximum $\ell_1$ sensitivity up to a $\sqrt{d}$ factor in $O(d)$ sensitivity computations. We also generalize these results to $\ell_p$ norms. Lastly, we experimentally show that for a wide class of structured matrices in real-world datasets, the total sensitivity can be quickly approximated and is significantly smaller than the theoretical prediction, demonstrating that real-world datasets have on average low intrinsic effective dimensionality.
We propose an interpretable model to uncover the behavioral patterns of human movements by analyzing their trajectories. Our approach is based on the belief that human actions are driven by intentions and are influenced by environmental factors such as spatial relationships with surrounding objects. To model this, we use a set of spatial-temporal logic rules that include intention variables as principles. These rules are automatically discovered and used to capture the dynamics of human actions. To learn the model parameters and rule content, we design an EM learning algorithm that treats the unknown rule content as a latent variable. In the E-step, we evaluate the posterior over the latent rule content, and in the M-step, we optimize the rule generator and model parameters by maximizing the expected log-likelihood. Our model has wide-ranging applications in areas such as sports analytics, robotics, and autonomous cars. We demonstrate the model's superior interpretability and prediction performance on both pedestrian and NBA basketball player datasets, achieving promising results.
Learning feature interactions can be the key for multivariate predictive modeling. ReLU-activated neural networks create piecewise linear prediction models, and other nonlinear activation functions lead to models with only high-order feature interactions. Recent methods incorporate candidate polynomial terms of fixed orders into deep learning, which is subject to the issue of combinatorial explosion, or learn the orders that are difficult to adapt to different regions of the feature space. We propose a Polyhedron Attention Module (PAM) to create piecewise polynomial models where the input space is split into polyhedrons which define the different pieces and on each piece the hyperplanes that define the polyhedron boundary multiply to form the interactive terms, resulting in interactions of adaptive order to each piece. PAM is interpretable to identify important interactions in predicting a target. Theoretic analysis shows that PAM has stronger expression capability than ReLU-activated networks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior classification performance of PAM on massive datasets of the click-through rate prediction and PAM can learn meaningful interaction effects in a medical problem.
We present RoboHive, a comprehensive software platform and ecosystem for research in the field of Robot Learning and Embodied Artificial Intelligence. Our platform encompasses a diverse range of pre-existing and novel environments, including dexterous manipulation with the Shadow Hand, whole-arm manipulation tasks with Franka and Fetch robots, quadruped locomotion, among others. Included environments are organized within and cover multiple domains such as hand manipulation, locomotion, multi-task, multi-agent, muscles, etc. In comparison to prior works, RoboHive offers a streamlined and unified task interface taking dependency on only a minimal set of well-maintained packages, features tasks with high physics fidelity and rich visual diversity, and supports common hardware drivers for real-world deployment. The unified interface of RoboHive offers a convenient and accessible abstraction for algorithmic research in imitation, reinforcement, multi-task, and hierarchical learning. Furthermore, RoboHive includes expert demonstrations and baseline results for most environments, providing a standard for benchmarking and comparisons. Details: https://sites.google.com/view/robohive
tl;dr: NurViD, a large video dataset with expert-level annotation for nursing procedure activity understanding.
The application of deep learning to nursing procedure activity understanding has the potential to greatly enhance the quality and safety of nurse-patient interactions. By utilizing the technique, we can facilitate training and education, improve quality control, and enable operational compliance monitoring. However, the development of automatic recognition systems in this field is currently hindered by the scarcity of appropriately labeled datasets. The existing video datasets pose several limitations: 1) these datasets are small-scale in size to support comprehensive investigations of nursing activity; 2) they primarily focus on single procedures, lacking expert-level annotations for various nursing procedures and action steps; and 3) they lack temporally localized annotations, which prevents the effective localization of targeted actions within longer video sequences. To mitigate these limitations, we propose NurViD, a large video dataset with expert-level annotation for nursing procedure activity understanding. NurViD consists of over 1.5k videos totaling 144 hours, making it approximately four times longer than the existing largest nursing activity datasets. Notably, it encompasses 51 distinct nursing procedures and 177 action steps, providing a much more comprehensive coverage compared to existing datasets that primarily focus on limited procedures. To evaluate the efficacy of current deep learning methods on nursing activity understanding, we establish three benchmarks on NurViD: procedure recognition on untrimmed videos, procedure and action recognition on trimmed videos, and action detection. Our benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/minghu0830/NurViD-benchmark.
tl;dr: We show the potential of improving imitation learning by leveraging diverse data sources through effective data selection.
Imitation learning (IL) algorithms excel in acquiring high-quality policies from expert data for sequential decision-making tasks. But, their effectiveness is hampered when faced with limited expert data. To tackle this challenge, a novel framework called (offline) IL with supplementary data has emerged, which enhances learning by incorporating an additional yet imperfect dataset obtained inexpensively from sub-optimal policies. Nonetheless, learning becomes challenging due to the potential inclusion of out-of-expert-distribution samples. In this work, we pioneer the mathematical formalization of this framework, uncovering its limitations. Our theoretical analysis reveals that a naive approach—applying the behavioral cloning (BC) algorithm concept to the combined set of expert and supplementary data—may fall short of vanilla BC, which solely relies on expert data. This deficiency arises due to the distribution shift between the two data sources. To address this issue, we propose a new importance-sampling-based technique for selecting data within the expert distribution. We prove that the proposed method theoretically eliminates the gap of the naive approach, highlighting its efficacy when handling imperfect data. Empirical studies demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in tasks including robotics locomotion control, Atari video games, and image classification. Overall, our work underscores the potential of improving IL by leveraging diverse data sources through effective data selection.
tl;dr: We enable in-context learning over graphs with a novel in-context task representation and corresponding pretraining architecture and objectives.
In-context learning is the ability of a pretrained model to adapt to novel and diverse downstream tasks by conditioning on prompt examples, without optimizing any parameters. While large language models have demonstrated this ability, how in-context learning could be performed over graphs is unexplored. In this paper, we develop \textbf{Pr}etraining \textbf{O}ver \textbf{D}iverse \textbf{I}n-Context \textbf{G}raph S\textbf{y}stems (PRODIGY), the first pretraining framework that enables in-context learning over graphs. The key idea of our framework is to formulate in-context learning over graphs with a novel \emph{prompt graph} representation, which connects prompt examples and queries. We then propose a graph neural network architecture over the prompt graph and a corresponding family of in-context pretraining objectives. With PRODIGY, the pretrained model can directly perform novel downstream classification tasks on unseen graphs via in-context learning. We provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our framework by showcasing its strong in-context learning performance on tasks involving citation networks and knowledge graphs. Our approach outperforms the in-context learning accuracy of contrastive pretraining baselines with hard-coded adaptation by 18\% on average across all setups. Moreover, it also outperforms standard finetuning with limited data by 33\% on average with in-context learning.
tl;dr: We introduce a new framework that unifies all existing concept based explainability methods
In recent years, concept-based approaches have emerged as some of the most promising explainability methods to help us interpret the decisions of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). These methods seek to discover intelligible visual ``concepts'' buried within the complex patterns of ANN activations in two key steps: (1) concept extraction followed by (2) importance estimation. While these two steps are shared across methods, they all differ in their specific implementations. Here, we introduce a unifying theoretical framework that recast the first step -- concept extraction problem -- as a special case of **dictionary learning**, and we formalize the second step -- concept importance estimation -- as a more general form of **attribution method**.
This framework offers several advantages as it allows us: (i) to propose new evaluation metrics for comparing different concept extraction approaches; (ii) to leverage modern attribution methods and evaluation metrics to extend and systematically evaluate state-of-the-art concept-based approaches and importance estimation techniques; (iii) to derive theoretical guarantees regarding the optimality of such methods.
We further leverage our framework to try to tackle a crucial question in explainability: how to *efficiently* identify clusters of data points that are classified based on a similar shared strategy.
To illustrate these findings and to highlight the main strategies of a model, we introduce a visual representation called the strategic cluster graph. Finally, we present Lens, a dedicated website that offers a complete compilation of these visualizations for all classes of the ImageNet dataset.
tl;dr: Flexible contextual bandit algorithms for simple and cumulative regret
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains understudied. We propose a new family of computationally efficient bandit algorithms for the stochastic contextual bandit setting, where a tuning parameter determines the weight placed on cumulative regret minimization (where we establish near-optimal minimax guarantees) versus simple regret minimization (where we establish state-of-the-art guarantees). Our algorithms work with any function class, are robust to model misspecification, and can be used in continuous arm settings. This flexibility comes from constructing and relying on “conformal arm sets" (CASs). CASs provide a set of arms for every context, encompassing the context-specific optimal arm with a certain probability across the context distribution. Our positive results on simple and cumulative regret guarantees are contrasted with a negative result, which shows that no algorithm can achieve instance-dependent simple regret guarantees while simultaneously achieving minimax optimal cumulative regret guarantees.
Gradient-based sampling algorithms have demonstrated their effectiveness in text generation, especially in the context of controlled text generation. However, there exists a lack of theoretically grounded and principled approaches for this task. In this paper, we take an important step toward building a principled approach for sampling from language models with gradient-based methods. We use discrete distributions given by language models to define densities and develop an algorithm based on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo to sample from them. We name our gradient-based technique Structured Voronoi Sampling (SVS). In an experimental setup where the reference distribution is known, we show that the empirical distribution of SVS samples is closer to the reference distribution compared to alternative sampling schemes. Furthermore, in a controlled generation task, SVS is able to generate fluent and diverse samples while following the control targets significantly better than other methods.
The proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm stands as one of the most prosperous methods in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical understanding of PPO remains deficient. Specifically, it is unclear whether PPO or its optimistic variants can effectively solve linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), which are arguably the simplest models in RL with function approximation.
To bridge this gap, we propose an optimistic variant of PPO for episodic adversarial linear MDPs with full-information feedback, and establish a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^{3/4}H^2K^{3/4})$ regret for it. Here $d$ is the ambient dimension of linear MDPs, $H$ is the length of each episode, and $K$ is the number of episodes. Compared with existing policy-based algorithms, we achieve the state-of-the-art regret bound in both stochastic linear MDPs and adversarial linear MDPs with full information. Additionally, our algorithm design features a novel multi-batched updating mechanism and the theoretical analysis utilizes a new covering number argument of value and policy classes, which might be of independent interest.
tl;dr: We extend diffusion models to functional data with arbitrary codomain and incorporating symmetry
Denoising diffusion models have proven to be a flexible and effective paradigm for generative modelling.
Their recent extension to infinite dimensional Euclidean spaces has allowed for the modelling of stochastic processes.
However, many problems in the natural sciences incorporate symmetries and involve data living in non-Euclidean spaces.
In this work, we extend the framework of diffusion models to incorporate a series of geometric priors in infinite-dimension modelling.
We do so by a) constructing a noising process which admits, as limiting distribution, a geometric Gaussian process that transforms under the symmetry group of interest, and b) approximating the score with a neural network that is equivariant w.r.t. this group.
We show that with these conditions, the generative functional model admits the same symmetry.
We demonstrate scalability and capacity of the model, using a novel Langevin-based conditional sampler, to fit complex scalar and vector fields, with Euclidean and spherical codomain, on synthetic and real-world weather data.
tl;dr: We improve the transferability of neural network representations to downstream tasks by aligning them with human similarity judgments and ensuring that local similarity structure is preserved.
Deep neural networks have reached human-level performance on many computer vision tasks. However, the objectives used to train these networks enforce only that similar images are embedded at similar locations in the representation space, and do not directly constrain the global structure of the resulting space. Here, we explore the impact of supervising this global structure by linearly aligning it with human similarity judgments. We find that a naive approach leads to large changes in local representational structure that harm downstream performance. Thus, we propose a novel method that aligns the global structure of representations while preserving their local structure. This global-local transform considerably improves accuracy across a variety of few-shot learning and anomaly detection tasks. Our results indicate that human visual representations are globally organized in a way that facilitates learning from few examples, and incorporating this global structure into neural network representations improves performance on downstream tasks.
tl;dr: QATCH is a toolbox for testing Table Representation Learning models on unseen data, automating checklists for Questions Answering and Semantic Parsing tasks, and evaluating performance with cross-task metrics.
Table Representation Learning (TRL) models are commonly pre-trained on large open-domain datasets comprising millions of tables and then used to address downstream tasks. Choosing the right TRL model to use on proprietary data can be challenging, as the best results depend on the content domain, schema, and data quality. Our purpose is to support end-users in testing TRL models on proprietary data in two established SQL-centric tasks, i.e., Question Answering (QA) and Semantic Parsing (SP). We present QATCH (Query-Aided TRL Checklist), a toolbox to highlight TRL models’ strengths and weaknesses on relational tables unseen at training time. For an input table, QATCH automatically generates a testing checklist tailored to QA and SP. Checklist generation is driven by a SQL query engine that crafts tests of different complexity. This design facilitates inherent portability, allowing the checks to be used by alternative models. We also introduce a set of cross-task performance metrics evaluating the TRL model’s performance over its output. Finally, we show how QATCH automatically generates tests for proprietary datasets to evaluate various state-of-the-art models including TAPAS, TAPEX, and CHATGPT.
tl;dr: This paper proposes two novel RL approaches combined with GNNs for Suggesting Variable Order for Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition.
Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition (CAD) is one of the pillar algorithms of symbolic computation, and its worst-case complexity is double exponential to the number of variables. Researchers found that variable order dramatically affects efficiency and proposed various heuristics.
The existing learning-based methods are all supervised learning methods that cannot cope with diverse polynomial sets.
This paper proposes two Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches combined with Graph Neural Networks (GNN) for Suggesting Variable Order (SVO). One is GRL-SVO(UP), a branching heuristic integrated with CAD. The other is GRL-SVO(NUP), a fast heuristic providing a total order directly. We generate a random dataset and collect a real-world dataset from SMT-LIB. The experiments show that our approaches outperform state-of-the-art learning-based heuristics and are competitive with the best expert-based heuristics. Interestingly, our models show a strong generalization ability, working well on various datasets even if they are only trained on a 3-var random dataset. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/dongyuhang22/GRL-SVO.
tl;dr: A novel adaptive algorithm using normalized and annealing weight decay in federated learning.
Weight decay is a standard technique to improve generalization performance in modern deep neural network optimization, and is also widely adopted in federated learning (FL) to prevent overfitting in local clients. In this paper, we first explore the choices of weight decay and identify that weight decay value appreciably influences the convergence of existing FL algorithms. While preventing overfitting is crucial, weight decay can introduce a different optimization goal towards the global objective, which is further amplified in FL due to multiple local updates and heterogeneous data distribution.
To address this challenge, we develop {\it Federated optimization with Normalized Annealing Regularization} (FedNAR), a simple yet effective and versatile algorithmic plug-in that can be seamlessly integrated into any existing FL algorithms. Essentially, we regulate the magnitude of each update by performing co-clipping of the gradient and weight decay.
We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FedNAR's convergence rate and conduct extensive experiments on both vision and language datasets with different backbone federated optimization algorithms. Our experimental results consistently demonstrate that incorporating FedNAR into existing FL algorithms leads to accelerated convergence and heightened model accuracy. Moreover, FedNAR exhibits resilience in the face of various hyperparameter configurations. Specifically, FedNAR has the ability to self-adjust the weight decay when the initial specification is not optimal, while the accuracy of traditional FL algorithms would markedly decline. Our codes are released at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/fednar-BE8F}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/fednar-BE8F}.
tl;dr: We derive sample complexity lower bound and design an algorithm with matching upper bound for differential privacy-preserving best arm identification with fixed confidence.
Best Arm Identification (BAI) problems are progressively used for data-sensitive applications, such as designing adaptive clinical trials, tuning hyper-parameters, and conducting user studies to name a few. Motivated by the data privacy concerns invoked by these applications, we study the problem of BAI with fixed confidence under $\epsilon$-global Differential Privacy (DP). First, to quantify the cost of privacy, we derive a lower bound on the sample complexity of any $\delta$-correct BAI algorithm satisfying $\epsilon$-global DP. Our lower bound suggests the existence of two privacy regimes depending on the privacy budget $\epsilon$. In the high-privacy regime (small $\epsilon$), the hardness depends on a coupled effect of privacy and a novel information-theoretic quantity, called the Total Variation Characteristic Time. In the low-privacy regime (large $\epsilon$), the sample complexity lower bound reduces to the classical non-private lower bound. Second, we propose AdaP-TT, an $\epsilon$-global DP variant of the Top Two algorithm. AdaP-TT runs in *arm-dependent adaptive episodes* and adds *Laplace noise* to ensure a good privacy-utility trade-off. We derive an asymptotic upper bound on the sample complexity of AdaP-TT that matches with the lower bound up to multiplicative constants in the high-privacy regime. Finally, we provide an experimental analysis of AdaP-TT that validates our theoretical results.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel Non-parametric Bayesian model over the space of decision trees and derive a variational approximation to the posterior distribution.
Decision trees are a well-established tool in machine learning for classification and regression tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel non-parametric Bayesian model that uses variational inference to approximate a posterior distribution over the space of stochastic decision trees. We evaluate the model's performance on 18 datasets and demonstrate its competitiveness with other state-of-the-art methods in regression tasks. We also explore its application to causal inference problems. We provide a fully vectorized implementation of our algorithm in PyTorch.
tl;dr: We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD).
We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target distribution is sub-Gaussian with a Lipschitz score, SVGD with $n$ particles and an appropriate step size sequence drives the kernel Stein discrepancy to zero at an order ${1/}{\sqrt{\log\log n}}$ rate. We suspect that the dependence on $n$ can be improved, and we hope that our explicit, non-asymptotic proof strategy will serve as a template for future refinements.
tl;dr: We propose a quasi-Newton-type method that converges faster than Nesterov's accelerated gradient in the "small dimension" regime, while matching its optimal rate in the "large dimension" regime.
In this paper, we propose an accelerated quasi-Newton proximal extragradient method for solving unconstrained smooth convex optimization problems. With access only to the gradients of the objective, we prove that our method can achieve a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\min\\{\frac{1}{k^2}, \frac{\sqrt{d\log k}}{k^{2.5}}\\}\bigr)$, where $d$ is the problem dimension and $k$ is the number of iterations. In particular, in the regime where $k = \mathcal{O}(d)$, our method matches the _optimal rate_ of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{k^2})$ by Nesterov's accelerated gradient (NAG). Moreover, in the the regime where $k = \Omega(d \log d)$, it outperforms NAG and converges at a _faster rate_ of $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\frac{\sqrt{d\log k}}{k^{2.5}}\bigr)$. To the best of our knowledge, this result is the first to demonstrate a provable gain for a quasi-Newton-type method over NAG in the convex setting. To achieve such results, we build our method on a recent variant of the Monteiro-Svaiter acceleration framework and adopt an online learning perspective to update the Hessian approximation matrices, in which we relate the convergence rate of our method to the dynamic regret of a specific online convex optimization problem in the space of matrices.
tl;dr: We show that bifurcations cause loss jumps in RNN training and introduce an efficient algorithm for locating fixed points, cycles, and bifurcation manifolds in RNNs
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are popular machine learning tools for modeling and forecasting sequential data and for inferring dynamical systems (DS) from observed time series. Concepts from DS theory (DST) have variously been used to further our understanding of both, how trained RNNs solve complex tasks, and the training process itself. Bifurcations are particularly important phenomena in DS, including RNNs, that refer to topological (qualitative) changes in a system's dynamical behavior as one or more of its parameters are varied. Knowing the bifurcation structure of an RNN will thus allow to deduce many of its computational and dynamical properties, like its sensitivity to parameter variations or its behavior during training. In particular, bifurcations may account for sudden loss jumps observed in RNN training that could severely impede the training process. Here we first mathematically prove for a particular class of ReLU-based RNNs that certain bifurcations are indeed associated with loss gradients tending toward infinity or zero. We then introduce a novel heuristic algorithm for detecting all fixed points and $k$-cycles in ReLU-based RNNs and their existence and stability regions, hence bifurcation manifolds in parameter space. In contrast to previous numerical algorithms for finding fixed points and common continuation methods, our algorithm provides $\textit{exact}$ results and returns fixed points and cycles up to high orders with surprisingly good scaling behavior. We exemplify the algorithm on the analysis of the training process of RNNs, and find that the recently introduced technique of generalized teacher forcing completely avoids certain types of bifurcations in training. Thus, besides facilitating the DST analysis of trained RNNs, our algorithm provides a powerful instrument for analyzing the training process itself.
tl;dr: We prove the optimality of deep neural collapse for the deep unconstrained features model - an extension of the unconstrained features model to arbitrarily many layers - for binary classification, and we provide experiments to support our theory.
Neural collapse (NC) refers to the surprising structure of the last layer of deep neural networks in the terminal phase of gradient descent training. Recently, an increasing amount of experimental evidence has pointed to the propagation of NC to earlier layers of neural networks. However, while the NC in the last layer is well studied theoretically, much less is known about its multi-layered counterpart - deep neural collapse (DNC). In particular, existing work focuses either on linear layers or only on the last two layers at the price of an extra assumption. Our work fills this gap by generalizing the established analytical framework for NC - the unconstrained features model - to multiple non-linear layers. Our key technical contribution is to show that, in a deep unconstrained features model, the unique global optimum for binary classification exhibits all the properties typical of DNC. This explains the existing experimental evidence of DNC. We also empirically show that (i) by optimizing deep unconstrained features models via gradient descent, the resulting solution agrees well with our theory, and (ii) trained networks recover the unconstrained features suitable for the occurrence of DNC, thus supporting the validity of this modeling principle.
The well-established practice of time series analysis involves estimating deterministic, non-stationary trend and seasonality components followed by learning the residual stochastic, stationary components. Recently, it has been shown that one can learn the deterministic non-stationary components accurately using multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis (mSSA) in the absence of a correlated stationary component; meanwhile, in the absence of deterministic non-stationary components, the Autoregressive (AR) stationary component can also be learnt readily, e.g. via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). However, a theoretical underpinning of multi-stage learning algorithms involving both deterministic and stationary components has been absent in the literature despite its pervasiveness. We resolve this open question by establishing desirable theoretical guarantees for a natural two-stage algorithm, where mSSA is first applied to estimate the non-stationary components despite the presence of a correlated stationary AR component, which is subsequently learned from the residual time series. We provide a finite-sample forecasting consistency bound for the proposed algorithm, SAMoSSA, which is data-driven and thus requires minimal parameter tuning. To establish theoretical guarantees, we overcome three hurdles: (i) we characterize the spectra of Page matrices of stable AR processes, thus extending the analysis of mSSA; (ii) we extend the analysis of AR process identification in the presence of arbitrary bounded perturbations; (iii) we characterize the out-of-sample or forecasting error, as opposed to solely considering model identification. Through representative empirical studies, we validate the superior performance of SAMoSSA compared to existing baselines. Notably, SAMoSSA's ability to account for AR noise structure yields improvements ranging from 5% to 37% across various benchmark datasets.
tl;dr: The paper presents the BIOSCAN-1M Insect Dataset, a million-image collection of hand-labelled insect images with genetic data, aimed to train computer vision models for taxonomic assessment and foster machine learning applications in biodiversity.
In an effort to catalog insect biodiversity, we propose a new large dataset of hand-labelled insect images, the BIOSCAN-1M Insect Dataset. Each record is taxonomically classified by an expert, and also has associated genetic information including raw nucleotide barcode sequences and assigned barcode index numbers, which are genetic-based proxies for species classification. This paper presents a curated million-image dataset, primarily to train computer-vision models capable of providing image-based taxonomic assessment, however, the dataset also presents compelling characteristics, the study of which would be of interest to the broader machine learning community. Driven by the biological nature inherent to the dataset, a characteristic long-tailed class-imbalance distribution is exhibited. Furthermore, taxonomic labelling is a hierarchical classification scheme, presenting a highly fine-grained classification problem at lower levels. Beyond spurring interest in biodiversity research within the machine learning community, progress on creating an image-based taxonomic classifier will also further the ultimate goal of all BIOSCAN research: to lay the foundation for a comprehensive survey of global biodiversity. This paper introduces the dataset and explores the classification task through the implementation and analysis of a baseline classifier. The code repository of the BIOSCAN-1M-Insect dataset is available at https://github.com/zahrag/BIOSCAN-1M
tl;dr: We prove that softmax-attention weights trained with gradient descent converge to a max-margin solution that separates locally-optimal tokens from non-optimal ones.
Attention mechanism is a central component of the transformer architecture which led to the phenomenal success of large language models. However, the theoretical principles underlying the attention mechanism are poorly understood, especially its nonconvex optimization dynamics. In this work, we explore the seminal softmax-attention model $f(X)=\langle Xv, \texttt{softmax}(XWp)\rangle$, where $X$ is the token sequence and $(v,W,p)$ are trainable parameters. We prove that running gradient descent on $p$, or equivalently $W$, converges in direction to a max-margin solution that separates *locally-optimal* tokens from non-optimal ones. This clearly formalizes attention as an optimal token selection mechanism. Remarkably, our results are applicable to general data and precisely characterize *optimality* of tokens in terms of the value embeddings $Xv$ and problem geometry. We also provide a broader regularization path analysis that establishes the margin maximizing nature of attention even for nonlinear prediction heads. When optimizing $v$ and $p$ simultaneously with logistic loss, we identify conditions under which the regularization paths directionally converge to their respective hard-margin SVM solutions where $v$ separates the input features based on their labels. Interestingly, the SVM formulation of $p$ is influenced by the support vector geometry of $v$. Finally, we verify our theoretical findings via numerical experiments and provide insights.
The translation of brain dynamics into natural language is pivotal for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a field that has seen substantial growth in recent years. With the swift advancement of large language models, such as ChatGPT, the need to bridge the gap between the brain and languages becomes increasingly pressing. Current methods, however, require eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features, which can restrict the practical application of these systems. These event markers may not be readily available or could be challenging to acquire during real-time inference, and the sequence of eye fixations may not align with the order of spoken words. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel framework, DeWave, that integrates discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks. DeWave uses a quantized variational encoder to derive discrete codex encoding and align it with pre-trained language models. This discrete codex representation brings forth two advantages: 1) it alleviates the order mismatch between eye fixations and spoken words by introducing text-EEG contrastive alignment training, and 2) it minimizes the interference caused by individual differences in EEG waves through an invariant discrete codex. Our model surpasses the previous baseline (40.1 and 31.7) by 3.06% and 6.34\%, respectively, achieving 41.35 BLEU-1 and 33.71 Rouge-F on the ZuCo Dataset. Furthermore, this work is the first to facilitate the translation of entire EEG signal periods without the need for word-level order markers (e.g., eye fixations), scoring 20.5 BLEU-1 and 29.5 Rouge-1 on the ZuCo Dataset, respectively.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are often used for tasks involving the 3D geometry of a given graph, such as molecular dynamics simulation. While incorporating Euclidean distance into Message Passing Neural Networks (referred to as Vanilla DisGNN) is a straightforward way to learn the geometry, it has been demonstrated that Vanilla DisGNN is geometrically incomplete. In this work, we first construct families of novel and symmetric geometric graphs that Vanilla DisGNN cannot distinguish even when considering all-pair distances, which greatly expands the existing counterexample families. Our counterexamples show the inherent limitation of Vanilla DisGNN to capture symmetric geometric structures. We then propose $k$-DisGNNs, which can effectively exploit the rich geometry contained in the distance matrix. We demonstrate the high expressive power of $k$-DisGNNs from three perspectives: 1. They can learn high-order geometric information that cannot be captured by Vanilla DisGNN. 2. They can unify some existing well-designed geometric models. 3. They are universal function approximators from geometric graphs to scalars (when $k\geq 2$) and vectors (when $k\geq 3$). Most importantly, we establish a connection between geometric deep learning (GDL) and traditional graph representation learning (GRL), showing that those highly expressive GNN models originally designed for GRL can also be applied to GDL with impressive performance, and that existing complicated, equivariant models are not the only solution. Experiments verify our theory. Our $k$-DisGNNs achieve many new state-of-the-art results on MD17.
tl;dr: A new convolution based neural operator architecture is proposed for accurate and robust learning of PDEs.
Although very successfully used in conventional machine learning, convolution based neural network architectures -- believed to be inconsistent in function space -- have been largely ignored in the context of learning solution operators of PDEs. Here, we present novel adaptations for convolutional neural networks to demonstrate that they are indeed able to process functions as inputs and outputs. The resulting architecture, termed as convolutional neural operators (CNOs), is designed specifically to preserve its underlying continuous nature, even when implemented in a discretized form on a computer. We prove a universality theorem to show that CNOs can approximate operators arising in PDEs to desired accuracy. CNOs are tested on a novel suite of benchmarks, encompassing a diverse set of PDEs with multi-scale solutions and are observed to significantly outperform baselines, paving the way for an alternative framework for robust and accurate operator learning.
776. Improving *day-ahead* Solar Irradiance Time Series Forecasting by Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Context
tl;dr: We present a novel deep learning architecture which leverages the spatio-temporal context (e.g. satellite data) around a meteorological station to improve the forecasting of solar irradiance at this station.
Solar power harbors immense potential in mitigating climate change by substantially reducing CO$_{2}$ emissions. Nonetheless, the inherent variability of solar irradiance poses a significant challenge for seamlessly integrating solar power into the electrical grid. While the majority of prior research has centered on employing purely time series-based methodologies for solar forecasting, only a limited number of studies have taken into account factors such as cloud cover or the surrounding physical context.
In this paper, we put forth a deep learning architecture designed to harness spatio-temporal context using satellite data, to attain highly accurate day-ahead time-series forecasting for any given station, with a particular emphasis on forecasting Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI). We also suggest a methodology to extract a distribution for each time step prediction, which can serve as a very valuable measure of uncertainty attached to the forecast. When evaluating models, we propose a testing scheme in which we separate particularly difficult examples from easy ones, in order to capture the model performances in crucial situations, which in the case of this study are the days suffering from varying cloudy conditions. Furthermore, we present a new multi-modal dataset gathering satellite imagery over a large zone and time series for solar irradiance and other related physical variables from multiple geographically diverse solar stations. Our approach exhibits robust performance in solar irradiance forecasting, including zero-shot generalization tests at unobserved solar stations, and holds great promise in promoting the effective integration of solar power into the grid.
tl;dr: An end-to-end neuro-symbolic learning framework that fuses neural network training, symbol grounding, and logical constraint synthesis
Neuro-symbolic systems combine the abilities of neural perception and logical reasoning. However, end-to-end learning of neuro-symbolic systems is still an unsolved challenge. This paper proposes a natural framework that fuses neural network training, symbol grounding, and logical constraint synthesis into a coherent and efficient end-to-end learning process. The capability of this framework comes from the improved interactions between the neural and the symbolic parts of the system in both the training and inference stages. Technically, to bridge the gap between the continuous neural network and the discrete logical constraint, we introduce a difference-of-convex programming technique to relax the logical constraints while maintaining their precision. We also employ cardinality constraints as the language for logical constraint learning and incorporate a trust region method to avoid the degeneracy of logical constraint in learning. Both theoretical analyses and empirical evaluations substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
tl;dr: We propose a new class of stable probabilistic numerical solvers for stiff ordinary differential equations.
Probabilistic solvers provide a flexible and efficient framework for simulation, uncertainty quantification, and inference in dynamical systems. However, like standard solvers, they suffer performance penalties for certain stiff systems, where small steps are required not for reasons of numerical accuracy but for the sake of stability. This issue is greatly alleviated in semi-linear problems by the probabilistic exponential integrators developed in this paper. By including the fast, linear dynamics in the prior, we arrive at a class of probabilistic integrators with favorable properties. Namely, they are proven to be L-stable, and in a certain case reduce to a classic exponential integrator---with the added benefit of providing a probabilistic account of the numerical error. The method is also generalized to arbitrary non-linear systems by imposing piece-wise semi-linearity on the prior via Jacobians of the vector field at the previous estimates, resulting in probabilistic exponential Rosenbrock methods. We evaluate the proposed methods on multiple stiff differential equations and demonstrate their improved stability and efficiency over established probabilistic solvers. The present contribution thus expands the range of problems that can be effectively tackled within probabilistic numerics.
779. Neural Harmonics: Bridging Spectral Embedding and Matrix Completion in Self-Supervised Learning
tl;dr: self-supervised learning methods perform low-rank matrix recovery
Self-supervised methods received tremendous attention thanks to their seemingly heuristic approach to learning representations that respect the semantics of the data without any apparent supervision in the form of labels. A growing body of literature is already being published in an attempt to build a coherent and theoretically grounded understanding of the workings of a zoo of losses used in modern self-supervised representation learning methods.
In this paper, we attempt to provide an understanding from the perspective of a Laplace operator and connect the inductive bias stemming from the augmentation process to a low-rank matrix completion problem.
To this end, we leverage the results from low-rank matrix completion to provide theoretical analysis on the convergence of modern SSL methods and a key property that affects their downstream performance.
tl;dr: Deep neural networks are becoming worse models of neurons in primate inferotemporal cortex as they have improved on ImageNet.
One of the most impactful findings in computational neuroscience over the past decade is that the object recognition accuracy of deep neural networks (DNNs) correlates with their ability to predict neural responses to natural images in the inferotemporal (IT) cortex. This discovery supported the long-held theory that object recognition is a core objective of the visual cortex, and suggested that more accurate DNNs would serve as better models of IT neuron responses to images. Since then, deep learning has undergone a revolution of scale: billion parameter-scale DNNs trained on billions of images are rivaling or outperforming humans at visual tasks including object recognition. Have today's DNNs become more accurate at predicting IT neuron responses to images as they have grown more accurate at object recognition?
Surprisingly, across three independent experiments, we find that this is not the case. DNNs have become progressively worse models of IT as their accuracy has increased on ImageNet. To understand why DNNs experience this trade-off and evaluate if they are still an appropriate paradigm for modeling the visual system, we turn to recordings of IT that capture spatially resolved maps of neuronal activity elicited by natural images. These neuronal activity maps reveal that DNNs trained on ImageNet learn to rely on different visual features than those encoded by IT and that this problem worsens as their accuracy increases. We successfully resolved this issue with the neural harmonizer, a plug-and-play training routine for DNNs that aligns their learned representations with humans. Our results suggest that harmonized DNNs break the trade-off between ImageNet accuracy and neural prediction accuracy that assails current DNNs and offer a path to more accurate models of biological vision. Our work indicates that the standard approach for modeling IT with task-optimized DNNs needs revision, and other biological constraints, including human psychophysics data, are needed to accurately reverse-engineer the visual cortex.
tl;dr: We proposed a fine-grained goal prompting method for image-goal navigation. It significantly outperforms baselines, surpassing SOTA by 8% in success rate with 1/50 model size.
Learning to navigate to an image-specified goal is an important but challenging task for autonomous systems like household robots. The agent is required to well understand and reason the location of the navigation goal from a picture shot in the goal position. Existing methods try to solve this problem by learning a navigation policy, which captures semantic features of the goal image and observation image independently and lastly fuses them for predicting a sequence of navigation actions. However, these methods suffer from two major limitations. 1) They may miss detailed information in the goal image, and thus fail to reason the goal location. 2) More critically, it is hard to focus on the goal-relevant regions in the observation image, because they attempt to understand observation without goal conditioning. In this paper, we aim to overcome these limitations by designing a Fine-grained Goal Prompting (\sexyname) method for image-goal navigation. In particular, we leverage fine-grained and high-resolution feature maps in the goal image as prompts to perform conditioned embedding, which preserves detailed information in the goal image and guides the observation encoder to pay attention to goal-relevant regions. Compared with existing methods on the image-goal navigation benchmark, our method brings significant performance improvement on 3 benchmark datasets (\textit{i.e.,} Gibson, MP3D, and HM3D). Especially on Gibson, we surpass the state-of-the-art success rate by 8\% with only 1/50 model size.
tl;dr: We propose a novel RLHF framework called SeqRank, which significantly improves the human feedback efficiency and performance of RLHF.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) alleviates the problem of designing a task-specific reward function in reinforcement learning by learning it from human preference. However, existing RLHF models are considered inefficient as they produce only a single preference data from each human feedback. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel RLHF framework called SeqRank, that uses sequential preference ranking to enhance the feedback efficiency. Our method samples trajectories in a sequential manner by iteratively selecting a defender from the set of previously chosen trajectories $\mathcal{K}$ and a challenger from the set of unchosen trajectories $\mathcal{U}\setminus\mathcal{K}$, where $\mathcal{U}$ is the replay buffer. We propose two trajectory comparison methods with different defender sampling strategies: (1) sequential pairwise comparison that selects the most recent trajectory and (2) root pairwise comparison that selects the most preferred trajectory from $\mathcal{K}$. We construct a data structure and rank trajectories by preference to augment additional queries. The proposed method results in at least 39.2% higher average feedback efficiency than the baseline and also achieves a balance between feedback efficiency and data dependency. We examine the convergence of the empirical risk and the generalization bound of the reward model with Rademacher complexity. While both trajectory comparison methods outperform conventional pairwise comparison, root pairwise comparison improves the average reward in locomotion tasks and the average success rate in manipulation tasks by 29.0% and 25.0%, respectively. The source code and the videos are provided in the supplementary material.
tl;dr: We study the proportional infinite-depth-and-width limit of Transformers at initialization in order to devise a modified attention mechanism that avoids known degeneracy issues.
In deep learning theory, the covariance matrix of the representations serves as a
proxy to examine the network’s trainability. Motivated by the success of Transform-
ers, we study the covariance matrix of a modified Softmax-based attention model
with skip connections in the proportional limit of infinite-depth-and-width. We
show that at initialization the limiting distribution can be described by a stochastic
differential equation (SDE) indexed by the depth-to-width ratio. To achieve a
well-defined stochastic limit, the Transformer’s attention mechanism is modified
by centering the Softmax output at identity, and scaling the Softmax logits by a
width-dependent temperature parameter. We examine the stability of the network
through the corresponding SDE, showing how the scale of both the drift and diffu-
sion can be elegantly controlled with the aid of residual connections. The existence
of a stable SDE implies that the covariance structure is well-behaved, even for very
large depth and width, thus preventing the notorious issues of rank degeneracy
in deep attention models. Finally, we show, through simulations, that the SDE
provides a surprisingly good description of the corresponding finite-size model.
We coin the name shaped Transformer for these architectural modifications.
We propose Neural 3D Articulated object Prior (NAP), the first 3D deep generative model to synthesize 3D articulated object models. Despite the extensive research on generating 3D static objects, compositions, or scenes, there are hardly any approaches on capturing the distribution of articulated objects, a common object category for human and robot interaction. To generate articulated objects, we first design a novel articulation tree/graph parameterization and then apply a diffusion-denoising probabilistic model over this representation where articulated objects can be generated via denoising from random complete graphs. In order to capture both the geometry and the motion structure whose distribution will affect each other, we design a graph denoising network for learning the reverse diffusion process. We propose a novel distance that adapts widely used 3D generation metrics to our novel task to evaluate generation quality. Experiments demonstrate our high performance in articulated object generation as well as its applications on conditioned generation, including Part2Motion, PartNet-Imagination, Motion2Part, and GAPart2Object.
Google's quantum supremacy announcement has received broad questions from academia and industry due to the debatable estimate of 10,000 years' running time for the classical simulation task on the Summit supercomputer. Has quantum supremacy already come? Or will it come in one or two decades later? To avoid hasty advertisements of quantum supremacy by tech giants or quantum startups and eliminate the cost of dedicating a team to the classical simulation task, we advocate an open-source approach to maintain a trustable benchmark performance. In this paper, we take a reinforcement learning approach for the classical simulation of quantum circuits and demonstrate its great potential by reporting an estimated simulation time of less than 4 days, a speedup of 5.40x over the state-of-the-art method. Specifically, we formulate the classical simulation task as a tensor network contraction ordering problem using the K-spin Ising model and employ a novel Hamiltonina-based reinforcement learning algorithm. Then, we establish standard criteria to evaluate the performance of classical simulation of quantum circuits. We develop a dozen of massively parallel environments to simulate quantum circuits. We open-source our parallel gym environments and benchmarks. We hope the AI/ML community and quantum physics community will collaborate to maintain reference curves for validating an unequivocal first demonstration of empirical quantum supremacy.
tl;dr: We proposed anchored value iteration and achieve an accelerated rate for the Bellman consistency and optimality operators.
Value Iteration (VI) is foundational to the theory and practice of modern reinforcement learning, and it is known to converge at a $\mathcal{O}(\gamma^k)$-rate. Surprisingly, however, the optimal rate for the VI setup was not known, and finding a general acceleration mechanism has been an open problem. In this paper, we present the first accelerated VI for both the Bellman consistency and optimality operators. Our method, called Anc-VI, is based on an \emph{anchoring} mechanism (distinct from Nesterov's acceleration), and it reduces the Bellman error faster than standard VI. In particular, Anc-VI exhibits a $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$-rate for $\gamma\approx 1$ or even $\gamma=1$, while standard VI has rate $\mathcal{O}(1)$ for $\gamma\ge 1-1/k$, where $k$ is the iteration count. We also provide a complexity lower bound matching the upper bound up to a constant factor of $4$, thereby establishing optimality of the accelerated rate of Anc-VI. Finally, we show that the anchoring mechanism provides the same benefit in the approximate VI and Gauss--Seidel VI setups as well.
tl;dr: (i) We introduce a new diagnostic for critical initialization in a wide class of deep neural networks. (ii) We show that a combination of Normalization layers and residual connections leads to everywhere-critical architectures.
Deep neural networks are notorious for defying theoretical treatment. However, when the number of parameters in each layer tends to infinity, the network function is a Gaussian process (GP) and quantitatively predictive description is possible. Gaussian approximation allows one to formulate criteria for selecting hyperparameters, such as variances of weights and biases, as well as the learning rate. These criteria rely on the notion of criticality defined for deep neural networks. In this work we describe a new practical way to diagnose criticality. We introduce *partial Jacobians* of a network, defined as derivatives of preactivations in layer $l$ with respect to preactivations in layer $l_0\leq l$. We derive recurrence relations for the norms of partial Jacobians and utilize these relations to analyze criticality of deep fully connected neural networks with LayerNorm and/or residual connections. We derive and implement a simple and cheap numerical test that allows one to select optimal initialization for a broad class of deep neural networks; containing fully connected, convolutional and normalization layers. Using these tools we show quantitatively that proper stacking of the LayerNorm (applied to preactivations) and residual connections leads to an architecture that is critical for any initialization. Finally, we apply our methods to analyze ResNet and MLP-Mixer architectures; demonstrating the everywhere-critical regime.
tl;dr: We improve offline RL performance on imbalanced datasets
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning a decision-making policy without interaction with the environment. This makes it particularly beneficial in situations where such interactions are costly.
However, a known challenge for offline RL algorithms is the distributional mismatch between the state-action distributions of the learned policy and the dataset, which can significantly impact performance. State-of-the-art algorithms address it by constraining the policy to align with the state-action pairs in the dataset. However, this strategy struggles on datasets that predominantly consist of trajectories collected by low-performing policies and only a few trajectories from high-performing ones. Indeed, the constraint to align with the data leads the policy to imitate low-performing behaviors predominating the dataset. Our key insight to address this issue is to constrain the policy to the policy that collected the good parts of the dataset rather than all data. To this end, we optimize the importance sampling weights to emulate sampling data from a data distribution generated by a nearly optimal policy. Our method exhibits considerable performance gains (up to five times better) over the existing approaches in state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms over 72 imbalanced datasets with varying types of imbalance.
tl;dr: Fully vectorizable multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmark in JAX allowing experimentation on affordable hardware
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) research is faced with a trade-off: it either uses complex environments requiring large compute resources, which makes it inaccessible to researchers with limited resources, or relies on simpler dynamics for faster execution, which makes the transferability of the results to more realistic tasks challenging. Motivated by these challenges, we present Gigastep, a fully vectorizable, MARL environment implemented in JAX, capable of executing up to one billion environment steps per second on consumer-grade hardware. Its design allows for comprehensive MARL experimentation, including a complex, high-dimensional space defined by 3D dynamics, stochasticity, and partial observations. Gigastep supports both collaborative and adversarial tasks, continuous and discrete action spaces, and provides RGB image and feature vector observations, allowing the evaluation of a wide range of MARL algorithms.
We validate Gigastep's usability through an extensive set of experiments, underscoring its role in widening participation and promoting inclusivity in the MARL research community.
There are a number of diverging hypotheses about the neural text degeneration problem, i.e., generating repetitive and dull loops, which makes this problem both interesting and confusing. In this work, we aim to advance our understanding by presenting a straightforward and fundamental explanation from the data perspective. Our preliminary investigation reveals a strong correlation between the degeneration issue and the presence of repetitions in training data. Subsequent experiments also demonstrate that by selectively dropping out the attention to repetitive words in training data, degeneration can be significantly minimized. Furthermore, our empirical analysis illustrates that prior works addressing the degeneration issue from various standpoints, such as the high-inflow words, the likelihood objective, and the self-reinforcement phenomenon, can be interpreted by one simple explanation. That is, penalizing the repetitions in training data is a common and fundamental factor for their effectiveness. Moreover, our experiments reveal that penalizing the repetitions in training data remains critical even when considering larger model sizes and instruction tuning.
Audio-visual learning has been a major pillar of multi-modal machine learning, where the community mostly focused on its $\textit{modality-aligned}$ setting, $\textit{i.e.}$, the audio and visual modality are $\textit{both}$ assumed to signal the prediction target.
With the Look, Listen, and Parse dataset (LLP), we investigate the under-explored $\textit{unaligned}$ setting, where the goal is to recognize audio and visual events in a video with only weak labels observed.
Such weak video-level labels only tell what events happen without knowing the modality they are perceived (audio, visual, or both).
To enhance learning in this challenging setting, we incorporate large-scale contrastively pre-trained models as the modality teachers. A simple, effective, and generic method, termed $\textbf{V}$isual-$\textbf{A}$udio $\textbf{L}$abel Elab$\textbf{or}$ation (VALOR), is innovated to harvest modality labels for the training events.
Empirical studies show that the harvested labels significantly improve an attentional baseline by $\textbf{8.0}$ in average F-score (Type@AV).
Surprisingly, we found that modality-independent teachers outperform their modality-fused counterparts since they are noise-proof from the other potentially unaligned modality.
Moreover, our best model achieves the new state-of-the-art on all metrics of LLP by a substantial margin ($\textbf{+5.4}$ F-score for Type@AV). VALOR is further generalized to Audio-Visual Event Localization and achieves the new state-of-the-art as well.
Finding the proper depth $d$ of a graph convolutional network (GCN) that provides strong representation ability has drawn significant attention, yet nonetheless largely remains an open problem for the graph learning community. Although noteworthy progress has been made, the depth or the number of layers of a corresponding GCN is realized by a series of graph convolution operations, which naturally makes $d$ a positive integer ($d \in \mathbb{N}+$). An interesting question is whether breaking the constraint of $\mathbb{N}+$ by making $d$ a real number ($d \in \mathbb{R}$) can bring new insights into graph learning mechanisms. In this work, by redefining GCN's depth $d$ as a trainable parameter continuously adjustable within $(-\infty,+\infty)$, we open a new door of controlling its signal processing capability to model graph homophily/heterophily (nodes with similar/dissimilar labels/attributes tend to be inter-connected). A simple and powerful GCN model TEDGCN, is proposed to retain the simplicity of GCN and meanwhile automatically search for the optimal $d$ without the prior knowledge regarding whether the input graph is homophilic or heterophilic. Negative-valued $d$ intrinsically enables high-pass frequency filtering functionality via augmented topology for graph heterophily. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of TEDGCN on node classification tasks for a variety of homophilic and heterophilic graphs.
Deep neural network (DNN) inference based on secure 2-party computation (2PC) can offer cryptographically-secure privacy protection but suffers from orders of magnitude latency overhead due to enormous communication. Previous works heavily rely on a proxy metric of ReLU counts to approximate the communication overhead and focus on reducing the ReLUs to improve the communication efficiency. However, we observe these works achieve limited communication reduction for state-of-the-art (SOTA) 2PC protocols due to the ignorance of other linear and non-linear operations, which now contribute to the majority of communication. In this work, we present CoPriv, a framework that jointly optimizes the 2PC inference protocol and the DNN architecture. CoPriv features a new 2PC protocol for convolution based on Winograd transformation and develops DNN-aware optimization to significantly reduce the inference communication. CoPriv further develops a 2PC-aware network optimization algorithm that is compatible with the proposed protocol and simultaneously reduces the communication for all the linear and non-linear operations. We compare CoPriv with the SOTA 2PC protocol, CrypTFlow2, and demonstrate 2.1× communication reduction for both ResNet-18 and ResNet-32 on CIFAR-100. We also compare CoPriv with SOTA network optimization methods, including SNL, MetaPruning, etc. CoPriv achieves 9.98× and 3.88× online and total communication reduction with a higher accuracy compare to SNL, respectively. CoPriv also achieves 3.87× online communication reduction with more than 3% higher accuracy compared to MetaPruning.
While the expressive power and computational capabilities of graph neural networks (GNNs) have been theoretically studied, their optimization and learning dynamics, in general, remain largely unexplored. Our study undertakes the Graph Attention Network (GAT), a popular GNN architecture in which a node's neighborhood aggregation is weighted by parameterized attention coefficients. We derive a conservation law of GAT gradient flow dynamics, which explains why a high portion of parameters in GATs with standard initialization struggle to change during training. This effect is amplified in deeper GATs, which perform significantly worse than their shallow counterparts. To alleviate this problem, we devise an initialization scheme that balances the GAT network. Our approach i) allows more effective propagation of gradients and in turn enables trainability of deeper networks, and ii) attains a considerable speedup in training and convergence time in comparison to the standard initialization. Our main theorem serves as a stepping stone to studying the learning dynamics of positive homogeneous models with attention mechanisms.
Investigating the optimal stochastic process beyond Gaussian for noise injection in a score-based generative model remains an open question. Brownian motion is a light-tailed process with continuous paths, which leads to a slow convergence rate for the Number of Function Evaluation (NFE). Recent studies have shown that diffusion models suffer from mode-collapse issues on imbalanced data.
In order to overcome the limitations of Brownian motion, we introduce a novel score-based generative model referred to as Lévy-Itō Model (LIM). This model utilizes isotropic $\alpha$-stable Lévy processes. We first derive an exact reverse-time stochastic differential equation driven by the Lévy process and develop the corresponding fractional denoising score matching. The proposed generative model takes advantage of the heavy-tailed properties of the Lévy process. Our experimental results show LIM allows for faster and more diverse sampling while maintaining high fidelity compared to existing diffusion models across various image datasets such as CIFAR10, CelebA, and imbalanced dataset CIFAR10LT. Comparing our results to those of DDPM with 3.21 Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and 0.6437 Recall on the CelebA dataset, we achieve 1.58 FID and 0.7006 Recall using the same architecture. LIM shows the best performance in NFE 500 with $2\times$ faster total wall-clock time than the baseline.
tl;dr: Generate Controllable 3D Avatars from Textual Descriptions
We present \emph{DreamHuman}, a method to generate realistic animatable 3D human avatar models entirely from textual descriptions. Recent text-to-3D methods have made considerable strides in generation, but are still lacking in important aspects. Control and often spatial resolution remain limited, existing methods produce fixed rather than 3D human models that can be placed in different poses (i.e. re-posable or animatable), and anthropometric consistency for complex structures like people remains a challenge. \emph{DreamHuman} connects large text-to-image synthesis models, neural radiance fields, and statistical human body models in a novel optimization framework. This makes it possible to generate dynamic 3D human avatars with high-quality textures and learnt per-instance rigid and non rigid geometric deformations. We demonstrate that our method is capable to generate a wide variety of animatable, realistic 3D human models from text. These have diverse appearance, clothing, skin tones and body shapes, and outperform both generic text-to-3D approaches and previous text-based 3D avatar generators in visual fidelity.
Coupled oscillators are being increasingly used as the basis of machine learning (ML) architectures, for instance in sequence modeling, graph representation learning and in physical neural networks that are used in analog ML devices. We introduce an abstract class of *neural oscillators* that encompasses these architectures and prove that neural oscillators are universal, i.e, they can approximate any continuous and casual operator mapping between time-varying functions, to desired accuracy. This universality result provides theoretical justification for the use of oscillator based ML systems. The proof builds on a fundamental result of independent interest, which shows that a combination of forced harmonic oscillators with a nonlinear read-out suffices to approximate the underlying operators.
tl;dr: A universal and interactive model for all kinds of segmentation tasks with multi-modality prompts as inputs.
In this work, we present SEEM, a promotable and interactive model for segmenting everything everywhere all at once in an image. In SEEM, we propose a novel and versatile decoding mechanism that enables diverse prompting for all types of segmentation tasks, aiming at a universal interface that behaves like large language models (LLMs). More specifically, SEEM is designed with four desiderata:
i) Versatility. We introduce a new visual prompt to unify different spatial queries including points, boxes, scribbles, and masks, which can further generalize to a different referring image; ii) Compositionality. We learn a joint visual-semantic space between text and visual prompts, which facilitates the dynamic composition of two prompt types required for various segmentation tasks, as shown in Fig. 1;
iii) Interactivity. We further incorporate learnable memory prompts into the decoder to retain segmentation history through mask-guided cross-attention from the decoder to image features; iv) Semantic awareness. We use a text encoder to encode text queries and mask labels into the same semantic space for open-vocabulary segmentation. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study to validate the effectiveness of SEEM across diverse segmentation tasks. The results demonstrate that SEEM exhibits robust generalizing to unseen user intents as it learns to compose prompts of different types in a unified representation space. Our approach achieves competitive performance on interactive segmentation, generic segmentation, referring segmentation, and video object segmentation on 9 datasets with minimum 1/100 supervision in a single set of weights.
Semantic segmentation datasets often exhibit two types of imbalance: \textit{class imbalance}, where some classes appear more frequently than others and \textit{size imbalance}, where some objects occupy more pixels than others. This causes traditional evaluation metrics to be biased towards \textit{majority classes} (e.g. overall pixel-wise accuracy) and \textit{large objects} (e.g. mean pixel-wise accuracy and per-dataset mean intersection over union). To address these shortcomings, we propose the use of fine-grained mIoUs along with corresponding worst-case metrics, thereby offering a more holistic evaluation of segmentation techniques. These fine-grained metrics offer less bias towards large objects, richer statistical information, and valuable insights into model and dataset auditing. Furthermore, we undertake an extensive benchmark study, where we train and evaluate 15 modern neural networks with the proposed metrics on 12 diverse natural and aerial segmentation datasets. Our benchmark study highlights the necessity of not basing evaluations on a single metric and confirms that fine-grained mIoUs reduce the bias towards large objects. Moreover, we identify the crucial role played by architecture designs and loss functions, which lead to best practices in optimizing fine-grained metrics. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}.
Recently, text-to-image models have been thriving. Despite their powerful generative capacity, our research has uncovered a lack of robustness in this generation process. Specifically, the introduction of small perturbations to the text prompts can result in the blending of primary subjects with other categories or their complete disappearance in the generated images. In this paper, we propose **Auto-attack on Text-to-image Models (ATM)**, a gradient-based approach, to effectively and efficiently generate such perturbations. By learning a Gumbel Softmax distribution, we can make the discrete process of word replacement or extension continuous, thus ensuring the differentiability of the perturbation generation. Once the distribution is learned, ATM can sample multiple attack samples simultaneously. These attack samples can prevent the generative model from generating the desired subjects without tampering with the category keywords in the prompt. ATM has achieved a 91.1\% success rate in short-text attacks and an 81.2\% success rate in long-text attacks. Further empirical analysis revealed three attack patterns based on: 1) variability in generation speed, 2) similarity of coarse-grained characteristics, and 3) polysemy of words. The code is available at https://github.com/duchengbin8/Stable_Diffusion_is_Unstable
tl;dr: Benchmark to evaluate any LLM on syntactic and semantic parsing
Recent work has shown that generation from a prompted or fine-tuned language model can perform well at semantic parsing when the output is constrained to be a valid semantic representation. We introduce BenchCLAMP, a Benchmark to evaluate Constrained LAnguage Model Parsing, that includes context-free grammars for seven semantic parsing datasets and two syntactic parsing datasets with varied output meaning representations, as well as a constrained decoding interface to generate only valid outputs covered by these grammars. We provide low, medium, and high resource splits for each dataset, allowing accurate comparison of various language models under different data regimes. Our benchmark supports evaluation of language models using prompt-based learning as well as fine-tuning. We benchmark seven language models, including two GPT-3 variants available only through an API. Our experiments show that encoder-decoder pretrained language models can achieve similar performance or even surpass state-of-the-art methods for both syntactic and semantic parsing when the model output is constrained to be valid.
The financial markets, which involve over \$90 trillion market capitals, attract the attention of innumerable profit-seeking investors globally. Recent explosion of reinforcement learning in financial trading (RLFT) research has shown stellar performance on many quantitative trading tasks. However, it is still challenging to deploy reinforcement learning (RL) methods into real-world financial markets due to the highly composite nature of this domain, which entails design choices and interactions between components that collect financial data, conduct feature engineering, build market environments, make investment decisions, evaluate model behaviors and offers user interfaces. Despite the availability of abundant financial data and advanced RL techniques, a remarkable gap still exists between the potential and realized utilization of RL in financial trading. In particular, orchestrating an RLFT project lifecycle poses challenges in engineering (i.e. hard to build), benchmarking (i.e. hard to compare) and usability (i.e. hard to optimize, maintain and use). To overcome these challenges, we introduce TradeMaster, a holistic open-source RLFT platform that serves as a i) software toolkit, ii) empirical benchmark, and iii) user interface. Our ultimate goal is to provide infrastructures for transparent and reproducible RLFT research and facilitate their real-world deployment with industry impact. TradeMaster will be updated continuously and welcomes contributions from both RL and finance communities.
Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) are prevalent in various real-world scenarios, where each node is associated with a text description. The cornerstone of representation learning on TAGs lies in the seamless integration of textual semantics within individual nodes and the topological connections across nodes. Recent advancements in pre-trained language models (PLMs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) have facilitated effective learning on TAGs, garnering increased research interest. However, the absence of meaningful benchmark datasets and standardized evaluation procedures for TAGs has impeded progress in this field. In this paper, we propose CS-TAG, a comprehensive and diverse collection of challenging benchmark datasets for TAGs. The CS-TAG datasets are notably large in scale and encompass a wide range of domains, spanning from citation networks to purchase graphs. In addition to building the datasets, we conduct extensive benchmark experiments over CS-TAG with various learning paradigms, including PLMs, GNNs, PLM-GNN co-training methods, and the proposed novel topological pre-training of language models. In a nutshell, we provide an overview of the CS-TAG datasets, standardized evaluation procedures, and present baseline experiments. The entire CS-TAG project is publicly accessible at \url{https://github.com/sktsherlock/TAG-Benchmark}.
804. VOCE: Variational Optimization with Conservative Estimation for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning
Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms promise to learn policies that satisfy safety constraints directly in offline datasets without interacting with the environment. This arrangement is particularly important in scenarios with high sampling costs and potential dangers, such as autonomous driving and robotics. However, the influence of safety constraints and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions have made it challenging for previous methods to achieve high reward returns while ensuring safety. In this work, we propose a Variational Optimization with Conservative Eestimation algorithm (VOCE) to solve the problem of optimizing safety policies in the offline dataset. Concretely, we reframe the problem of offline safe RL using probabilistic inference, which introduces variational distributions to make the optimization of policies more flexible. Subsequently, we utilize pessimistic estimation methods to estimate the Q-value of cost and reward, which mitigates the extrapolation errors induced by OOD actions. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the VOCE algorithm achieves competitive performance across multiple experimental tasks, particularly outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of safety.
tl;dr: We propose a GFlowNet-based method to efficiently solve graph combinatorial optimization problems.
Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are often NP-hard and thus out of reach for exact algorithms, making them a tempting domain to apply machine learning methods. The highly structured constraints in these problems can hinder either optimization or sampling directly in the solution space.
On the other hand, GFlowNets have recently emerged as a powerful machinery to efficiently sample from composite unnormalized densities sequentially and have the potential to amortize such solution-searching processes in CO, as well as generate diverse solution candidates.
In this paper, we design Markov decision processes (MDPs) for different combinatorial problems and propose to train conditional GFlowNets to sample from the solution space.
Efficient training techniques are also developed to benefit long-range credit assignment.
Through extensive experiments on a variety of different CO tasks with synthetic and realistic data, we demonstrate that GFlowNet policies can efficiently find high-quality solutions.
Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/zdhNarsil/GFlowNet-CombOpt.
tl;dr: Structurally pruned models can exhibit similar benign performance while having drastic (and different) drops on adversarial tasks. We mitigate the issue with a one-shot kernel smoothness-aware grouped kernel pruning procedure requiring no extra cost.
Densely structured pruning methods utilizing simple pruning heuristics can deliver immediate compression and acceleration benefits with acceptable benign performances. However, empirical findings indicate such naively pruned networks are extremely fragile under simple adversarial attacks. Naturally, we would be interested in knowing if such a phenomenon also holds for carefully designed modern structured pruning methods. If so, then to what extent is the severity? And what kind of remedies are available?
Unfortunately, both the questions and the solution remain largely unaddressed: no prior art is able to provide a thorough investigation on the adversarial performance of modern structured pruning methods (spoiler: it is not good), yet the few works that attempt to provide mitigation often do so at various extra costs with only to-be-desired performance.
In this work, we answer both questions by fairly and comprehensively investigating the adversarial performance of 10+ popular structured pruning methods. Solution-wise, we take advantage of *Grouped Kernel Pruning (GKP)*'s recent success in pushing densely structured pruning freedom to a more fine-grained level. By mixing up kernel smoothness — a classic robustness-related kernel-level metric — into a modified GKP procedure, we present a one-shot-post-train-weight-dependent GKP method capable of advancing SOTA performance on both the benign and adversarial scale, while requiring no extra (in fact, often less) cost than a standard pruning procedure. Please refer to our [GitHub repository](https://github.com/henryzhongsc/adv_robust_gkp) for code implementation, tool sharing, and model checkpoints.
tl;dr: We introduce a benchmark of Evolutionary Optimization methods tailored to machine learning applications.
Recently, the Deep Learning community has become interested in evolutionary optimization (EO) as a means to address hard optimization problems, e.g. meta-learning through long inner loop unrolls or optimizing non-differentiable operators. One core reason for this trend has been the recent innovation in hardware acceleration and compatible software -- making distributed population evaluations much easier than before. Unlike for gradient descent-based methods though, there is a lack of hyperparameter understanding and best practices for EO – arguably due to severely less `graduate student descent' and benchmarking being performed for EO methods. Additionally, classical benchmarks from the evolutionary community provide few practical insights for Deep Learning applications. This poses challenges for newcomers to hardware-accelerated EO and hinders significant adoption. Hence, we establish a new benchmark of EO methods (NEB) tailored toward Deep Learning applications and exhaustively evaluate traditional and meta-learned EO. We investigate core scientific questions including resource allocation, fitness shaping, normalization, regularization & scalability of EO. The benchmark is open-sourced at https://github.com/neuroevobench/neuroevobench under Apache-2.0 license.
tl;dr: We present the first approach to safety verification for continuous-time decision-tree policies.
Decision trees have gained popularity as interpretable surrogate models for learning-based control policies. However, providing safety guarantees for systems controlled by decision trees is an open challenge. We show that the problem is undecidable even for systems with the simplest dynamics, and PSPACE-complete for finite-horizon properties. The latter can be verified for discrete-time systems via bounded model checking. However, for continuous-time systems, such an approach requires discretization, thereby weakening the guarantees for the original system. This paper presents the first algorithm to directly verify decision-tree controlled system in continuous time. The key aspect of our method is exploiting the decision-tree structure to propagate a set-based approximation through the decision nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by verifying safety of several decision trees distilled to imitate neural-network policies for nonlinear systems.
tl;dr: OceanBench is a framework that provides applied ML researchers to easily interface with domain-specific data, preprocessing routines and benchmark metrics.
The ocean is a crucial component of the Earth's system.
It profoundly influences human activities and plays a critical role in climate regulation.
Our understanding has significantly improved over the last decades with the advent of satellite remote sensing data, allowing us to capture essential sea surface quantities over the globe, e.g., sea surface height (SSH).
Despite their ever-increasing abundance, ocean satellite data presents challenges for information extraction due to their sparsity and irregular sampling, signal complexity, and noise.
Machine learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated their capabilities in dealing with large-scale, complex signals.
Therefore we see an opportunity for these ML models to harness the full extent of the information contained in ocean satellite data.
However, data representation and relevant evaluation metrics can be the defining factors when determining the success of applied ML.
The processing steps from the raw observation data to a ML-ready state and from model outputs to interpretable quantities require domain expertise, which can be a significant barrier to entry for ML researchers.
In addition, imposing fixed processing steps, like committing to specific variables, regions, and geometries, will narrow the scope of ML models and their potential impact on real-world applications.
OceanBench is a unifying framework that provides standardized processing steps that comply with domain-expert standards.
It is designed with a flexible and pedagogical abstraction: it a) provides plug-and-play data and pre-configured pipelines for ML researchers to benchmark their models w.r.t. ML and domain-related baselines and b) provides a transparent and configurable framework for researchers to customize and extend the pipeline for their tasks.
In this work, we demonstrate the OceanBench framework through a first edition dedicated to SSH interpolation challenges.
We provide datasets and ML-ready benchmarking pipelines for the long-standing problem of interpolating observations from simulated ocean satellite data, multi-modal and multi-sensor fusion issues, and transfer-learning to real ocean satellite observations.
The OceanBench framework is available at https://github.com/jejjohnson/oceanbench and the dataset registry is available at https://github.com/quentinf00/oceanbench-data-registry.
The distillation of ranking models has become an important topic in both academia and industry. In recent years, several advanced methods have been proposed to tackle this problem, often leveraging ranking information from teacher rankers that is absent in traditional classification settings. To date, there is no well-established consensus on how to evaluate this class of models. Moreover, inconsistent benchmarking on a wide range of tasks and datasets make it difficult to assess or invigorate advances in this field. This paper first examines representative prior arts on ranking distillation, and raises three questions to be answered around methodology and reproducibility. To that end, we propose a systematic and unified benchmark, Ranking Distillation Suite (RD-Suite), which is a suite of tasks with 4 large real-world datasets, encompassing two major modalities (textual and numeric) and two applications (standard distillation and distillation transfer). RD-Suite consists of benchmark results that challenge some of the common wisdom in the field, and the release of datasets with teacher scores and evaluation scripts for future research. RD-Suite paves the way towards better understanding of ranking distillation, facilities more research in this direction, and presents new challenges.
No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR-VQA) plays an essential role in improving the viewing experience of end-users. Driven by deep learning, recent NR-VQA models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have achieved outstanding performance. To build a reliable and practical assessment system, it is of great necessity to evaluate their robustness. However, such issue has received little attention in the academic community. In this paper, we make the first attempt to evaluate the robustness of NR-VQA models against
adversarial attacks, and propose a patch-based random search method for black-box attack. Specifically, considering both the attack effect on quality score and the visual quality of adversarial video, the attack problem is formulated as misleading the estimated quality score under the constraint of just-noticeable difference (JND). Built upon such formulation, a novel loss function called Score-Reversed Boundary Loss is designed to push the adversarial video’s estimated quality score far away from its ground-truth score towards a specific boundary, and the JND constraint is modeled as a strict $L_2$ and $L_\infty$ norm restriction. By this means, both white-box and black-box attacks can be launched in an effective and imperceptible manner. The source code is available at https://github.com/GZHU-DVL/AttackVQA.
tl;dr: A benchmark database of over 5,000 waveform recordings from ventricular tachycardia alarms in intensive care unit patients.
False arrhythmia alarms in intensive care units (ICUs) are a continuing problem despite considerable effort from industrial and academic algorithm developers. Of all life-threatening arrhythmias, ventricular tachycardia (VT) stands out as the most challenging arrhythmia to detect reliably. We introduce a new annotated VT alarm database, VTaC (Ventricular Tachycardia annotated alarms from ICUs) consisting of over 5,000 waveform recordings with VT alarms triggered by bedside monitors in the ICU. Each VT alarm waveform in the dataset has been labeled by at least two independent human expert annotators. The dataset encompasses data collected from ICUs in two major US hospitals and includes data from three leading bedside monitor manufacturers, providing a diverse and representative collection of alarm waveform data. Each waveform recording comprises at least two electrocardiogram (ECG) leads and one or more pulsatile waveforms, such as photoplethysmogram (PPG or PLETH) and arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveforms. We demonstrate the utility of this new benchmark dataset for the task of false arrhythmia alarm reduction, and present performance of multiple machine learning approaches, including conventional supervised machine learning, deep learning, semi-supervised learning, and generative approaches for the task of VT false alarm reduction.
tl;dr: We fuse a frozen LLM with pre-trained visual models to demonstrate a wide suite of multimodal abilities, including stronger text-to-image generation on tasks with longer and more complex language.
We propose a method to fuse frozen text-only large language models (LLMs) with pre-trained image encoder and decoder models, by mapping between their embedding spaces. Our model demonstrates a wide suite of multimodal capabilities: image retrieval, novel image generation, and multimodal dialogue. Ours is the first approach capable of conditioning on arbitrarily interleaved image and text inputs to generate coherent image (and text) outputs. To achieve strong performance on image generation, we propose an efficient mapping network to ground the LLM to an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model. This mapping network translates hidden representations of text into the embedding space of the visual models, enabling us to leverage the strong text representations of the LLM for visual outputs. Our approach outperforms baseline generation models on tasks with longer and more complex language. In addition to novel image generation, our model is also capable of image retrieval from a prespecified dataset, and decides whether to retrieve or generate at inference time. This is done with a learnt decision module which conditions on the hidden representations of the LLM. Our model exhibits a wider range of capabilities compared to prior multimodal language models. It can process image-and-text inputs, and produce retrieved images, generated images, and generated text — outperforming non-LLM based generation models across several text-to-image tasks that measure context dependence.
814. DinoSR: Self-Distillation and Online Clustering for Self-supervised Speech Representation Learning
In this paper, we introduce self-distillation and online clustering for self-supervised speech representation learning (DinoSR) which combines masked language modeling, self-distillation, and online clustering. We show that these concepts complement each other and result in a strong representation learning model for speech. DinoSR first extracts contextualized embeddings from the input audio with a teacher network, then runs an online clustering system on the embeddings to yield a machine-discovered phone inventory, and finally uses the discretized tokens to guide a student network. We show that DinoSR surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance in several downstream tasks, and provide a detailed analysis of the model and the learned discrete units. The source code will be made available after the anonymity period.
tl;dr: We show that knowledge distillation acts as a form of partial variance reduction, which can reduce the stochastic gradient noise, but may not eliminate it completely, depending on the properties of the “teacher” model.
Knowledge distillation is a popular approach for enhancing the performance of "student" models, with lower representational capacity, by taking advantage of more powerful "teacher" models. Despite its apparent simplicity, the underlying mechanics behind knowledge distillation (KD) are not yet fully understood. In this work, we shed new light on the inner workings of this method, by examining it from an optimization perspective. Specifically, we show that, in the context of linear and deep linear models, KD can be interpreted as a novel type of stochastic variance reduction mechanism. We provide a detailed convergence analysis of the resulting dynamics, which hold under standard assumptions for both strongly-convex and non-convex losses, showing that KD acts as a form of \emph{partial variance reduction}, which can reduce the stochastic gradient noise, but may not eliminate it completely, depending on the properties of the ``teacher'' model. Our analysis puts further emphasis on the need for careful parametrization of KD, in particular w.r.t. the weighting of the distillation loss, and is validated empirically on both linear models and deep neural networks.
816. CSMeD: Bridging the Dataset Gap in Automated Citation Screening for Systematic Literature Reviews
tl;dr: CSMeD is a consolidated meta-dataset addressing the limitations of existing datasets in evaluating automated citation screening for systematic literature reviews, offering unified access to 325 SLRs and introducing a new full text screening dataset.
Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) play an essential role in summarising, synthesising and validating scientific evidence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques to automate the identification of relevant studies for SLRs. However, the lack of standardised evaluation datasets makes comparing the performance of such automated literature screening systems difficult. In this paper, we analyse the citation screening evaluation datasets, revealing that many of the available datasets are either too small, suffer from data leakage or have limited applicability to systems treating automated literature screening as a classification task, as opposed to, for example, a retrieval or question-answering task. To address these challenges, we introduce CSMED, a meta-dataset consolidating nine publicly released collections, providing unified access to 325 SLRs from the fields of medicine and computer science. CSMED serves as a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating the performance of automated citation screening models. Additionally, we introduce CSMED-FT, a new dataset designed explicitly for evaluating the full text publication screening task. To demonstrate the utility of CSMED, we conduct experiments and establish baselines on new datasets.
Vanilla spiking neurons in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) use charge-fire-reset neuronal dynamics, which can only be simulated serially and can hardly learn long-time dependencies. We find that when removing reset, the neuronal dynamics can be reformulated in a non-iterative form and parallelized. By rewriting neuronal dynamics without reset to a general formulation, we propose the Parallel Spiking Neuron (PSN), which generates hidden states that are independent of their predecessors, resulting in parallelizable neuronal dynamics and extremely high simulation speed. The weights of inputs in the PSN are fully connected, which maximizes the utilization of temporal information. To avoid the use of future inputs for step-by-step inference, the weights of the PSN can be masked, resulting in the masked PSN. By sharing weights across time-steps based on the masked PSN, the sliding PSN is proposed to handle sequences of varying lengths. We evaluate the PSN family on simulation speed and temporal/static data classification, and the results show the overwhelming advantage of the PSN family in efficiency and accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study about parallelizing spiking neurons and can be a cornerstone for the spiking deep learning research. Our codes are available at https://github.com/fangwei123456/Parallel-Spiking-Neuron.
In adaptive data analysis, a mechanism gets $n$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution $\cal{D}$, and
is required to provide accurate estimations to a sequence of adaptively chosen statistical queries with respect to $\cal{D}$.
Hardt and Ullman (FOCS 2014) and Steinke and Ullman (COLT 2015) showed that in general, it is computationally hard to answer more than $\Theta(n^2)$ adaptive queries, assuming the existence of one-way functions.
However, these negative results strongly rely on an adversarial model that significantly advantages the adversarial analyst over the mechanism, as the analyst, who chooses the adaptive queries, also chooses the underlying distribution $\cal{D}$.
This imbalance raises questions with respect to the applicability of the obtained hardness results -- an analyst who has complete knowledge of the underlying distribution $\cal{D}$ would have little need, if at all, to issue statistical queries to a mechanism which only holds a finite number of samples from $\cal{D}$.
We consider more restricted adversaries, called \emph{balanced}, where each such adversary consists of two separated algorithms: The \emph{sampler} who is the entity that chooses the distribution and provides the samples to the mechanism, and the \emph{analyst} who chooses the adaptive queries, but has no prior knowledge of the underlying distribution (and hence has no a priori advantage with respect to the mechanism).
We improve the quality of previous lower bounds by revisiting them using an efficient \emph{balanced} adversary, under standard public-key cryptography assumptions. We show that these stronger hardness assumptions are unavoidable in the sense that any computationally bounded \emph{balanced} adversary that has the structure of all known attacks, implies the existence of public-key cryptography.
The Naïve Mean Field (NMF) approximation is widely employed in modern Machine Learning due to the huge computational gains it bestows on the statistician. Despite its popularity in practice, theoretical guarantees for high-dimensional problems are only available under strong structural assumptions (e.g. sparsity). Moreover, existing theory often does not explain empirical observations noted in the existing literature.
In this paper, we take a step towards addressing these problems by deriving sharp asymptotic characterizations for the NMF approximation in high-dimensional linear regression. Our results apply to a wide class of natural priors and allow for model mismatch (i.e. the underlying statistical model can be different from the fitted model). We work under an iid Gaussian design and the proportional asymptotic regime, where the number of features and number of observations grow at a proportional rate. As a consequence of our asymptotic characterization, we establish two concrete corollaries: (a) we establish the inaccuracy of the NMF approximation for the log-normalizing constant in this regime, and (b) we provide theoretical results backing the empirical observation that the NMF approximation can be overconfident in terms of uncertainty quantification.
Our results utilize recent advances in the theory of Gaussian comparison inequalities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of these ideas to the analysis of Bayesian variational inference problems. Our theoretical results are corroborated by numerical experiments. Lastly, we believe our results can be generalized to non-Gaussian designs and provide empirical evidence to support it.
820. H2RBox-v2: Incorporating Symmetry for Boosting Horizontal Box Supervised Oriented Object Detection
With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection, e.g. in autonomous driving and remote sensing, the recently proposed paradigm involving weakly-supervised detector H2RBox for learning rotated box (RBox) from the more readily-available horizontal box (HBox) has shown promise. This paper presents H2RBox-v2, to further bridge the gap between HBox-supervised and RBox-supervised oriented object detection. Specifically, we propose to leverage the reflection symmetry via flip and rotate consistencies, using a weakly-supervised network branch similar to H2RBox, together with a novel self-supervised branch that learns orientations from the symmetry inherent in visual objects. The detector is further stabilized and enhanced by practical techniques to cope with peripheral issues e.g. angular periodicity. To our best knowledge, H2RBox-v2 is the first symmetry-aware self-supervised paradigm for oriented object detection. In particular, our method shows less susceptibility to low-quality annotation and insufficient training data compared to H2RBox. Specifically, H2RBox-v2 achieves very close performance to a rotation annotation trained counterpart -- Rotated FCOS: 1) DOTA-v1.0/1.5/2.0: 72.31%/64.76%/50.33% vs. 72.44%/64.53%/51.77%; 2) HRSC: 89.66% vs. 88.99%; 3) FAIR1M: 42.27% vs. 41.25%.
tl;dr: Adaptive statistical lower bound for semi-supervised learning linear classification in 2-GMM data model.
Prior theoretical and empirical works have established that semi-supervised learning algorithms can leverage the unlabeled data to improve over the labeled sample complexity of supervised learning (SL) algorithms. However, existing theoretical work focuses on regimes where the unlabeled data is sufficient to learn a good decision boundary using unsupervised learning (UL) alone. This begs the question: Can SSL algorithms simultaneously improve upon both UL and SL? To this end, we derive a tight lower bound for 2-Gaussian mixture models that explicitly depends on the labeled and the unlabeled dataset size as well as the signal-to-noise ratio of the mixture distribution. Surprisingly, our result implies that no SSL algorithm improves upon the minimax-optimal statistical error rates of SL or UL algorithms for these distributions. Nevertheless, in our real-world experiments, SSL algorithms can often outperform UL and SL algorithms. In summary, our work suggests that while it is possible to prove the performance gains of SSL algorithms, this would require careful tracking of constants in the theoretical analysis.
tl;dr: We propose SyncDiffusion, a module that synchronizes multiple diffusions to create coherent image montages.
The remarkable capabilities of pretrained image diffusion models have been utilized not only for generating fixed-size images but also for creating panoramas. However, naive stitching of multiple images often results in visible seams. Recent techniques have attempted to address this issue by performing joint diffusions in multiple windows and averaging latent features in overlapping regions. However, these approaches, which focus on seamless montage generation, often yield incoherent outputs by blending different scenes within a single image. To overcome this limitation, we propose SyncDiffusion, a plug-and-play module that synchronizes multiple diffusions through gradient descent from a perceptual similarity loss. Specifically, we compute the gradient of the perceptual loss using the predicted denoised images at each denoising step, providing meaningful guidance for achieving coherent montages. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method produces significantly more coherent outputs compared to previous methods (66.35% vs. 33.65% in our user study) while still maintaining fidelity (as assessed by GIQA) and compatibility with the input prompt (as measured by CLIP score). We further demonstrate the versatility our method across three plug-and-play applications: layout-guided image generation, conditional image generation and 360-degree panorama generation. Our project page is at https://syncdiffusion.github.io.
Today's online advertisers procure digital ad impressions through interacting with autobidding platforms: advertisers convey high level procurement goals via setting levers such as budget, target return-on-investment, max cost per click, etc.. Then ads platforms subsequently procure impressions on advertisers' behalf, and report final procurement conversions (e.g. click) to advertisers. In practice, advertisers may receive minimal information on platforms' procurement details, and procurement outcomes are subject to non-stationary factors like seasonal patterns, occasional system corruptions, and market trends which make it difficult for advertisers to optimize lever decisions effectively. Motivated by this, we present an online learning framework that helps advertisers dynamically optimize ad platform lever decisions while subject to general long-term constraints in a realistic bandit feedback environment with non-stationary procurement outcomes. In particular, we introduce a primal-dual algorithm for online decision making with multi-dimension decision variables, bandit feedback and long-term uncertain constraints. We show that our algorithm achieves low regret in many worlds when procurement outcomes are generated through procedures that are stochastic, adversarial, adversarially corrupted, periodic, and ergodic, respectively, without having to know which procedure is the ground truth. Finally, we emphasize that our proposed algorithm and theoretical results extend beyond the applications of online advertising.
tl;dr: We combine a hypothesis-testing strategy with topological rules, enhancing explainable retrieval when a fine-tuning set is unavailable.
This paper presents an innovative approach to enhancing explainable image retrieval, particularly in situations where a fine-tuning set is unavailable. The widely-used SPatial verification (SP) method, despite its efficacy, relies on a spatial model and the hypothesis-testing strategy for instance recognition, leading to inherent limitations, including the assumption of planar structures and neglect of topological relations among features. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a pioneering technique that replaces the spatial model with a topological one within the RANSAC process. We propose bio-inspired saccade and fovea functions to verify the topological consistency among features, effectively circumventing the issues associated with SP's spatial model. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SP, achieving state-of-the-art performance in non-fine-tuning retrieval. Furthermore, our approach can enhance performance when used in conjunction with fine-tuned features. Importantly, our method retains high explainability and is lightweight, offering a practical and adaptable solution for a variety of real-world applications.
825. Multimodal Deep Learning Model Unveils Behavioral Dynamics of V1 Activity in Freely Moving Mice
tl;dr: We propose a novel multimodal deep-learning model that integrates visual, behavioral, and temporal dynamics and achieves state-of-the-art predictions of V1 activity in freely-moving mice.
Despite their immense success as a model of macaque visual cortex, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have struggled to predict activity in visual cortex of the mouse, which is thought to be strongly dependent on the animal’s behavioral state. Furthermore, most computational models focus on predicting neural responses to static images presented under head fixation, which are dramatically different from the dynamic, continuous visual stimuli that arise during movement in the real world. Consequently, it is still unknown how natural visual input and different behavioral variables may integrate over time to generate responses in primary visual cortex (V1). To address this, we introduce a multimodal recurrent neural network that integrates gaze-contingent visual input with behavioral and temporal dynamics to explain V1 activity in freely moving mice. We show that the model achieves state-of-the-art predictions of V1 activity during free exploration and demonstrate the importance of each component in an extensive ablation study. Analyzing our model using maximally activating stimuli and saliency maps, we reveal new insights into cortical function, including the prevalence of mixed selectivity for behavioral variables in mouse V1. In summary, our model offers a comprehensive deep-learning framework for exploring the computational principles underlying V1 neurons in freely-moving animals engaged in natural behavior.
Learning fine-grained embeddings from coarse labels is a challenging task due to limited label granularity supervision, i.e., lacking the detailed distinctions required for fine-grained tasks. The task becomes even more demanding when attempting few-shot fine-grained recognition, which holds practical significance in various applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that embeds visual embeddings into a hyperbolic space and enhances their discriminative ability with a hierarchical cosine margins manner. Specifically, the hyperbolic space offers distinct advantages, including the ability to capture hierarchical relationships and increased expressive power, which favors modeling fine-grained objects. Based on the hyperbolic space, we further enforce relatively large/small similarity margins between coarse/fine classes, respectively, yielding the so-called hierarchical cosine margins manner. While enforcing similarity margins in the regular Euclidean space has become popular for deep embedding learning, applying it to the hyperbolic space is non-trivial and validating the benefit for coarse-to-fine generalization is valuable. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method, yielding state-of-the-art results surpassing competing methods.
Designing robust machine learning systems remains an open problem, and there is a need for benchmark problems that cover both environmental changes and evaluation on a downstream task. In this work, we introduce AVOIDDS, a realistic object detection benchmark for the vision-based aircraft detect-and-avoid problem. We provide a labeled dataset consisting of 72,000 photorealistic images of intruder aircraft with various lighting conditions, weather conditions, relative geometries, and geographic locations. We also provide an interface that evaluates trained models on slices of this dataset to identify changes in performance with respect to changing environmental conditions. Finally, we implement a fully-integrated, closed-loop simulator of the vision-based detect-and-avoid problem to evaluate trained models with respect to the downstream collision avoidance task. This benchmark will enable further research in the design of robust machine learning systems for use in safety-critical applications. The AVOIDDS dataset and code are publicly available at https://purl.stanford.edu/hj293cv5980 and https://github.com/sisl/VisionBasedAircraftDAA, respectively.
tl;dr: We develop a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning tasks.
When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning tasks. We model delegation as a principal-agent game, in which accurate learning can be incentivized by the principal using performance-based contracts. Adapting the economic theory of contract design to this setting, we define budget-optimal contracts and prove they take a simple threshold form under reasonable assumptions. In the binary-action case, the optimality of such contracts is shown to be equivalent to the classic Neyman-Pearson lemma, establishing a formal connection between contract design and statistical hypothesis testing. Empirically, we demonstrate that budget-optimal contracts can be constructed using small-scale data, leveraging recent advances in the study of learning curves and scaling laws. Performance and economic outcomes are evaluated using synthetic and real-world classification tasks.
tl;dr: A meta-algorithm that tunes the LR of any base optimizer, with empirical evaluation.
We introduce a technique for tuning the learning rate scale factor of any base optimization algorithm and schedule automatically, which we call Mechanic. Our method provides a practical realization of recent theoretical reductions for accomplishing a similar goal in online convex optimization. We rigorously evaluate Mechanic on a range of large scale deep learning tasks with varying batch sizes, schedules, and base optimization algorithms. These experiments demonstrate that depending on the problem, Mechanic either comes very close to, matches or even improves upon manual tuning of learning rates.
tl;dr: This work characterizes the optimal latent distribution for generative models from the perspective of minimizing model complexity and proposes a two-stage training scheme that achieves practical improvements on GAN, VQGAN and DiT.
In generative modeling, numerous successful approaches leverage a low-dimensional latent space, e.g., Stable Diffusion models the latent space induced by an encoder and generates images through a paired decoder. Although the selection of the latent space is empirically pivotal, determining the optimal choice and the process of identifying it remain unclear. In this study, we aim to shed light on this under-explored topic by rethinking the latent space from the perspective of model complexity. Our investigation starts with the classic generative adversarial networks (GANs). Inspired by the GAN training objective, we propose a novel "distance" between the latent and data distributions, whose minimization coincides with that of the generator complexity. The minimizer of this distance is characterized as the optimal data-dependent latent that most effectively capitalizes on the generator's capacity. Then, we consider parameterizing such a latent distribution by an encoder network and propose a two-stage training strategy called Decoupled Autoencoder (DAE), where the encoder is only updated in the first stage with an auxiliary decoder and then frozen in the second stage while the actual decoder is being trained. DAE can improve the latent distribution and as a result, improve the generative performance. Our theoretical analyses are corroborated by comprehensive experiments on various models such as VQGAN and Diffusion Transformer, where our modifications yield significant improvements in sample quality with decreased model complexity.
tl;dr: Our work examines the synergy between self-training and contrastive learning, finding complementary benefits under distribution shift setups and up to 8% accuracy improvement in certain datasets.
Self-training and contrastive learning have emerged as leading techniques for incorporating unlabeled data, both under distribution shift (unsupervised domain adaptation) and when it is absent (semi-supervised learning). However, despite the popularity and compatibility of these techniques, their efficacy in combination remains surprisingly unexplored. In this paper, we first undertake a systematic empirical investigation of this combination, finding (i) that in domain adaptation settings, self-training and contrastive learning offer significant complementary gains; and (ii) that in semi-supervised learning settings, surprisingly, the benefits are not synergistic. Across eight distribution shift datasets (e.g., BREEDs, WILDS), we demonstrate that the combined method obtains 3--8\% higher accuracy than either approach independently. Finally, we theoretically analyze these techniques in a simplified model of distribution shift demonstrating scenarios under which the features produced by contrastive learning can yield a good initialization for self-training to further amplify gains and achieve optimal performance, even when either method alone would fail.
tl;dr: We provide a formal framework for discussions of locality in normative plasticity models, fit existing models into this framework, and discuss implications for experimental tests.
In recent years, many researchers have proposed new models for synaptic plasticity in the brain based on principles of machine learning. The central motivation has been the development of learning algorithms that are able to learn difficult tasks while qualifying as "biologically plausible". However, the concept of a biologically plausible learning algorithm is only heuristically defined as an algorithm that is potentially implementable by biological neural networks. Further, claims that neural circuits could implement any given algorithm typically rest on an amorphous concept of "locality" (both in space and time). As a result, it is unclear what many proposed local learning algorithms actually predict biologically, and which of these are consequently good candidates for experimental investigation. Here, we address this lack of clarity by proposing formal and operational definitions of locality. Specifically, we define different classes of locality, each of which makes clear what quantities cannot be included in a learning rule if an algorithm is to qualify as local with respect to a given (biological) constraint. We subsequently use this framework to distill testable predictions from various classes of biologically plausible synaptic plasticity models that are robust to arbitrary choices about neural network architecture. Therefore, our framework can be used to guide claims of biological plausibility and to identify potential means of experimentally falsifying a proposed learning algorithm for the brain.
tl;dr: We propose a benchmark to evaluate methods that enable machine learning in the presence label noise. We also introduce a design space for labeling error detection models.
Machine learning (ML) models are only as good as the data they are trained on. But recent studies have found datasets widely used to train and evaluate ML models, e.g. _ImageNet_, to have pervasive labeling errors. Erroneous labels on the train set hurt ML models' ability to generalize, and they impact evaluation and model selection using the test set. Consequently, learning in the presence of labeling errors is an active area of research, yet this field lacks a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate these methods. Most of these methods are evaluated on a few computer vision datasets with significant variance in the experimental protocols. With such a large pool of methods and inconsistent evaluation, it is also unclear how ML practitioners can choose the right models to assess label quality in their data. To this end, we propose a benchmarking environment _AQuA_ to rigorously evaluate methods that enable machine learning in the presence of label noise. We also introduce a design space to delineate concrete design choices of label error detection models. We hope that our proposed design space and benchmark enable practitioners to choose the right tools to improve their label quality and that our benchmark enables objective and rigorous evaluation of machine learning tools facing mislabeled data.
tl;dr: We solve several open questions about the computational complexity of training two-layer neural networks.
We study the parameterized complexity of training two-layer neural networks with respect to the dimension of the input data and the number of hidden neurons, considering ReLU and linear threshold activation functions. Albeit the computational complexity of these problems has been studied numerous times in recent years, several questions are still open. We answer questions by Arora et al. (ICLR 2018) and Khalife and Basu (IPCO 2022) showing that both problems are NP-hard for two dimensions, which excludes any polynomial-time algorithm for constant dimension. We also answer a question by Froese et al. (JAIR 2022) proving W[1]-hardness for four ReLUs (or two linear threshold neurons) with zero training error. Finally, in the ReLU case, we show fixed-parameter tractability for the combined parameter number of dimensions and number of ReLUs if the network is assumed to compute a convex map. Our results settle the complexity status regarding these parameters almost completely.
Given the intractably large size of the space of proofs, any model that is capable of general deductive reasoning must generalize to proofs of greater complexity. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) possess some abstract deductive reasoning ability given chain-of-thought prompts. However, they have primarily been tested on proofs using modus ponens or of a specific size, and from the same distribution as the in-context examples. To measure the general deductive reasoning ability of LLMs, we test on a broad set of deduction rules and measure their ability to generalize to more complex proofs from simpler demonstrations from multiple angles: depth-, width-, and compositional generalization. To facilitate systematic exploration, we construct a new synthetic and programmable reasoning dataset that enables control over deduction rules and proof complexity. Our experiments on four LLMs of various sizes and training objectives show that they are able to generalize to compositional proofs. However, they have difficulty generalizing to longer proofs, and they require explicit demonstrations to produce hypothetical subproofs, specifically in proof by cases and proof by contradiction.
tl;dr: We study if Q-value advice from an untrusted machine-learned policy provides more benefits for the consistency and robustness tradeoff than the black-box advice in the context of learning-augmented online algorithms for MDPs.
We study the tradeoff between consistency and robustness in the context of a single-trajectory time-varying Markov Decision Process (MDP) with untrusted machine-learned advice. Our work departs from the typical approach of treating advice as coming from black-box sources by instead considering a setting where additional information about how the advice is generated is available. We prove a first-of-its-kind consistency and robustness tradeoff given Q-value advice under a general MDP model that includes both continuous and discrete state/action spaces. Our results highlight that utilizing Q-value advice enables dynamic pursuit of the better of machine-learned advice and a robust baseline, thus result in near-optimal performance guarantees, which provably improves what can be obtained solely with black-box advice.
tl;dr: We build a tabular benchmark with specified distribution shift patterns, which highlights the importance of future research that builds an understanding of how distributions differ.
Different distribution shifts require different algorithmic and operational
interventions. Methodological research must be grounded by the specific
shifts they address. Although nascent benchmarks provide a promising
empirical foundation, they \emph{implicitly} focus on covariate
shifts, and the validity of empirical findings depends on the type of shift,
e.g., previous observations on algorithmic performance can fail to be valid when
the $Y|X$ distribution changes. We conduct a thorough investigation of
natural shifts in 5 tabular datasets over 86,000 model configurations, and
find that $Y|X$-shifts are most prevalent. To encourage researchers to
develop a refined language for distribution shifts, we build
``WhyShift``, an empirical testbed of curated real-world shifts where
we characterize the type of shift we benchmark performance over. Since
$Y|X$-shifts are prevalent in tabular settings, we \emph{identify covariate
regions} that suffer the biggest $Y|X$-shifts and discuss implications for
algorithmic and data-based interventions. Our testbed highlights the
importance of future research that builds an understanding of why
distributions differ.
Supervised machine learning approaches have been increasingly used in accelerating electronic structure prediction as surrogates of first-principle computational methods, such as density functional theory (DFT). While numerous quantum chemistry datasets focus on chemical properties and atomic forces, the ability to achieve accurate and efficient prediction of the Hamiltonian matrix is highly desired, as it is the most important and fundamental physical quantity that determines the quantum states of physical systems and chemical properties. In this work, we generate a new Quantum Hamiltonian dataset, named as QH9, to provide precise Hamiltonian matrices for 2,399 molecular dynamics trajectories and 130,831 stable molecular geometries, based on the QM9 dataset. By designing benchmark tasks with various molecules, we show that current machine learning models have the capacity to predict Hamiltonian matrices for arbitrary molecules. Both the QH9 dataset and the baseline models are provided to the community through an open-source benchmark, which can be highly valuable for developing machine learning methods and accelerating molecular and materials design for scientific and technological applications. Our benchmark is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenDFT/QHBench}.
We consider a robust reinforcement learning problem, where a learning agent learns from a simulated training environment. To account for the model mis-specification between this training environment and the true environment due to lack of data, we adopt a formulation of Bayesian risk MDP (BRMDP) with infinite horizon, which uses Bayesian posterior to estimate the transition model and impose a risk functional to account for the model uncertainty. Observations from the real environment that is out of the agent's control arrive periodically and are utilized by the agent to update the Bayesian posterior to reduce model uncertainty. We theoretically demonstrate that BRMDP balances the trade-off between robustness and conservativeness, and we further develop a multi-stage Bayesian risk-averse Q-learning algorithm to solve BRMDP with streaming observations from real environment. The proposed algorithm learns a risk-averse yet optimal policy that depends on the availability of real-world observations. We provide a theoretical guarantee of strong convergence for the proposed algorithm.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are hard to deploy on edge devices due to its high computation and storage complexities. As a common practice for model compression, network pruning consists of two major categories: unstructured and structured pruning, where unstructured pruning constantly performs better. However, unstructured pruning presents a structured pattern at high pruning rates, which limits its performance. To this end, we propose a Rank-based PruninG (RPG) method to maintain the ranks of sparse weights in an adversarial manner. In each step, we minimize the low-rank approximation error for the weight matrices using singular value decomposition, and maximize their distance by pushing the weight matrices away from its low rank approximation. This rank-based optimization objective guides sparse weights towards a high-rank topology. The proposed method is conducted in a gradual pruning fashion to stabilize the change of rank during training. Experimental results on various datasets and different tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in high sparsity. The proposed RPG outperforms the state-of-the-art performance by 1.13\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet in ResNet-50 with 98\% sparsity. The codes are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/Pruning/RPG and https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/RPG.
841. Minimax Risks and Optimal Procedures for Estimation under Functional Local Differential Privacy
tl;dr: We investigate how functional local differential privacy preserves statistical utility by analyzing the minimax risk for univariate mean estimation and nonparametric density estimation.
As concerns about data privacy continue to grow, differential privacy (DP) has emerged as a fundamental concept that aims to guarantee privacy by ensuring individuals' indistinguishability in data analysis. Local differential privacy (LDP) is a rigorous type of DP that requires individual data to be privatized before being sent to the collector, thus removing the need for a trusted third party to collect data. Among the numerous (L)DP-based approaches, functional DP has gained considerable attention in the DP community because it connects DP to statistical decision-making by formulating it as a hypothesis-testing problem and also exhibits Gaussian-related properties. However, the utility of privatized data is generally lower than that of non-private data, prompting research into optimal mechanisms that maximize the statistical utility for given privacy constraints. In this study, we investigate how functional LDP preserves the statistical utility by analyzing minimax risks of univariate mean estimation as well as nonparametric density estimation. We leverage the contraction property of functional LDP mechanisms and classical information-theoretical bounds to derive private minimax lower bounds. Our theoretical study reveals that it is possible to establish an interpretable, continuous balance between the statistical utility and privacy level, which has not been achieved under the $\epsilon$-LDP framework. Furthermore, we suggest minimax optimal mechanisms based on Gaussian LDP (a type of functional LDP) that achieve the minimax upper bounds and show via a numerical study that they are superior to the counterparts derived under $\epsilon$-LDP. The theoretical and empirical findings of this work suggest that Gaussian LDP should be considered a reliable standard for LDP.
tl;dr: We give an efficient active tester-learner pair for halfspaces in the testable learning framework defined by Rubinfeld and Vasilyan (2022).
We give the first polynomial-time algorithm for the testable learning
of halfspaces in the presence of adversarial label noise under the Gaussian distribution. In the recently introduced testable learning
model, one is required to produce a tester-learner such that if the data passes the tester, then one can trust the output of the robust learner on the data. Our tester-learner runs in time $\text{poly}(d/\epsilon)$ and outputs a halfspace with misclassification error $O(\text{opt})+\epsilon$, where $\text{opt}$ is the 0-1 error of the best fitting halfspace. At a technical level, our algorithm employs an iterative soft localization technique enhanced with appropriate testers to ensure that the data distribution is sufficiently similar to a Gaussian. Finally, our algorithm can be readily adapted to yield an efficient and testable active learner requiring only $d ~ \text{polylog}(1/\epsilon)$ labeled examples.
In computer vision, models must be able to adapt to changes in image resolution to effectively carry out tasks such as image segmentation; This is known as scale-equivariance. Recent works have made progress in developing scale-equivariant convolutional neural networks, e.g., through weight-sharing and kernel resizing. However, these networks are not truly scale-equivariant in practice. Specifically, they do not consider anti-aliasing as they formulate the down-scaling operation in the continuous domain. To address this shortcoming, we directly formulate down-scaling in the discrete domain with consideration of anti-aliasing. We then propose a novel architecture based on Fourier layers to achieve truly scale-equivariant deep nets, i.e., absolute zero equivariance-error. Following prior works, we test this model on MNIST-scale and STL-10 datasets. Our proposed model achieves competitive classification performance while maintaining zero equivariance-error.
tl;dr: This paper proposes OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark and open-source toolbox for spatio-temporal predictive learning that supports 14 state-of-the-art recurrent-based and recurrent-free models.
Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the diverse settings, complex implementation, and difficult reproducibility. Without standardization, comparisons can be unfair and insights inconclusive. To address this dilemma, we propose OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark for spatio-temporal predictive learning that categorizes prevalent approaches into recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. OpenSTL provides a modular and extensible framework implementing various state-of-the-art methods. We conduct standard evaluations on datasets across various domains, including synthetic moving object trajectory, human motion, driving scenes, traffic flow, and weather forecasting. Based on our observations, we provide a detailed analysis of how model architecture and dataset properties affect spatio-temporal predictive learning performance. Surprisingly, we find that recurrent-free models achieve a good balance between efficiency and performance than recurrent models. Thus, we further extend the common MetaFormers to boost recurrent-free spatial-temporal predictive learning. We open-source the code and models at https://github.com/chengtan9907/OpenSTL.
Certifiable, adaptive uncertainty estimates for unknown quantities are an essential ingredient of sequential decision-making algorithms. Standard approaches rely on problem-dependent concentration results and are limited to a specific combination of parameterization, noise family, and estimator. In this paper, we revisit the likelihood-based inference principle and propose to use \emph{likelihood ratios} to construct \emph{any-time valid} confidence sequences without requiring specialized treatment in each application scenario. Our method is especially suitable for problems with well-specified likelihoods, and the resulting sets always maintain the prescribed coverage in a model-agnostic manner. The size of the sets depends on a choice of estimator sequence in the likelihood ratio. We discuss how to provably choose the best sequence of estimators and shed light on connections to online convex optimization with algorithms such as Follow-the-Regularized-Leader. To counteract the initially large bias of the estimators, we propose a reweighting scheme that also opens up deployment in non-parametric settings such as RKHS function classes. We provide a \emph{non-asymptotic} analysis of the likelihood ratio confidence sets size for generalized linear models, using insights from convex duality and online learning. We showcase the practical strength of our method on generalized linear bandit problems, survival analysis, and bandits with various additive noise distributions.
tl;dr: This paper theoretically explains the underline mechanism that makes simple concepts more likely to be learned by DNNs.
This paper theoretically explains the intuition that simple concepts are more likely to be learned by deep neural networks (DNNs) than complex concepts. In fact, recent studies have observed [24, 15] and proved [26] the emergence of interactive concepts in a DNN, i.e., it is proven that a DNN usually only encodes a small number of interactive concepts, and can be considered to use their interaction effects to compute inference scores. Each interactive concept is encoded by the DNN to represent the collaboration between a set of input variables. Therefore, in this study, we aim to theoretically explain that interactive concepts involving more input variables (i.e., more complex concepts) are more difficult to learn. Our finding clarifies the exact conceptual complexity that boosts the learning difficulty.
This paper studies two fundamental problems in regularized Graphon Mean-Field Games (GMFGs). First, we establish the existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE) of any $\lambda$-regularized GMFG (for $\lambda\geq 0$). This result relies on weaker conditions than previous works analyzing both unregularized GMFGs ($\lambda=0$) and $\lambda$-regularized MFGs, which are special cases of GMFGs. Second, we propose provably efficient algorithms to learn the NE in weakly monotone GMFGs, motivated by Lasry and Lions (2007). Previous literature either only analyzed continuous-time algorithms or required extra conditions to analyze discrete-time algorithms. In contrast, we design a discrete-time algorithm and derive its convergence rate solely under weakly monotone conditions. Furthermore, we develop and analyze the action-value function estimation procedure during the online learning process, which is absent from algorithms for monotone GMFGs. This serves as a sub-module in our optimization algorithm. The efficiency of the designed algorithm is corroborated by empirical evaluations.
tl;dr: We propose a spatial-temporal diffusion probabilistic model for GPS trajectory generation.
Pervasive integration of GPS-enabled devices and data acquisition technologies has led to an exponential increase in GPS trajectory data, fostering advancements in spatial-temporal data mining research. Nonetheless, GPS trajectories contain personal geolocation information, rendering serious privacy concerns when working with raw data. A promising approach to address this issue is trajectory generation, which involves replacing original data with generated, privacy-free alternatives. Despite the potential of trajectory generation, the complex nature of human behavior and its inherent stochastic characteristics pose challenges in generating high-quality trajectories.
In this work, we propose a spatial-temporal diffusion probabilistic model for trajectory generation (DiffTraj). This model effectively combines the generative abilities of diffusion models with the spatial-temporal features derived from real trajectories. The core idea is to reconstruct and synthesize geographic trajectories from white noise through a reverse trajectory denoising process. Furthermore, we propose a Trajectory UNet (Traj-UNet) deep neural network to embed conditional information and accurately estimate noise levels during the reverse process. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that DiffTraj can be intuitively applied to generate high-fidelity trajectories while retaining the original distributions. Moreover, the generated results can support downstream trajectory analysis tasks and significantly outperform other methods in terms of geo-distribution evaluations.
tl;dr: Improvements to the architecture and training of current state-of-the-art synchrony-based model that facilitates it to group multi-object datasets with colour images and simultaenous represent more than three objects.
Current state-of-the-art object-centric models use slots and attention-based routing for binding. However, this class of models has several conceptual limitations: the number of slots is hardwired; all slots have equal capacity; training has high computational cost; there are no object-level relational factors within slots. Synchrony-based models in principle can address these limitations by using complex-valued activations which store binding information in their phase components. However, working examples of such synchrony-based models have been developed only very recently, and are still limited to toy grayscale datasets and simultaneous storage of less than three objects in practice. Here we introduce architectural modifications and a novel contrastive learning method that greatly improve the state-of-the-art synchrony-based model. For the first time, we obtain a class of synchrony-based models capable of discovering objects in an unsupervised manner in multi-object color datasets and simultaneously representing more than three objects.
tl;dr: We investigate how an adversary could impose exploitable behaviors on instruction-tuned LLMs via data poisoning.
Instruction tuning is an effective technique to align large language models (LLMs) with human intent. In this work, we investigate how an adversary can exploit instruction tuning by injecting specific instruction-following examples into the training data that intentionally changes the model's behavior. For example, an adversary can achieve content injection by injecting training examples that mention target content and eliciting such behavior from downstream models. To achieve this goal, we propose \textit{AutoPoison}, an automated data poisoning pipeline. It naturally and coherently incorporates versatile attack goals into poisoned data with the help of an oracle LLM. We showcase two example attacks: content injection and over-refusal attacks, each aiming to induce a specific exploitable behavior. We quantify and benchmark the strength and the stealthiness of our data poisoning scheme. Our results show that AutoPoison allows an adversary to change a model's behavior by poisoning only a small fraction of data while maintaining a high level of stealthiness in the poisoned examples. We hope our work sheds light on how data quality affects the behavior of instruction-tuned models and raises awareness of the importance of data quality for responsible deployments of LLMs.
tl;dr: In this work, we build a benchmark for Multi-Domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (MESS) that allows to holistically analyze the performance across a wide range of domain-specific datasets like medicine, engineering, and agriculture.
While semantic segmentation has seen tremendous improvements in the past, there are still significant labeling efforts necessary and the problem of limited generalization to classes that have not been present during training. To address this problem, zero-shot semantic segmentation makes use of large self-supervised vision-language models, allowing zero-shot transfer to unseen classes. In this work, we build a benchmark for Multi-domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (MESS), which allows a holistic analysis of performance across a wide range of domain-specific datasets such as medicine, engineering, earth monitoring, biology, and agriculture. To do this, we reviewed 120 datasets, developed a taxonomy, and classified the datasets according to the developed taxonomy. We select a representative subset consisting of 22 datasets and propose it as the MESS benchmark. We evaluate eight recently published models on the proposed MESS benchmark and analyze characteristics for the performance of zero-shot transfer models. The toolkit is available at https://github.com/blumenstiel/MESS.
Bayesian persuasion studies the problem faced by an informed sender who strategically discloses information to influence the behavior of an uninformed receiver. Recently, a growing attention has been devoted to settings where the sender and the receiver interact sequentially, in which the receiver's decision-making problem is usually modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). However, the literature focuses on computing optimal information-revelation policies (a.k.a. signaling schemes) under the restrictive assumption that the receiver acts myopically, selecting actions to maximize the one-step utility and disregarding future rewards. This is justified by the fact that, when the receiver is farsighted and thus considers future rewards, finding an optimal Markovian signaling scheme is NP-hard. In this paper, we show that Markovian signaling schemes do not constitute the "right" class of policies. Indeed, differently from most of the MDPs settings, we show that Markovian signaling schemes are not optimal, and general history-dependent signaling schemes should be considered. Moreover, we also show that history-dependent signaling schemes circumvent the negative complexity results affecting Markovian signaling schemes. Formally, we design an algorithm that computes an optimal and $\epsilon$-persuasive history-dependent signaling scheme in time polynomial in ${1}/{\epsilon}$ and in the instance size. The crucial challenge is that general history-dependent signaling schemes cannot be represented in polynomial space. Nevertheless, we introduce a convenient subclass of history-dependent signaling schemes, called promise-form, which are as powerful as general history-dependent ones and efficiently representable. Intuitively, promise-form signaling schemes compactly encode histories in the form of honest promises on future receiver's rewards.
853. A Framework for Fast and Stable Representations of Multiparameter Persistent Homology Decompositions
Topological data analysis (TDA) is an area of data science that focuses on using invariants from algebraic topology to provide multiscale shape descriptors for geometric data sets such as point clouds. One of the most important such descriptors is persistent homology, which encodes the change in shape as a filtration parameter changes; a typical parameter is the feature scale. For many data sets, it is useful to simultaneously vary multiple filtration parameters, for example feature scale and density. While the theoretical properties of single parameter persistent homology are well understood, less is known about the multiparameter case. A central question is the problem of representing multiparameter persistent homology by elements of a vector space for integration with standard machine learning algorithms. Existing approaches to this problem either ignore most of the multiparameter information to reduce to the one-parameter case or are heuristic and potentially unstable in the face of noise. In this article, we introduce a new general representation framework that leverages recent results on decompositions of multiparameter persistent homology. This framework is rich in information, fast to compute, and encompasses previous approaches. Moreover, we establish theoretical stability guarantees under this framework as well as efficient algorithms for practical computation, making this framework an applicable and versatile tool for analyzing geometric and point cloud data. We validate our stability results and algorithms with numerical experiments that demonstrate statistical convergence, prediction accuracy, and fast running times on several real data sets.
tl;dr: We unify LayerNorm and RMSNorm in pre-normalization Transformers and propose equivalent and efficient Transformer variants.
Transformers have achieved great success in machine learning applications.
Normalization techniques, such as Layer Normalization (LayerNorm, LN) and Root Mean Square Normalization (RMSNorm), play a critical role in accelerating and stabilizing the training of Transformers.
While LayerNorm recenters and rescales input vectors, RMSNorm only rescales the vectors by their RMS value.
Despite being more computationally efficient, RMSNorm may compromise the representation ability of Transformers.
There is currently no consensus regarding the preferred normalization technique, as some models employ LayerNorm while others utilize RMSNorm, especially in recent large language models.
It is challenging to convert Transformers with one normalization to the other type.
While there is an ongoing disagreement between the two normalization types,
we propose a solution to unify two mainstream Transformer architectures, Pre-LN and Pre-RMSNorm Transformers.
By removing the inherent redundant mean information in the main branch of Pre-LN Transformers, we can reduce LayerNorm to RMSNorm, achieving higher efficiency.
We further propose the Compressed RMSNorm (CRMSNorm) and Pre-CRMSNorm Transformer based on a lossless compression of the zero-mean vectors.
We formally establish the equivalence of Pre-LN, Pre-RMSNorm, and Pre-CRMSNorm Transformer variants in both training and inference.
It implies that Pre-LN Transformers can be substituted with Pre-(C)RMSNorm counterparts at almost no cost, offering the same arithmetic functionality along with free efficiency improvement.
Experiments demonstrate that we can reduce the training and inference time of Pre-LN Transformers by 1% - 10%.
tl;dr: We propose an approach for minimal contiguous conformal prediction sets for ordinal classification with cardinality guarantees using non-parametric modelling of unimodal class distributions
Ordinal classification (OC), i.e., labeling instances along classes with a natural ordering, is common in multiple applications such as size or budget based recommendations and disease severity labeling. Often in practical scenarios, it is desirable to obtain a small set of likely classes with a guaranteed high chance of including the true class. Recent works on conformal prediction (CP) address this problem for the classification setting with non-ordered labels but the resulting prediction sets (PS) are often non-contiguous and unsuitable for ordinal classification. In this work, we propose a framework to adapt existing CP methods to generate contiguous sets with guaranteed coverage and minimal cardinality. Our framework employs a novel non-parametric approach for modeling unimodal distributions. Empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our method outperforms SOTA baselines by 4% on Accuracy@K and 8% on PS size.
tl;dr: Topological Parallax compares a trained model to a reference dataset to determine whether they have similar multiscale geometric structure, which we argue is a desirable property..
For safety and robustness of AI systems, we introduce _topological parallax_ as a
theoretical and computational tool that compares a trained model to a reference dataset to determine whether they have similar multiscale geometric structure.
Our proofs and examples show that this geometric similarity between dataset and model is essential
to trustworthy interpolation and perturbation, and we conjecture that this new concept will add value to the current debate regarding the unclear relationship between "overfitting"' and "generalization'' in applications of deep-learning.
In typical deep-learning applications, an explicit geometric description of the model is
impossible, but parallax can estimate topological features (components, cycles, voids, etc.)
in the model by examining the effect on the Rips complex of geodesic distortions using the reference dataset.
Thus, parallax indicates whether the model shares similar multiscale geometric features with the dataset.
Parallax presents theoretically via topological data analysis [TDA] as a bi-filtered persistence module,
and the key properties of this module are stable under perturbation of the reference dataset.
tl;dr: We offer a theoretical analysis investigating the factors contributing to the neural prediction error in terms of the spectral properties of deep neural network models and brain responses.
The representations of neural networks are often compared to those of biological systems by performing regression between the neural network responses and those measured from biological systems. Many different state-of-the-art deep neural networks yield similar neural predictions, but it remains unclear how to differentiate among models that perform equally well at predicting neural responses. To gain insight into this, we use a recent theoretical framework that relates the generalization error from regression to the spectral properties of the model and the target. We apply this theory to the case of regression between model activations and neural responses and decompose the neural prediction error in terms of the model eigenspectra, alignment of model eigenvectors and neural responses, and the training set size. Using this decomposition, we introduce geometrical measures to interpret the neural prediction error. We test a large number of deep neural networks that predict visual cortical activity and show that there are multiple types of geometries that result in low neural prediction error as measured via regression. The work demonstrates that carefully decomposing representational metrics can provide interpretability of how models are capturing neural activity and points the way towards improved models of neural activity.
tl;dr: A simulated environment enables multi-agent reinforcement learning for order fulfillment.
The dramatic growth of global e-commerce has led to a surge in demand for efficient and cost-effective order fulfillment which can increase customers' service levels and sellers' competitiveness. However, managing order fulfillment is challenging due to a series of interdependent online sequential decision-making problems. To clear this hurdle, rather than solving the problems separately as attempted in some recent researches, this paper proposes a method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning to integratively solve the series of interconnected problems, encompassing order handling, packing and pickup, storage, order consolidation, and last-mile delivery. In particular, we model the integrated problem as a Markov game, wherein a team of agents learns a joint policy via interacting with a simulated environment. Since no simulated environment supporting the complete order fulfillment problem exists, we devise Order Fulfillment COoperative mUlti-agent Reinforcement learning Scalable Environment (OFCOURSE) in the OpenAI Gym style, which allows reproduction and re-utilization to build customized applications. By constructing the fulfillment system in OFCOURSE, we optimize a joint policy that solves the integrated problem, facilitating sequential order-wise operations across all fulfillment units and minimizing the total cost of fulfilling all orders within the promised time. With OFCOURSE, we also demonstrate that the joint policy learned by multi-agent reinforcement learning outperforms the combination of locally optimal policies. The source code of OFCOURSE is available at: https://github.com/GitYiheng/ofcourse.
This paper focuses on addressing the practical yet challenging problem of model heterogeneity in federated learning, where clients possess models with different network structures. To track this problem, we propose a novel framework called pFedHR, which leverages heterogeneous model reassembly to achieve personalized federated learning. In particular, we approach the problem of heterogeneous model personalization as a model-matching optimization task on the server side. Moreover, pFedHR automatically and dynamically generates informative and diverse personalized candidates with minimal human intervention. Furthermore, our proposed heterogeneous model reassembly technique mitigates the adverse impact introduced by using public data with different distributions from the client data to a certain extent. Experimental results demonstrate that pFedHR outperforms baselines on three datasets under both IID and Non-IID settings. Additionally, pFedHR effectively reduces the adverse impact of using different public data and dynamically generates diverse personalized models in an automated manner.
860. MVDoppler: Unleashing the Power of Multi-View Doppler for MicroMotion-based Gait Classification
tl;dr: A novel dataset and corresponding baseline models for multi-view Doppler-based gait classification
Modern perception systems rely heavily on high-resolution cameras, LiDARs, and advanced deep neural networks, enabling exceptional performance across various applications. However, these optical systems predominantly depend on geometric features and shapes of objects, which can be challenging to capture in long-range perception applications. To overcome this limitation, alternative approaches such as Doppler-based perception using high-resolution radars have been proposed.
Doppler-based systems are capable of measuring micro-motions of targets remotely and with very high precision. When compared to geometric features, the resolution of micro-motion features exhibits significantly greater resilience to the influence of distance. However, the true potential of Doppler-based perception has yet to be fully realized due to several factors. These include the unintuitive nature of Doppler signals, the limited availability of public Doppler datasets, and the current datasets' inability to capture the specific co-factors that are unique to Doppler-based perception, such as the effect of the radar's observation angle and the target's motion trajectory.
This paper introduces a new large multi-view Doppler dataset together with baseline perception models for micro-motion-based gait analysis and classification. The dataset captures the impact of the subject's walking trajectory and radar's observation angle on the classification performance. Additionally, baseline multi-view data fusion techniques are provided to mitigate these effects. This work demonstrates that sub-second micro-motion snapshots can be sufficient for reliable detection of hand movement patterns and even changes in a pedestrian's walking behavior when distracted by their phone. Overall, this research not only showcases the potential of Doppler-based perception, but also offers valuable solutions to tackle its fundamental challenges.
tl;dr: We train an instruction-following agent for Minecraft by finetuning VPT with both text and visual goals.
Constructing AI models that respond to text instructions is challenging, especially for sequential decision-making tasks. This work introduces an instruction-tuned Video Pretraining (VPT) model for Minecraft called STEVE-1, demonstrating that the unCLIP approach, utilized in DALL•E 2, is also effective for creating instruction-following sequential decision-making agents. STEVE-1 is trained in two steps: adapting the pretrained VPT model to follow commands in MineCLIP's latent space, then training a prior to predict latent codes from text. This allows us to finetune VPT through self-supervised behavioral cloning and hindsight relabeling, bypassing the need for costly human text annotations. By leveraging pretrained models like VPT and MineCLIP and employing best practices from text-conditioned image generation, STEVE-1 costs just $60 to train and can follow short-horizon open-ended text and visual instructions in Minecraft. STEVE-1 sets a new bar for open-ended instruction following in Minecraft with low-level controls (mouse and keyboard) and raw pixel inputs, far outperforming previous baselines and robustly completing 12 of 13 tasks in our early-game evaluation suite. We provide experimental evidence highlighting key factors for downstream performance, including pretraining, classifier-free guidance, and data scaling. All resources, including our model weights, training scripts, and evaluation tools are made available for further research.
tl;dr: We show the advantage of training self-supervised learning models of infant egocentric videos using the natural developmental curriculum.
Infants possess a remarkable ability to rapidly learn and process visual inputs. As an infant's mobility increases, so does the variety and dynamics of their visual inputs. Is this change in the properties of the visual inputs beneficial or even critical for the proper development of the visual system? To address this question, we used video recordings from infants wearing head-mounted cameras to train a variety of self-supervised learning models. Critically, we separated the infant data by age group and evaluated the importance of training with a curriculum aligned with developmental order. We found that initiating learning with the data from the youngest age group provided the strongest learning signal and led to the best learning outcomes in terms of downstream task performance. We then showed that the benefits of the data from the youngest age group are due to the slowness and simplicity of the visual experience. The results provide strong empirical evidence for the importance of the properties of the early infant experience and developmental progression in training. More broadly, our approach and findings take a noteworthy step towards reverse engineering the learning mechanisms in newborn brains using image-computable models from artificial intelligence.
tl;dr: We developed a new information-theoretic measure that quantifies the amount, content and direction of information transmitted between brain regions.
Quantifying the amount, content and direction of communication between brain regions is key to understanding brain function. Traditional methods to analyze brain activity based on the Wiener-Granger causality principle quantify the overall information propagated by neural activity between simultaneously recorded brain regions, but do not reveal the information flow about specific features of interest (such as sensory stimuli). Here, we develop a new information theoretic measure termed Feature-specific Information Transfer (FIT), quantifying how much information about a specific feature flows between two regions. FIT merges the Wiener-Granger causality principle with information-content specificity. We first derive FIT and prove analytically its key properties. We then illustrate and test them with simulations of neural activity, demonstrating that FIT identifies, within the total information propagated between regions, the information that is transmitted about specific features. We then analyze three neural datasets obtained with different recording methods, magneto- and electro-encephalography, and spiking activity, to demonstrate the ability of FIT to uncover the content and direction of information flow between brain regions beyond what can be discerned with traditional analytical methods. FIT can improve our understanding of how brain regions communicate by uncovering previously unaddressed feature-specific information flow.
tl;dr: Optimal and adaptive dynamic regret bounds for non-stationary nonparametric contextual bandits in terms of new, tighter non-stationarity measure .
We study nonparametric contextual bandits where Lipschitz mean reward functions may change over time.
We first establish the minimax dynamic regret rate in this less understood setting in terms of number of changes $L$ and total-variation $V$, both capturing all changes in distribution over context space, and argue that state-of-the-art procedures are suboptimal in this setting.
Next, we tend to the question of an _adaptivity_ for this setting, i.e. achieving the minimax rate without knowledge of $L$ or $V$. Quite importantly, we posit that the bandit problem, viewed locally at a given context $X_t$, should not be affected by reward changes in other parts of context space $\cal X$. We therefore propose a notion of _change_, which we term _experienced significant shifts_, that better accounts for locality, and thus counts considerably less changes than $L$ and $V$. Furthermore, similar to recent work on non-stationary MAB (Suk & Kpotufe, 2022), _experienced significant shifts_ only count the most _significant_ changes in mean rewards, e.g., severe best-arm changes relevant to observed contexts.
Our main result is to show that this more tolerant notion of change can in fact be adapted to.
This paper delves into stochastic optimization problems that involve Markovian noise. We present a unified approach for the theoretical analysis of first-order gradient methods for stochastic optimization and variational inequalities. Our approach covers scenarios for both non-convex and strongly convex minimization problems. To achieve an optimal (linear) dependence on the mixing time of the underlying noise sequence, we use the randomized batching scheme, which is based on the multilevel Monte Carlo method. Moreover, our technique allows us to eliminate the limiting assumptions of previous research on Markov noise, such as the need for a bounded domain and uniformly bounded stochastic gradients. Our extension to variational inequalities under Markovian noise is original. Additionally, we provide lower bounds that match the oracle complexity of our method in the case of strongly convex optimization problems.
tl;dr: We focus on the active symmetries of signals supported on a fixed graph domain, and show a bias-variance tradeoff between expressivity and regularity of the estimator controlled by the choice of symmetry.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly described as being permutation equivariant with respect to node relabeling in the graph. This symmetry of GNNs is often compared to the translation equivariance of Euclidean convolution neural networks (CNNs). However, these two symmetries are fundamentally different: The translation equivariance of CNNs corresponds to symmetries of the fixed domain acting on the image signals (sometimes known as active symmetries), whereas in GNNs any permutation acts on both the graph signals and the graph domain (sometimes described as passive symmetries). In this work, we focus on the active symmetries of GNNs, by considering a learning setting where signals are supported on a fixed graph. In this case, the natural symmetries of GNNs are the automorphisms of the graph. Since real-world graphs tend to be asymmetric, we relax the notion of symmetries by formalizing approximate symmetries via graph coarsening. We present a bias-variance formula that quantifies the tradeoff between the loss in expressivity and the gain in the regularity of the learned estimator, depending on the chosen symmetry group. To illustrate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on image inpainting, traffic flow prediction, and human pose estimation with different choices of symmetries. We show theoretically and empirically that the best generalization performance can be achieved by choosing a suitably larger group than the graph automorphism, but smaller than the permutation group.
The goal of causal representation learning is to find a representation of data that consists of causally related latent variables. We consider a setup where one has access to data from multiple domains that potentially share a causal representation. Crucially, observations in different domains are assumed to be unpaired, that is, we only observe the marginal distribution in each domain but not their joint distribution. In this paper, we give sufficient conditions for identifiability of the joint distribution and the shared causal graph in a linear setup. Identifiability holds if we can uniquely recover the joint distribution and the shared causal representation from the marginal distributions in each domain. We transform our results into a practical method to recover the shared latent causal graph.
tl;dr: We introduce Ego4D Goal-Step, the largest available egocentric dataset for procedural activity understanding, containing 2,742 hours of long videos with specific goal labels and 430 hours of segments with fine-grained step/substep labels.
Human activities are goal-oriented and hierarchical, comprising primary goals at the top level, sequences of steps and substeps in the middle, and atomic actions at the lowest level. Recognizing human activities thus requires relating atomic actions and steps to their functional objectives (what the actions contribute to) and modeling their sequential and hierarchical dependencies towards achieving the goals. Current activity recognition research has primarily focused on only the lowest levels of this hierarchy, i.e., atomic or low-level actions, often in trimmed videos with annotations spanning only a few seconds. In this work, we introduce Ego4D Goal-Step, a new set of annotations on the recently released Ego4D with a novel hierarchical taxonomy of goal-oriented activity labels. It provides dense annotations for 48K procedural step segments (430 hours) and high-level goal annotations for 2,807 hours of Ego4D videos. Compared to existing procedural video datasets, it is substantially larger in size, contains hierarchical action labels (goals - steps - substeps), and provides goal-oriented auxiliary information including natural language summary description, step completion status, and step-to-goal relevance information. We take a data-driven approach to build our taxonomy, resulting in dense step annotations that do not suffer from poor label-data alignment issues resulting from a taxonomy defined a priori. Through comprehensive evaluations and analyses, we demonstrate how Ego4D Goal-Step supports exploring various questions in procedural activity understanding, including goal inference, step prediction, hierarchical relation learning, and long-term temporal modeling.
General physical scene understanding requires more than simply localizing and recognizing objects -- it requires knowledge that objects can have different latent properties (e.g., mass or elasticity), and that those properties affect the outcome of physical events. While there has been great progress in physical and video prediction models in recent years, benchmarks to test their performance typically do not require an understanding that objects have individual physical properties, or at best test only those properties that are directly observable (e.g., size or color). This work proposes a novel dataset and benchmark, termed Physion++, that rigorously evaluates visual physical prediction in artificial systems under circumstances where those predictions rely on accurate estimates of the latent physical properties of objects in the scene. Specifically, we test scenarios where accurate prediction relies on estimates of properties such as mass, friction, elasticity, and deformability, and where the values of those properties can only be inferred by observing how objects move and interact with other objects or fluids. We evaluate the performance of a number of state-of-the-art prediction models that span a variety of levels of learning vs. built-in knowledge, and compare that performance to a set of human predictions. We find that models that have been trained using standard regimes and datasets do not spontaneously learn to make inferences about latent properties, but also that models that encode objectness and physical states tend to make better predictions. However, there is still a huge gap between all models and human performance, and all models' predictions correlate poorly with those made by humans, suggesting that no state-of-the-art model is learning to make physical predictions in a human-like way. These results show that current deep learning models that succeed in some settings nevertheless fail to achieve human-level physical prediction in other cases, especially those where latent property inference is required. Project page: https://dingmyu.github.io/physion_v2/
tl;dr: We demonstrate that Self-Supervised Models memorize detailed aspects of their training images, propose tests to quantify this memorization, and introduce a new diffusion-model based reconstruction attack.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms can produce useful image representations by learning to associate different parts of natural images with one another. However, when taken to the extreme, SSL models can unintendedly memorize specific parts in individual training samples rather than learning semantically meaningful associations. In this work, we perform a systematic study of the unintended memorization of image-specific information in SSL models -- which we refer to as déjà vu memorization. Concretely, we show that given the trained model and a crop of a training image containing only the background (e.g., water, sky, grass), it is possible to infer the foreground object with high accuracy or even visually reconstruct it. Furthermore, we show that déjà vu memorization is common to different SSL algorithms, is exacerbated by certain design choices, and cannot be detected by conventional techniques for evaluating representation quality. Our study of déjà vu memorization reveals previously unknown privacy risks in SSL models, as well as suggests potential practical mitigation strategies.
tl;dr: We provide improved algorithms and conditional lower bounds for the problem of estimating effective resistances between nodes in an undirected graph, and apply the techniques to more general problems involving general positive semidefinite matrices.
We provide new algorithms and conditional hardness for the problem of estimating effective resistances in $n$-node $m$-edge undirected, expander graphs. We provide an $\widetilde{O}(m\epsilon^{-1})$-time algorithm that produces with high probability, an $\widetilde{O}(n\epsilon^{-1})$-bit sketch from which the effective resistance between any pair of nodes can be estimated, to $(1 \pm \epsilon)$-multiplicative accuracy, in $\widetilde{O}(1)$-time. Consequently, we obtain an $\widetilde{O}(m\epsilon^{-1})$-time algorithm for estimating the effective resistance of all edges in such graphs, improving (for sparse graphs) on the previous fastest runtimes of $\widetilde{O}(m\epsilon^{-3/2})$ [Chu et. al. 2018] and $\widetilde{O}(n^2\epsilon^{-1})$ [Jambulapati, Sidford, 2018] for general graphs and $\widetilde{O}(m + n\epsilon^{-2})$ for expanders [Li, Sachdeva 2022].
We complement this result by showing a conditional lower bound that a broad set of algorithms for computing such estimates of the effective resistances between all pairs of nodes require $\widetilde{\Omega}(n^2 \epsilon^{-1/2})$-time, improving upon the previous best such lower bound of $\widetilde{\Omega}(n^2 \epsilon^{-1/13})$ [Musco et. al. 2017]. Further, we leverage the tools underlying these results to obtain improved algorithms and conditional hardness for more general problems of sketching the pseudoinverse of positive semidefinite matrices and estimating functions of their eigenvalues.
This paper addresses the problem of nearly optimal Vapnik--Chervonenkis dimension (VC-dimension) and pseudo-dimension estimations of the derivative functions of deep neural networks (DNNs). Two important applications of these estimations include: 1) Establishing a nearly tight approximation result of DNNs in the Sobolev space; 2) Characterizing the generalization error of machine learning methods with loss functions involving function derivatives. This theoretical investigation fills the gap of learning error estimations for a wide range of physics-informed machine learning models and applications including generative models, solving partial differential equations, operator learning, network compression, distillation, regularization, etc.
tl;dr: We develop a Bayesian modeling approach based on Wishart processes to accurately estimate noise correlations with very few trials by exploiting the smoothness of covariance change across neighboring conditions.
The signaling capacity of a neural population depends on the scale and orientation of its covariance across trials. Estimating this "noise" covariance is challenging and is thought to require a large number of stereotyped trials. New approaches are therefore needed to interrogate the structure of neural noise across rich, naturalistic behaviors and sensory experiences, with few trials per condition. Here, we exploit the fact that conditions are smoothly parameterized in many experiments and leverage Wishart process models to pool statistical power from trials in neighboring conditions. We demonstrate that these models perform favorably on experimental data from the mouse visual cortex and monkey motor cortex relative to standard covariance estimators. Moreover, they produce smooth estimates of covariance as a function of stimulus parameters, enabling estimates of noise correlations in entirely unseen conditions as well as continuous estimates of Fisher information—a commonly used measure of signal fidelity. Together, our results suggest that Wishart processes are broadly applicable tools for quantification and uncertainty estimation of noise correlations in trial-limited regimes, paving the way toward understanding the role of noise in complex neural computations and behavior.
What are the functionals of the reward that can be computed and optimized exactly in Markov Decision Processes?
In the finite-horizon, undiscounted setting, Dynamic Programming (DP) can only handle these operations efficiently for certain classes of statistics. We summarize the characterization of these classes for policy evaluation, and give a new answer for the planning problem. Interestingly, we prove that only generalized means can be optimized exactly, even in the more general framework of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL).
DistRL permits, however, to evaluate other functionals approximately. We provide error bounds on the resulting estimators, and discuss the potential of this approach as well as its limitations.
These results contribute to advancing the theory of Markov Decision Processes by examining overall characteristics of the return, and particularly risk-conscious strategies.
tl;dr: We deal with biases induced by weak supervision, proposing approaches to mitigate them in order to improve fairness and performance.
Weak supervision enables efficient development of training sets by reducing the need for ground truth labels. However, the techniques that make weak supervision attractive---such as integrating any source of signal to estimate unknown labels---also entail the danger that the produced pseudolabels are highly biased. Surprisingly, given everyday use and the potential for increased bias, weak supervision has not been studied from the point of view of fairness. We begin such a study, starting with the observation that even when a fair model can be built from a dataset with access to ground-truth labels, the corresponding dataset labeled via weak supervision can be arbitrarily unfair. To address this, we propose and empirically validate a model for source unfairness in weak supervision, then introduce a simple counterfactual fairness-based technique that can mitigate these biases. Theoretically, we show that it is possible for our approach to simultaneously improve both accuracy and fairness---in contrast to standard fairness approaches that suffer from tradeoffs. Empirically, we show that our technique improves accuracy on weak supervision baselines by as much as 32\% while reducing demographic parity gap by 82.5\%. A simple extension of our method aimed at maximizing performance produces state-of-the-art performance in five out of ten datasets in the WRENCH benchmark.
The remarkable growth and significant success of machine learning have expanded its applications into programming languages and program analysis. However, a key challenge in adopting the latest machine learning methods is the representation of programming languages which has a direct impact on the ability of machine learning methods to reason about programs. The absence of numerical awareness, aggregate data structure information, and improper way of presenting variables in previous representation works have limited their performances. To overcome the limitations and challenges of current program representations, we propose a novel graph-based program representation called PERFOGRAPH. PERFOGRAPH can capture numerical information and the aggregate data structure by introducing new nodes and edges. Furthermore, we propose an adapted embedding method to incorporate numerical awareness.
These enhancements make PERFOGRAPH a highly flexible and scalable representation that can effectively capture programs' intricate dependencies and semantics. Consequently, it serves as a powerful tool for various applications such as program analysis, performance optimization, and parallelism discovery. Our experimental results demonstrate that PERFOGRAPH outperforms existing representations and sets new state-of-the-art results by reducing the error rate by 7.4% (AMD dataset) and 10% (NVIDIA dataset) in the well-known Device Mapping challenge. It also sets new state-of-the-art results in various performance optimization tasks like Parallelism Discovery and Numa and Prefetchers Configuration prediction.
tl;dr: GATr is a new general-purpose network for geometric data, based on geometric algebra representations + E(3) equivariance + a transformer architecture
Problems involving geometric data arise in physics, chemistry, robotics, computer vision, and many other fields. Such data can take numerous forms, for instance points, direction vectors, translations, or rotations, but to date there is no single architecture that can be applied to such a wide variety of geometric types while respecting their symmetries. In this paper we introduce the Geometric Algebra Transformer (GATr), a general-purpose architecture for geometric data. GATr represents inputs, outputs, and hidden states in the projective geometric (or Clifford) algebra, which offers an efficient 16-dimensional vector-space representation of common geometric objects as well as operators acting on them. GATr is equivariant with respect to E(3), the symmetry group of 3D Euclidean space. As a Transformer, GATr is versatile, efficient, and scalable. We demonstrate GATr in problems from n-body modeling to wall-shear-stress estimation on large arterial meshes to robotic motion planning. GATr consistently outperforms both non-geometric and equivariant baselines in terms of error, data efficiency, and scalability.
Dynamic graph neural networks (DyGNNs) currently struggle with handling distribution shifts that are inherent in dynamic graphs.
Existing work on DyGNNs with out-of-distribution settings only focuses on the time domain, failing to handle cases involving distribution shifts in the spectral domain. In this paper, we discover that there exist cases with distribution shifts unobservable in the time domain while observable in the spectral domain, and propose to study distribution shifts on dynamic graphs in the spectral domain for the first time.
However, this investigation poses two key challenges: i) it is non-trivial to capture different graph patterns that are driven by various frequency components entangled in the spectral domain; and ii) it remains unclear how to handle distribution shifts with the discovered spectral patterns. To address these challenges, we propose Spectral Invariant Learning for Dynamic Graphs under Distribution Shifts (SILD), which can handle distribution shifts on dynamic graphs by capturing and utilizing invariant and variant spectral patterns. Specifically, we first design a DyGNN with Fourier transform to obtain the ego-graph trajectory spectrums, allowing the mixed dynamic graph patterns to be transformed into separate frequency components. We then develop a disentangled spectrum mask to filter graph dynamics from various frequency components and discover the invariant and variant spectral patterns. Finally, we propose invariant spectral filtering, which encourages the model to rely on invariant patterns for generalization under distribution shifts. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world dynamic graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method for both node classification and link prediction tasks under distribution shifts.
tl;dr: We propose how to value and reward parties while ensuring incentives like individual rationality, fairness and privacy (but deter excessive privacy demands).
Collaborative machine learning involves training models on data from multiple parties but must incentivize their participation. Existing data valuation methods fairly value and reward each party based on shared data or model parameters but neglect the privacy risks involved. To address this, we introduce _differential privacy_ (DP) as an incentive. Each party can select its required DP guarantee and perturb its _sufficient statistic_ (SS) accordingly. The mediator values the perturbed SS by the Bayesian surprise it elicits about the model parameters. As our valuation function enforces a _privacy-valuation trade-off_, parties are deterred from selecting excessive DP guarantees that reduce the utility of the grand coalition's model. Finally, the mediator rewards each party with different posterior samples of the model parameters. Such rewards still satisfy existing incentives like fairness but additionally preserve DP and a high similarity to the grand coalition's posterior. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our approach on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Additive Noise Models (ANMs) are a common model class for causal discovery from observational data. Due to a lack of real-world data for which an underlying ANM is known, ANMs with randomly sampled parameters are commonly used to simulate data for the evaluation of causal discovery algorithms. While some parameters may be fixed by explicit assumptions, fully specifying an ANM requires choosing all parameters. Reisach et al. (2021) show that, for many ANM parameter choices, sorting the variables by increasing variance yields an ordering close to a causal order and introduce ‘var-sortability’ to quantify this alignment. Since increasing variances may be unrealistic and cannot be exploited when data scales are arbitrary, ANM data are often rescaled to unit variance in causal discovery benchmarking.
We show that synthetic ANM data are characterized by another pattern that is scale-invariant and thus persists even after standardization: the explainable fraction of a variable’s variance, as captured by the coefficient of determination $R^2$, tends to increase along the causal order. The result is high ‘$R^2$-sortability’, meaning that sorting the variables by increasing $R^2$ yields an ordering close to a causal order. We propose a computationally efficient baseline algorithm termed ‘$R^2$-SortnRegress’ that exploits high $R^2$-sortability and that can match and exceed the performance of established causal discovery algorithms. We show analytically that sufficiently high edge weights lead to a relative decrease of the noise contributions along causal chains, resulting in increasingly deterministic relationships and high $R^2$. We characterize $R^2$-sortability on synthetic data with different simulation parameters and find high values in common settings. Our findings reveal high $R^2$-sortability as an assumption about the data generating process relevant to causal discovery and implicit in many ANM sampling schemes. It should be made explicit, as its prevalence in real-world data is an open question. For causal discovery benchmarking, we provide implementations of $R^2$-sortability, the $R^2$-SortnRegress algorithm, and ANM simulation procedures in our library CausalDisco at https://causaldisco.github.io/CausalDisco/.
Existing private synthetic data generation algorithms are agnostic to downstream tasks. However, end users may have specific requirements that the synthetic data must satisfy. Failure to meet these requirements could significantly reduce the utility of the data for downstream use. We introduce a post-processing technique that improves the utility of the synthetic data with respect to measures selected by the end user, while preserving strong privacy guarantees and dataset quality. Our technique involves resampling from the synthetic data to filter out samples that do not meet the selected utility measures, using an efficient stochastic first-order algorithm to find optimal resampling weights. Through comprehensive numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the utility of synthetic data across multiple benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art synthetic data generation algorithms.
The challenge of overfitting, in which the model memorizes the training data and fails to generalize to test data, has become increasingly significant in the training of large neural networks. To tackle this challenge, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising training method, which can improve the generalization of neural networks even in the presence of label noise. However, a deep understanding of how SAM works, especially in the setting of nonlinear neural networks and classification tasks, remains largely missing. This paper fills this gap by demonstrating why SAM generalizes better than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for a certain data model and two-layer convolutional ReLU networks. The loss landscape of our studied problem is nonsmooth, thus current explanations for the success of SAM based on the Hessian information are insufficient. Our result explains the benefits of SAM, particularly its ability to prevent noise learning in the early stages, thereby facilitating more effective learning of features. Experiments on both synthetic and real data corroborate our theory.
tl;dr: We present AircraftVerse, a publicly available dataset with 27,714 diverse air vehicle designs. Each design consists of a design tree structure, a CAD model, and scientific flight simulation derived performance metrics.
We present AircraftVerse, a publicly available aerial vehicle design dataset. Aircraft design encompasses different physics domains and, hence, multiple modalities of representation. The evaluation of these designs requires the use of scientific analytical and simulation models ranging from computer-aided design tools for structural and manufacturing analysis, computational fluid dynamics tools for drag and lift computation, battery models for energy estimation, and simulation models for flight control and dynamics. AircraftVerse contains $27{,}714$ diverse air vehicle designs - the largest corpus of designs with this level of complexity. Each design comprises the following artifacts: a symbolic design tree describing topology, propulsion subsystem, battery subsystem, and other design details; a STandard for the Exchange of Product (STEP) model data; a 3D CAD design using a stereolithography (STL) file format; a 3D point cloud for the shape of the design; and evaluation results from high fidelity state-of-the-art physics models that characterize performance metrics such as maximum flight distance and hover-time. We also present baseline surrogate models that use different modalities of design representation to predict design performance metrics, which we provide as part of our dataset release. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of this dataset on the use of learning in aircraft design, and more generally, in the emerging field of deep learning for scientific design. AircraftVerse is accompanied by a datasheet as suggested in the recent literature, and it is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. The dataset with baseline models are hosted at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6525446, code at https://github.com/SRI-CSL/AircraftVerse, and the dataset description at https://uavdesignverse.onrender.com/.
tl;dr: We investigate the proximity bias issue in model calibration and propose a framework to address this issue.
Confidence calibration is central to providing accurate and interpretable uncertainty estimates, especially under safety-critical scenarios. However, we find that existing calibration algorithms often overlook the issue of proximity bias, a phenomenon where models tend to be more overconfident in low proximity data (i.e., data lying in the sparse region of the data distribution) compared to high proximity samples, and thus suffer from inconsistent miscalibration across different proximity samples. We examine the problem over $504$ pretrained ImageNet models and observe that: 1) Proximity bias exists across a wide variety of model architectures and sizes; 2) Transformer-based models are relatively more susceptible to proximity bias than CNN-based models; 3) Proximity bias persists even after performing popular calibration algorithms like temperature scaling; 4) Models tend to overfit more heavily on low proximity samples than on high proximity samples. Motivated by the empirical findings, we propose ProCal, a plug-and-play algorithm with a theoretical guarantee to adjust sample confidence based on proximity. To further quantify the effectiveness of calibration algorithms in mitigating proximity bias, we introduce proximity-informed expected calibration error (PIECE) with theoretical analysis. We show that ProCal is effective in addressing proximity bias and improving calibration on balanced, long-tail, and distribution-shift settings under four metrics over various model architectures. We believe our findings on proximity bias will guide the development of fairer and better-calibrated} models, contributing to the broader pursuit of trustworthy AI.
tl;dr: We introduce an extremely simple shape detection task that elicits fundamental, inconsistent phenomenon between humans and widely used neural network models
It is well-known that modern computer vision systems often exhibit behaviors misaligned with those of humans: from adversarial attacks to image corruptions, deep
learning vision models suffer in a variety of settings that humans capably handle. In
light of these phenomena, here we introduce another, orthogonal perspective studying the human-machine vision gap. We revisit the task of recovering images under
degradation, first introduced over 30 years ago in the Recognition-by-Components
theory of human vision. Specifically, we study the performance and behavior of
neural networks on the seemingly simple task of classifying regular polygons at
varying orders of degradation along their perimeters. To this end, we implement the
Automated Shape Recoverability Test
for rapidly generating large-scale datasets
of perimeter-degraded regular polygons, modernizing the historically manual creation of image recoverability experiments. We then investigate the capacity of
neural networks to recognize and recover such degraded shapes when initialized
with different priors. Ultimately, we find that neural networks’ behavior on this
simple task conflicts with human behavior, raising a fundamental question of the
robustness and learning capabilities of modern computer vision models
tl;dr: Our system, MultiMon, exploits erroneous agreement to autonomously uncover failures in text-guided multimodal models
Deployed multimodal models can fail in ways that evaluators did not anticipate. In order to find these failures before deployment, we introduce MultiMon, a system that automatically identifies systematic failures---generalizable, natural-language descriptions that describe categories of individual failures. To uncover systematic failures, MultiMon scrapes for examples of erroneous agreement: inputs that produce the same output, but should not. It then prompts a language model to identify common categories and describe them in natural language.
We use MultiMon to find 14 systematic failures (e.g."ignores quantifiers'') of the CLIP text-encoder, each comprising hundreds of distinct inputs (e.g."a shelf with a few/many books''). Because CLIP is the backbone for most state-of-the-art multimodal models, these inputs produce failures in Midjourney 5.1, DALL-E, VideoFusion, and others. MultiMon can also steer towards failures relevant to specific use cases, such as self-driving cars. We see MultiMon as a step towards evaluation that autonomously explores the long-tail of potential system failures.
Unsupervised video-based object-centric learning is a promising avenue to learn structured representations from large, unlabeled video collections, but previous approaches have only managed to scale to real-world datasets in restricted domains.
Recently, it was shown that the reconstruction of pre-trained self-supervised features leads to object-centric representations on unconstrained real-world image datasets.
Building on this approach, we propose a novel way to use such pre-trained features in the form of a temporal feature similarity loss.
This loss encodes semantic and temporal correlations between image patches and is a natural way to introduce a motion bias for object discovery.
We demonstrate that this loss leads to state-of-the-art performance on the challenging synthetic MOVi datasets.
When used in combination with the feature reconstruction loss, our model is the first object-centric video model that scales to unconstrained video datasets such as YouTube-VIS.
https://martius-lab.github.io/videosaur/
The extraordinary ability of generative models to generate photographic images has intensified concerns about the spread of disinformation, thereby leading to the demand for detectors capable of distinguishing between AI-generated fake images and real images. However, the lack of large datasets containing images from the most advanced image generators poses an obstacle to the development of such detectors. In this paper, we introduce the GenImage dataset, which has the following advantages: 1) Plenty of Images, including over one million pairs of AI-generated fake images and collected real images. 2) Rich Image Content, encompassing a broad range of image classes. 3) State-of-the-art Generators, synthesizing images with advanced diffusion models and GANs. The aforementioned advantages allow the detectors trained on GenImage to undergo a thorough evaluation and demonstrate strong applicability to diverse images. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the dataset and propose two tasks for evaluating the detection method in resembling real-world scenarios. The cross-generator image classification task measures the performance of a detector trained on one generator when tested on the others. The degraded image classification task assesses the capability of the detectors in handling degraded images such as low-resolution, blurred, and compressed images. With the GenImage dataset, researchers can effectively expedite the development and evaluation of superior AI-generated image detectors in comparison to prevailing methodologies.
tl;dr: Our method QuIP yield the first viable LLM quantization at 2 bits per weight, and comes with guarantees.
This work studies post-training parameter quantization in large language models (LLMs). We introduce quantization with incoherence processing (QuIP), a new method based on the insight that quantization benefits from incoherent weight and Hessian matrices, i.e., from the weights being even in magnitude and the directions in which it is important to round them accurately being unaligned with the coordinate axes. QuIP consists of two steps: (1) an adaptive rounding procedure minimizing a quadratic proxy objective; (2) efficient pre- and post-processing that ensures weight and Hessian incoherence via multiplication by random orthogonal matrices. We complement QuIP with the first theoretical analysis for an LLM-scale quantization algorithm, and show that our theory also applies to an existing method, OPTQ. Empirically, we find that our incoherence preprocessing improves several existing quantization algorithms and yields the first LLM quantization methods that produce viable results using only two bits per weight. Our code can be found at https://github.com/jerry-chee/QuIP.
Optimizer states are a major source of memory consumption for training neural networks, limiting the maximum trainable model within given memory budget. Compressing the optimizer states from 32-bit floating points to lower bitwidth is promising to reduce the training memory footprint, while the current lowest achievable bitwidth is 8-bit. In this work, we push optimizer states bitwidth down to 4-bit through a detailed empirical analysis of first and second moments. Specifically, we find that moments have complicated outlier patterns, that current block-wise quantization cannot accurately approximate. We use a smaller block size and propose to utilize both row-wise and column-wise information for better quantization. We further identify a zero point problem of quantizing the second moment, and solve this problem with a linear quantizer that excludes the zero point. Our 4-bit optimizers are evaluated on a wide variety of benchmarks including natural language understanding, machine translation, image classification, and instruction tuning. On all the tasks our optimizers can achieve comparable accuracy with their full-precision counterparts, while enjoying better memory efficiency.
tl;dr: This work focuses on the systematic exploration of RGB-D video salient object detection (DVSOD), which involves the release of a comprehensive, large-scale dataset and the benchmarking of cutting-edge models.
Salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify standout elements in a scene, with recent advancements primarily focused on integrating depth data (RGB-D) or temporal data from videos to enhance SOD in complex scenes. However, the unison of two types of crucial information remains largely underexplored due to data constraints. To bridge this gap, we in this work introduce the DViSal dataset, fueling further research in the emerging field of RGB-D video salient object detection (DVSOD). Our dataset features 237 diverse RGB-D videos alongside comprehensive annotations, including object and instance-level markings, as well as bounding boxes and scribbles. These resources enable a broad scope for potential research directions. We also conduct benchmarking experiments using various SOD models, affirming the efficacy of multimodal video input for salient object detection. Lastly, we highlight some intriguing findings and promising future research avenues. To foster growth in this field, our dataset and benchmark results are publicly accessible at: https://dvsod.github.io/.
As a powerful framework for graph representation learning, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have garnered significant attention in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no formal analysis of the logical expressiveness of GNNs as Boolean node classifiers over multi-relational graphs, where each edge carries a specific relation type. In this paper, we investigate $\mathcal{FOC}_2$, a fragment of first-order logic with two variables and counting quantifiers. On the negative side, we demonstrate that the R$^2$-GNN architecture, which extends the local message passing GNN by incorporating global readout, fails to capture $\mathcal{FOC}_2$ classifiers in the general case. Nevertheless, on the positive side, we establish that R$^2$-GNNs models are equivalent to $\mathcal{FOC}_2$ classifiers under certain restricted yet reasonable scenarios. To address the limitations of R$^2$-GNNs regarding expressiveness, we propose a simple graph transformation technique, akin to a preprocessing step, which can be executed in linear time. This transformation enables R$^2$-GNNs to effectively capture any $\mathcal{FOC}_2$ classifiers when applied to the "transformed" input graph. Moreover, we extend our analysis of expressiveness and graph transformation to temporal graphs, exploring several temporal GNN architectures and providing an expressiveness hierarchy for them. To validate our findings, we implement R$^2$-GNNs and the graph transformation technique and conduct empirical tests in node classification tasks against various well-known GNN architectures that support multi-relational or temporal graphs. Our experimental results consistently demonstrate that R$^2$-GNN with the graph transformation outperforms the baseline methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets
tl;dr: This paper introduces a novel formulation to address a gap in optimizing Average Precision (AP) while ensuring adversarial ranking robustness.
This paper seeks to address a gap in optimizing Average Precision (AP) while ensuring adversarial robustness, an area that has not been extensively explored to the best of our knowledge. AP maximization for deep learning has widespread applications, particularly when there is a significant imbalance between positive and negative examples. Although numerous studies have been conducted on adversarial training, they primarily focus on robustness concerning accuracy, ensuring that the average accuracy on adversarially perturbed examples is well maintained. However, this type of adversarial robustness is insufficient for many applications, as minor perturbations on a single example can significantly impact AP while not greatly influencing the accuracy of the prediction system. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel formulation that combines an AP surrogate loss with a regularization term representing adversarial ranking robustness, which maintains the consistency between ranking of clean data and that of perturbed data. We then devise an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm to optimize the resulting objective. Our empirical studies, which compare our method to current leading adversarial training baselines and other robust AP maximization strategies, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Notably, our methods outperform a state-of-the-art method (TRADES) by more than 4\% in terms of robust AP against PGD attacks while achieving 7\% higher AP on clean data simultaneously on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100.
Various deep learning models have been proposed for 3D bone shape reconstruction from two orthogonal (biplanar) X-ray images.
However, it is unclear how these models compare against each other since they are evaluated on different anatomy, cohort and (often privately held) datasets.
Moreover, the impact of the commonly optimized image-based segmentation metrics such as dice score on the estimation of clinical parameters relevant in 2D-3D bone shape reconstruction is not well known.
To move closer toward clinical translation, we propose a benchmarking framework that evaluates tasks relevant to real-world clinical scenarios, including reconstruction of fractured bones, bones with implants, robustness to population shift, and error in estimating clinical parameters.
Our open-source platform provides reference implementations of 8 models (many of whose implementations were not publicly available), APIs to easily collect and preprocess 6 public datasets, and the implementation of automatic clinical parameter and landmark extraction methods.
We present an extensive evaluation of 8 2D-3D models on equal footing using 6 public datasets comprising images for four different anatomies.
Our results show that attention-based methods that capture global spatial relationships tend to perform better across all anatomies and datasets; performance on clinically relevant subgroups may be overestimated without disaggregated reporting; ribs are substantially more difficult to reconstruct compared to femur, hip and spine; and the dice score improvement does not always bring corresponding improvement in the automatic estimation of clinically relevant parameters.
895. Asynchronous Proportional Response Dynamics: Convergence in Markets with Adversarial Scheduling
tl;dr: We study asynchronous dynamics in Fisher markets under adversarial scheduling and prove convergence properties of proportional response, best response, and regret minimization dynamics.
We study Proportional Response Dynamics (PRD) in linear Fisher markets, where participants act asynchronously. We model this scenario as a sequential process in which at each step, an adversary selects a subset of the players to update their bids, subject to liveness constraints. We show that if every bidder individually applies the PRD update rule whenever they are included in the group of bidders selected by the adversary, then, in the generic case, the entire dynamic converges to a competitive equilibrium of the market. Our proof technique reveals additional properties of linear Fisher markets, such as the uniqueness of the market equilibrium for generic parameters and the convergence of associated no swap regret dynamics and best response dynamics under certain conditions.
tl;dr: Introducing a new datasets composed of YouTube videos for American Sign Language to English translation.
Machine learning for sign languages is bottlenecked by data. In this paper, we present YouTube-ASL, a large-scale, open-domain corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) videos and accompanying English captions drawn from YouTube. With ~1000 hours of videos and >2500 unique signers, YouTube-ASL is ~3x as large and has ~10x as many unique signers as the largest prior ASL dataset. We train baseline models for ASL to English translation on YouTube-ASL and evaluate them on How2Sign, where we achieve a new fine-tuned state of the art of 12.397 BLEU and, for the first time, nontrivial zero-shot results.
tl;dr: Simple relaxations that help improve training of efficient panoptic segmentation.
This paper presents a new mechanism to facilitate the training of mask transformers for efficient panoptic segmentation, democratizing its deployment. We observe that due to the high complexity in the training objective of panoptic segmentation, it will inevitably lead to much higher penalization on false positive. Such unbalanced loss makes the training process of the end-to-end mask-transformer based architectures difficult, especially for efficient models. In this paper, we present ReMaX that adds relaxation to mask predictions and class predictions during the training phase for panoptic segmentation. We demonstrate that via these simple relaxation techniques during training, our model can be consistently improved by a clear margin without any extra computational cost on inference. By combining our method with efficient backbones like MobileNetV3-Small, our method achieves new state-of-the-art results for efficient panoptic segmentation on COCO, ADE20K and Cityscapes. Code and pre-trained checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/google-research/deeplab2.
tl;dr: We present a public benchmark for multimodal classification of Parkinson's disease analysis
The healthcare and AI communities have witnessed a growing interest in the development of AI-assisted systems for automated diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease (PD), one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorders. However, the progress in this area has been significantly impeded by the absence of a unified, publicly available benchmark, which prevents comprehensive evaluation of existing PD analysis methods and the development of advanced models. This work overcomes these challenges by introducing YouTubePD -- the first publicly available multimodal benchmark designed for PD analysis. We crowd-source existing videos featured with PD from YouTube, exploit multimodal information including in-the-wild videos, audio data, and facial landmarks across 200+ subject videos, and provide dense and diverse annotations from clinical expert. Based on our benchmark, we propose three challenging and complementary tasks encompassing both discriminative and generative tasks, along with a comprehensive set of corresponding baselines. Experimental evaluation showcases the potential of modern deep learning and computer vision techniques, in particular the generalizability of the models developed on YouTubePD to real-world clinical settings, while revealing their limitations. We hope our work paves the way for future research in this direction.
Latent graph inference (LGI) aims to jointly learn the underlying graph structure and node representations from data features. However, existing LGI methods commonly suffer from the issue of supervision starvation, where massive edge weights are learned without semantic supervision and do not contribute to the training loss. Consequently, these supervision-starved weights, which determine the predictions of testing samples, cannot be semantically optimal, resulting in poor generalization. In this paper, we observe that this issue is actually caused by the graph sparsification operation, which severely destroys the important connections established between pivotal nodes and labeled ones. To address this, we propose to restore the corrupted affinities and replenish the missed supervision for better LGI. The key challenge then lies in identifying the critical nodes and recovering the corrupted affinities. We begin by defining the pivotal nodes as k-hop starved nodes, which can be identified based on a given adjacency matrix. Considering the high computational burden, we further present a more efficient alternative inspired by CUR matrix decomposition. Subsequently, we eliminate the starved nodes by reconstructing the destroyed connections. Extensive experiments on representative benchmarks demonstrate that reducing the starved nodes consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art LGI methods, especially under extremely limited supervision (6.12% improvement on Pubmed with a labeling rate of only 0.3%).
tl;dr: We introduce a new kernel for univariate and multivariate time series that compares the linear dynamics extracted from NVAR delay embeddings and overcomes downsides of Reservoir Computing based approaches.
Kernel design is a pivotal but challenging aspect of time series analysis, especially in the context of small datasets. In recent years, Reservoir Computing (RC) has emerged as a powerful tool to compare time series based on the underlying dynamics of the generating process rather than the observed data. However, the performance of RC highly depends on the hyperparameter setting, which is hard to interpret and costly to optimize because of the recurrent nature of RC. Here, we present a new kernel for time series based on the recently established equivalence between reservoir dynamics and Nonlinear Vector AutoRegressive (NVAR) processes. The kernel is non-recurrent and depends on a small set of meaningful hyperparameters, for which we suggest an effective heuristic. We demonstrate excellent performance on a wide range of real-world classification tasks, both in terms of accuracy and speed. This further advances the understanding of RC representation learning models and extends the typical use of the NVAR framework to kernel design and representation of real-world time series data.
We present a multi-temporal, multi-modal remote-sensing dataset for predicting how active wildfires will spread at a resolution of 24 hours. The dataset consists of 13607 images across 607 fire events in the United States from January 2018 to October 2021. For each fire event, the dataset contains a full time series of daily observations, containing detected active fires and variables related to fuel, topography and weather conditions. The dataset is challenging due to: a) its inputs being multi-temporal, b) the high number of 23 multi-modal input channels, c) highly imbalanced labels and d) noisy labels, due to smoke, clouds, and inaccuracies in the active fire detection. The underlying complexity of the physical processes adds to these challenges. Compared to existing public datasets in this area, WildfireSpreadTS allows for multi-temporal modeling of spreading wildfires, due to its time series structure. Furthermore, we provide additional input modalities and a high spatial resolution of 375m for the active fire maps. We publish this dataset to encourage further research on this important task with multi-temporal, noise-resistant or generative methods, uncertainty estimation or advanced optimization techniques that deal with the high-dimensional input space.
tl;dr: A novel contrastive learning method to learn with noisy correspondence for robust image-text matching.
Recently, image-text matching has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry, which is fundamental to understanding the latent correspondence across visual and textual modalities. However, most existing methods implicitly assume the training pairs are well-aligned while ignoring the ubiquitous annotation noise, a.k.a noisy correspondence (NC), thereby inevitably leading to a performance drop. Although some methods attempt to address such noise, they still face two challenging problems: excessive memorizing/overfitting and unreliable correction for NC, especially under high noise. To address the two problems, we propose a generalized Cross-modal Robust Complementary Learning framework (CRCL), which benefits from a novel Active Complementary Loss (ACL) and an efficient Self-refining Correspondence Correction (SCC) to improve the robustness of existing methods. Specifically, ACL exploits active and complementary learning losses to reduce the risk of providing erroneous supervision, leading to theoretically and experimentally demonstrated robustness against NC. SCC utilizes multiple self-refining processes with momentum correction to enlarge the receptive field for correcting correspondences, thereby alleviating error accumulation and achieving accurate and stable corrections. We carry out extensive experiments on three image-text benchmarks, i.e., Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and CC152K, to verify the superior robustness of our CRCL against synthetic and real-world noisy correspondences.
Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful tool for retrospective improvement of Markov chain Monte Carlo output. However, the question of how to design Markov chains that are well-suited to such post-processing has yet to be addressed. This paper studies Stein importance sampling, in which weights are assigned to the states visited by a $\Pi$-invariant Markov chain to obtain a consistent approximation of $P$, the intended target. Surprisingly, the optimal choice of $\Pi$ is not identical to the target $P$; we therefore propose an explicit construction for $\Pi$ based on a novel variational argument. Explicit conditions for convergence of Stein $\Pi$-Importance Sampling are established. For $\approx 70$% of tasks in the PosteriorDB benchmark, a significant improvement over the analogous post-processing of $P$-invariant Markov chains is reported.
tl;dr: We introduce Event Stream GPT (ESGPT), an open-source library for building GPTs over continuous-time event sequences.
Generative, pre-trained transformers (GPTs, a type of "Foundation Models") have reshaped natural language processing (NLP) through their versatility in diverse downstream tasks. However, their potential extends far beyond NLP. This paper provides a software utility to help realize this potential, extending the applicability of GPTs to continuous-time sequences of complex events with internal dependencies, such as medical record datasets. Despite their potential, the adoption of foundation models in these domains has been hampered by the lack of suitable tools for model construction and evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce Event Stream GPT (ESGPT), an open-source library designed to streamline the end-to-end process for building GPTs for continuous-time event sequences. ESGPT allows users to (1) build flexible, foundation-model scale input datasets by specifying only a minimal configuration file, (2) leverage a Hugging Face compatible modeling API for GPTs over this modality that incorporates intra-event causal dependency structures and autoregressive generation capabilities, and (3) evaluate models via standardized processes that can assess few and even zero-shot performance of pre-trained models on user-specified fine-tuning tasks.
tl;dr: We evaluate continual learners' compositional generalization capability with proposed evaluation protocol and two benchmarks, i.e., CGQA and COBJ.
Compositionality facilitates the comprehension of novel objects using acquired concepts and the maintenance of a knowledge pool. This is particularly crucial for continual learners to prevent catastrophic forgetting and enable compositionally forward transfer of knowledge. However, the existing state-of-the-art benchmarks inadequately evaluate the capability of compositional generalization, leaving an intriguing question unanswered. To comprehensively assess this capability, we introduce two vision benchmarks, namely Compositional GQA (CGQA) and Compositional OBJects365 (COBJ), along with a novel evaluation framework called Compositional Few-Shot Testing (CFST). These benchmarks evaluate the systematicity, productivity, and substitutivity aspects of compositional generalization. Experimental results on five baselines and two modularity-based methods demonstrate that current continual learning techniques do exhibit somewhat favorable compositionality in their learned feature extractors. Nonetheless, further efforts are required in developing modularity-based approaches to enhance compositional generalization. We anticipate that our proposed benchmarks and evaluation protocol will foster research on continual learning and compositionality.
Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) and tool augmentation have been validated in recent work as effective practices for improving large language models (LLMs) to perform step-by-step reasoning on complex math-related tasks.
However, most existing math reasoning datasets may not be able to fully evaluate and analyze the ability of LLMs in manipulating tools and performing reasoning, as they often only require very few invocations of tools or miss annotations for evaluating intermediate reasoning steps, thus supporting only outcome evaluation.
To address the issue, we construct **CARP**, a new Chinese dataset consisting of 4,886 computation-intensive algebra problems with formulated annotations on intermediate steps, facilitating the evaluation of the intermediate reasoning process.
In CARP, we test four LLMs with CoT prompting, and find that they are all prone to make mistakes at the early steps of the solution, leading to incorrect answers.
Based on this finding, we propose a new approach that can facilitate the deliberation on reasoning steps with tool interfaces, namely **DELI**.
In DELI, we first initialize a step-by-step solution based on retrieved exemplars, then iterate two deliberation procedures that check and refine the intermediate steps of the generated solution, from both tool manipulation and natural language reasoning perspectives, until solutions converge or the maximum iteration is achieved.
Experimental results on CARP and six other datasets show that the proposed DELI mostly outperforms competitive baselines, and can further boost the performance of existing CoT methods.
Our data and code are available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CARP.
Given a point set $P\subseteq M$ from a metric space $(M,d)$ and numbers $k, z \in N$, the *metric $k$-center problem with $z$ outliers* is to find a set $C^\ast\subseteq P$ of $k$ points such that the maximum distance of all but at most $z$ outlier points of $P$ to their nearest center in ${C}^\ast$ is minimized. We consider this problem in the fully dynamic model, i.e., under insertions and deletions of points, for the case that the metric space has a bounded doubling dimension $dim$. We utilize a hierarchical data structure to maintain the points and their neighborhoods, which enables us to efficiently find the clusters. In particular, our data structure can be queried at any time to generate a $(3+\varepsilon)$-approximate solution for input values of $k$ and $z$ in worst-case query time $\varepsilon^{-O(dim)}k \log{n} \log\log{\Delta}$, where $\Delta$ is the ratio between the maximum and minimum distance between two points in $P$. Moreover, it allows insertion/deletion of a point in worst-case update time $\varepsilon^{-O(dim)}\log{n}\log{\Delta}$. Our result achieves a significantly faster query time with respect to $k$ and $z$ than the current state-of-the-art by Pellizzoni, Pietracaprina, and Pucci, which uses $\varepsilon^{-O(dim)}(k+z)^2\log{\Delta}$ query time to obtain a $(3+\varepsilon)$-approximation.
908. A Novel Framework for Policy Mirror Descent with General Parameterization and Linear Convergence
Modern policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning, such as TRPO and PPO, owe their success to the use of parameterized policies. However, while theoretical guarantees have been established for this class of algorithms, especially in the tabular setting, the use of general parameterization schemes remains mostly unjustified. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for policy optimization based on mirror descent that naturally accommodates general parameterizations. The policy class induced by our scheme recovers known classes, e.g., softmax, and generates new ones depending on the choice of mirror map. Using our framework, we obtain the first result that guarantees linear convergence for a policy-gradient-based method involving general parameterization. To demonstrate the ability of our framework to accommodate general parameterization schemes, we provide its sample complexity when using shallow neural networks, show that it represents an improvement upon the previous best results, and empirically validate the effectiveness of our theoretical claims on classic control tasks.
tl;dr: We introduce a new task, dataset, and framework for 4D Panoptic Scene Graph Generation.
We are living in a three-dimensional space while moving forward through a fourth dimension: time. To allow artificial intelligence to develop a comprehensive understanding of such a 4D environment, we introduce **4D Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG-4D)**, a new representation that bridges the raw visual data perceived in a dynamic 4D world and high-level visual understanding. Specifically, PSG-4D abstracts rich 4D sensory data into nodes, which represent entities with precise location and status information, and edges, which capture the temporal relations. To facilitate research in this new area, we build a richly annotated PSG-4D dataset consisting of 3K RGB-D videos with a total of 1M frames, each of which is labeled with 4D panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine-grained, dynamic scene graphs. To solve PSG-4D, we propose PSG4DFormer, a Transformer-based model that can predict panoptic segmentation masks, track masks along the time axis, and generate the corresponding scene graphs via a relation component. Extensive experiments on the new dataset show that our method can serve as a strong baseline for future research on PSG-4D. In the end, we provide a real-world application example to demonstrate how we can achieve dynamic scene understanding by integrating a large language model into our PSG-4D system.
Language instructions and demonstrations are two natural ways for users to teach robots personalized tasks. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown impressive performance in translating language instructions into code for robotic tasks. However, translating demonstrations into task code continues to be a challenge due to the length and complexity of both demonstrations and code, making learning a direct mapping intractable. This paper presents Demo2Code, a novel framework that generates robot task code from demonstrations via an extended chain-of-thought and defines a common latent specification to connect the two. Our framework employs a robust two-stage process: (1) a recursive summarization technique that condenses demonstrations into concise specifications, and (2) a code synthesis approach that expands each function recursively from the generated specifications. We conduct extensive evaluation on various robot task benchmarks, including a novel game benchmark Robotouille, designed to simulate diverse cooking tasks in a kitchen environment.
tl;dr: Multi-fidelity hyperparameter optimization with deep power laws that achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse benchmarks.
Hyperparameter optimization is an important subfield of machine learning that focuses on tuning the hyperparameters of a chosen algorithm to achieve peak performance. Recently, there has been a stream of methods that tackle the issue of hyperparameter optimization, however, most of the methods do not exploit the dominant power law nature of learning curves for Bayesian optimization. In this work, we propose Deep Power Laws (DPL), an ensemble of neural network models conditioned to yield predictions that follow a power-law scaling pattern. Our method dynamically decides which configurations to pause and train incrementally by making use of gray-box evaluations. We compare our method against 7 state-of-the-art competitors on 3 benchmarks related to tabular, image, and NLP datasets covering 59 diverse tasks. Our method achieves the best results across all benchmarks by obtaining the best any-time results compared to all competitors.
Graph neural architecture search (GraphNAS) has shown great potential for automatically designing graph neural architectures for graph related tasks. However, multi-task GraphNAS capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously has been largely unexplored in literature, posing great challenges to capture the complex relations and influences among different tasks. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel multi-task graph neural architecture search with task-aware collaboration and curriculum (MTGC3), which is able to simultaneously discover optimal architectures for different tasks and learn the collaborative relationships among different tasks in a joint manner. Specifically, we design the layer-wise disentangled supernet capable of managing multiple architectures in a unified framework, which combines with our proposed soft task-collaborative module to learn the transferability relationships between tasks. We further develop the task-wise curriculum training strategy to improve the architecture search procedure via reweighing the influence of different tasks based on task difficulties. Extensive experiments show that our proposed MTGC3 model achieves state-of-the-art performance against several baselines in multi-task scenarios, demonstrating its ability to discover effective architectures and capture the collaborative relationships for multiple tasks.
tl;dr: An interactive dataset of black box functions and benchmark for evaluating interpretability methods, including a new Automated Interpretability Agent (AIA)
Labeling neural network submodules with human-legible descriptions is useful for many downstream tasks: such descriptions can surface failures, guide interventions, and perhaps even explain important model behaviors. To date, most mechanistic descriptions of trained networks have involved small models, narrowly delimited phenomena, and large amounts of human labor. Labeling all human-interpretable sub-computations in models of increasing size and complexity will almost certainly require tools that can generate and validate descriptions automatically. Recently, techniques that use learned models in-the-loop for labeling have begun to gain traction, but methods for evaluating their efficacy are limited and ad-hoc. How should we validate and compare open-ended labeling tools? This paper introduces FIND (Function INterpretation and Description), a benchmark suite for evaluating the building blocks of automated interpretability methods. FIND contains functions that resemble components of trained neural networks, and accompanying descriptions of the kind we seek to generate. The functions are procedurally constructed across textual and numeric domains, and involve a range of real-world complexities, including noise, composition, approximation, and bias. We evaluate methods that use pretrained language models (LMs) to produce code-based and natural language descriptions of function behavior. Additionally, we introduce a new interactive method in which an Automated Interpretability Agent (AIA) generates function descriptions. We find that an AIA, built with an off-the-shelf LM augmented with black-box access to functions, can sometimes infer function structure—acting as a scientist by forming hypotheses, proposing experiments, and updating descriptions in light of new data. However, FIND also reveals that LM-based descriptions capture global function behavior while missing local details. These results suggest that FIND will be useful for characterizing the performance of more sophisticated interpretability methods before they are applied to real-world models.
914. Diffusion Model is an Effective Planner and Data Synthesizer for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
tl;dr: A diffusion-based method to facilitate multi-task reinforcement learning
Diffusion models have demonstrated highly-expressive generative capabilities in vision and NLP. Recent studies in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown that diffusion models are also powerful in modeling complex policies or trajectories in offline datasets. However, these works have been limited to single-task settings where a generalist agent capable of addressing multi-task predicaments is absent. In this paper, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of a single diffusion model in modeling large-scale multi-task offline data, which can be challenging due to diverse and multimodal data distribution. Specifically, we propose Multi-Task Diffusion Model (\textsc{MTDiff}), a diffusion-based method that incorporates Transformer backbones and prompt learning for generative planning and data synthesis in multi-task offline settings. \textsc{MTDiff} leverages vast amounts of knowledge available in multi-task data and performs implicit knowledge sharing among tasks. For generative planning, we find \textsc{MTDiff} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms across 50 tasks on Meta-World and 8 maps on Maze2D. For data synthesis, \textsc{MTDiff} generates high-quality data for testing tasks given a single demonstration as a prompt, which enhances the low-quality datasets for even unseen tasks.
The framework of multi-agent learning explores the dynamics of how an agent's strategies evolve in response to the evolving strategies of other agents. Of particular interest is whether or not agent strategies converge to well known solution concepts such as Nash Equilibrium (NE). In "higher order'' learning, agent dynamics include auxiliary states that can capture phenomena such as path dependencies. We introduce higher-order gradient play dynamics that resemble projected gradient ascent with auxiliary states. The dynamics are "payoff based'' and "uncoupled'' in that each agent's dynamics depend on its own evolving payoff and has no explicit dependence on the utilities of other agents. We first show that for any specific game with an isolated completely mixed-strategy NE, there exist higher-order gradient play dynamics that lead (locally) to that NE, both for the specific game and nearby games with perturbed utility functions. Conversely, we show that for any higher-order gradient play dynamics, there exists a game with a unique isolated completely mixed-strategy NE for which the dynamics do not lead to NE. Finally, we show that convergence to the mixed-strategy equilibrium in coordination games, comes at the expense of the dynamics being inherently internally unstable.
tl;dr: A multimodal human pose dataset for versatile wireless sensing including RGBD, mmWave radar, LiDAR, and WiFi
4D human perception plays an essential role in a myriad of applications, such as home automation and metaverse avatar simulation. However, existing solutions which mainly rely on cameras and wearable devices are either privacy intrusive or inconvenient to use. To address these issues, wireless sensing has emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging LiDAR, mmWave radar, and WiFi signals for device-free human sensing. In this paper, we propose MM-Fi, the first multi-modal non-intrusive 4D human dataset with 27 daily or rehabilitation action categories, to bridge the gap between wireless sensing and high-level human perception tasks. MM-Fi consists of over 320k synchronized frames of five modalities from 40 human subjects. Various annotations are provided to support potential sensing tasks, e.g., human pose estimation and action recognition. Extensive experiments have been conducted to compare the sensing capacity of each or several modalities in terms of multiple tasks. We envision that MM-Fi can contribute to wireless sensing research with respect to action recognition, human pose estimation, multi-modal learning, cross-modal supervision, and interdisciplinary healthcare research.
We present the Minigrid and Miniworld libraries which provide a suite of goal-oriented 2D and 3D environments. The libraries were explicitly created with a minimalistic design paradigm to allow users to rapidly develop new environments for a wide range of research-specific needs. As a result, both have received widescale adoption by the RL community, facilitating research in a wide range of areas. In this paper, we outline the design philosophy, environment details, and their world generation API. We also showcase the additional capabilities brought by the unified API between Minigrid and Miniworld through case studies on transfer learning (for both RL agents and humans) between the different observation spaces. The source code of Minigrid and Miniworld can be found at https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Minigrid and https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Miniworld along with their documentation at https://minigrid.farama.org/ and https://miniworld.farama.org/.
918. Pretraining task diversity and the emergence of non-Bayesian in-context learning for regression
tl;dr: We empirically demonstrate a task diversity threshold for the emergence of in-context learning in pretrained transformers beyond which the model can learn fundamentally new tasks in-context.
Pretrained transformers exhibit the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL): they can learn tasks from just a few examples provided in the prompt without updating any weights. This raises a foundational question: can ICL solve fundamentally _new_ tasks that are very different from those seen during pretraining? To probe this question, we examine ICL’s performance on linear regression while varying the diversity of tasks in the pretraining dataset. We empirically demonstrate a _task diversity threshold_ for the emergence of ICL. Below this threshold, the pretrained transformer cannot solve unseen regression tasks, instead behaving like a Bayesian estimator with the _non-diverse pretraining task distribution_ as the prior. Beyond this threshold, the transformer significantly outperforms this estimator; its behavior aligns with that of ridge regression, corresponding to a Gaussian prior over _all tasks_, including those not seen during pretraining. Thus, when pretrained on data with task diversity greater than the threshold, transformers _can_ optimally solve fundamentally new tasks in-context. Importantly, this capability hinges on it deviating from the Bayes optimal estimator with the pretraining distribution as the prior. This study also explores the effect of regularization, model capacity and task structure and underscores, in a concrete example, the critical role of task diversity, alongside data and model scale, in the emergence of ICL.
Aimed at adapting a generative model to a novel generation task with only a few given data samples, the capability of few-shot generation is crucial for many real-world applications with limited data, \emph{e.g.}, artistic domains.
Instead of training from scratch, recent works tend to leverage the prior knowledge stored in previous datasets, which is quite similar to the memory mechanism of human intelligence, but few of these works directly imitate the memory-recall mechanism that humans make good use of in accomplishing creative tasks, \emph{e.g.}, painting and writing.
Inspired by the memory mechanism of human brain, in this work, we carefully design a variational structured memory module (VSM), which can simultaneously store both episodic and semantic memories to assist existing generative models efficiently recall these memories during sample generation.
Meanwhile, we introduce a bionic memory updating strategy for the conversion between episodic and semantic memories, which can also model the uncertainty during conversion.
Then, we combine the developed VSM with various generative models under the Bayesian framework, and evaluate these memory-augmented generative models with few-shot generation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our methods.
tl;dr: We propose a new rewiring approach for continual reinforcement learning.
The human brain rewires itself for neuroplasticity in the presence of new tasks. We are inspired to harness this key process in continual reinforcement learning, prioritizing adaptation to non-stationary environments. In distinction to existing rewiring approaches that rely on pruning or dynamic routing, which may limit network capacity and plasticity, this work presents a novel rewiring scheme by permuting hidden neurons. Specifically, the neuron permutation is parameterized to be end-to-end learnable and can rearrange all available synapses to explore a large span of weight space, thereby promoting adaptivity. In addition, we introduce two main designs to steer the rewiring process in continual reinforcement learning: first, a multi-mode rewiring strategy is proposed which diversifies the policy and encourages exploration when encountering new environments. Secondly, to ensure stability on history tasks, the network is devised to cache each learned wiring while subtly updating its weights, allowing for retrospective recovery of any previous state appropriate for the task. Meanwhile, an alignment mechanism is curated to achieve better plasticity-stability tradeoff by jointly optimizing cached wirings and weights. Our proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on 18 continual reinforcement learning scenarios ranging from locomotion to manipulation, demonstrating its advantages over state-of-the-art competitors in performance-efficiency tradeoffs. Code is available at https://github.com/feifeiobama/RewireNeuron.
tl;dr: TimeX is an in-hoc explainer for time series models that generates interpretable attributions and also learns a latent space of explanations, along with landmarks, to summarize groups of informative temporal patterns.
Interpreting time series models is uniquely challenging because it requires identifying both the location of time series signals that drive model predictions and their matching to an interpretable temporal pattern. While explainers from other modalities can be applied to time series, their inductive biases do not transfer well to the inherently challenging interpretation of time series. We present TimeX, a time series consistency model for training explainers. TimeX trains an interpretable surrogate to mimic the behavior of a pretrained time series model. It addresses the issue of model faithfulness by introducing model behavior consistency, a novel formulation that preserves relations in the latent space induced by the pretrained model with relations in the latent space induced by TimeX. TimeX provides discrete attribution maps and, unlike existing interpretability methods, it learns a latent space of explanations that can be used in various ways, such as to provide landmarks to visually aggregate similar explanations and easily recognize temporal patterns. We evaluate TimeX on eight synthetic and real-world datasets and compare its performance against state-of-the-art interpretability methods. We also conduct case studies using physiological time series. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that TimeX achieves the highest or second-highest performance in every metric compared to baselines across all datasets. Through case studies, we show that the novel components of TimeX show potential for training faithful, interpretable models that capture the behavior of pretrained time series models.
tl;dr: We introduce Diffusion-TTA, an effective plug-and-play method for test time adaptation that uses generative feedback from a pre-trained diffusion model to adapt large-scale pre-trained discriminative models.
The advancements in generative modeling, particularly the advent of diffusion models, have sparked a fundamental question: how can these models be effectively used for discriminative tasks? In this work, we find that generative models can be great test-time adapters for discriminative models. Our method, Diffusion-TTA, adapts pre-trained discriminative models such as image classifiers, segmenters and depth predictors, to each unlabelled example in the test set using generative feedback from a diffusion model. We achieve this by modulating the conditioning of the diffusion model using the output of the discriminative model. We then maximize the image likelihood objective by backpropagating the gradients to discriminative model’s parameters. We show Diffusion-TTA significantly enhances the accuracy of various large-scale pre-trained discriminative models, such as, ImageNet classifiers, CLIP models, image pixel labellers and image depth predictors. Diffusion-TTA outperforms existing test-time adaptation methods, including TTT-MAE and TENT, and particularly shines in online adaptation setups, where the discriminative model is continually adapted to each example in the test set. We provide access to code, results, and visualizations on our website: https://diffusion-tta.github.io/
The existing graph neural architecture search (GNAS) methods heavily rely on supervised labels during the search process, failing to handle ubiquitous scenarios where supervisions are not available. In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised graph neural architecture search, which remains unexplored in the literature. The key problem is to discover the latent graph factors that drive the formation of graph data as well as the underlying relations between the factors and the optimal neural architectures. Handling this problem is challenging given that the latent graph factors together with architectures are highly entangled due to the nature of the graph and the complexity of the neural architecture search process. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Disentangled Self-supervised Graph Neural Architecture Search (DSGAS) model, which is able to discover the optimal architectures capturing various latent graph factors in a self-supervised fashion based on unlabeled graph data. Specifically, we first design a disentangled graph super-network capable of incorporating multiple architectures with factor-wise disentanglement, which are optimized simultaneously. Then, we estimate the performance of architectures under different factors by our proposed self-supervised training with joint architecture-graph disentanglement. Finally, we propose a contrastive search with architecture augmentations to discover architectures with factor-specific expertise. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance against several baseline methods in an unsupervised manner.
tl;dr: We propose a new kernel-based test for distributional effects of the treatment.
The average treatment effect, which is the difference in expectation of the counterfactuals, is probably the most popular target effect in causal inference with binary treatments. However, treatments may have effects beyond the mean, for instance decreasing or increasing the variance. We propose a new kernel-based test for distributional effects of the treatment. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first kernel-based, doubly-robust test with provably valid type-I error. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm is computationally efficient, avoiding the use of permutations.
tl;dr: We annotate 2246 generic 3D room layouts just from 2D segmentation masks, which are easy to annotate for humans.
Indoor rooms are among the most common use cases in 3D scene understanding. Current state-of-the-art methods for this task are driven by large annotated datasets. Room layouts are especially important, consisting of structural elements in 3D, such as wall, floor, and ceiling. However, they are difficult to annotate, especially on pure RGB video. We propose a novel method to produce generic 3D room layouts just from 2D segmentation masks, which are easy to annotate for humans. Based on these 2D annotations, we automatically reconstruct 3D plane equations for the structural elements and their spatial extent in the scene, and connect adjacent elements at the appropriate contact edges. We annotate and publicly release 2246 3D room layouts on the RealEstate10k dataset, containing YouTube videos. We demonstrate the high quality of these 3D layouts annotations with extensive experiments.
tl;dr: We design and deploy a learning approach for improving instruction-following agents from feedback provided in real time during collaborative interactions with human users.
We propose and deploy an approach to continually train an instruction-following agent from feedback provided by users during collaborative interactions. During interaction, human users instruct an agent using natural language, and provide realtime binary feedback as they observe the agent following their instructions. We design a contextual bandit learning approach, converting user feedback to immediate reward. We evaluate through thousands of human-agent interactions, demonstrating 15.4% absolute improvement in instruction execution accuracy over time. We also show our approach is robust to several design variations, and that the feedback signal is roughly equivalent to the learning signal of supervised demonstration data.
We focus on Continual Meta-Learning (CML), which targets accumulating and exploiting meta-knowledge on a sequence of non-i.i.d. tasks. The primary challenge is to strike a balance between stability and plasticity, where a model should be stable to avoid catastrophic forgetting in previous tasks and plastic to learn generalizable concepts from new tasks. To address this, we formulate the CML objective as controlling the average excess risk upper bound of the task sequence, which reflects the trade-off between forgetting and generalization. Based on the objective, we introduce a unified theoretical framework for CML in both static and shifting environments, providing guarantees for various task-specific learning algorithms. Moreover, we first present a rigorous analysis of a bi-level trade-off in shifting environments. To approach the optimal trade-off, we propose a novel algorithm that dynamically adjusts the meta-parameter and its learning rate w.r.t environment change. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed theory and algorithm.
tl;dr: proposed a PINNs (physics-informed neural networks) architecture for fast training
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently emerged as promising data-driven PDE solvers showing encouraging results on various PDEs.
However, there is a fundamental limitation of training PINNs to solve multi-dimensional PDEs and approximate very complex solution functions.
The number of training points (collocation points) required on these challenging PDEs grows substantially, and it is severely limited due to the expensive computational costs and heavy memory overhead.
To overcome this limit, we propose a network architecture and training algorithm for PINNs.
The proposed method, separable PINN (SPINN), operates on a per-axis basis to decrease the number of network propagations in multi-dimensional PDEs instead of point-wise processing in conventional PINNs.
We also propose using forward-mode automatic differentiation to reduce the computational cost of computing PDE residuals, enabling a large number of collocation points ($>10^7$) on a single commodity GPU.
The experimental results show significantly reduced computational costs ($62\times$ in wall-clock time, $1,394\times$ in FLOPs given the same number of collocation points) in multi-dimensional PDEs while achieving better accuracy.
Furthermore, we present that SPINN can solve a chaotic (2+1)-d Navier-Stokes equation much faster than the best-performing prior method (9 minutes vs. 10 hours in a single GPU), maintaining accuracy.
Finally, we showcase that SPINN can accurately obtain the solution of a highly nonlinear and multi-dimensional PDE, a (3+1)-d Navier-Stokes equation.
For visualized results and code, please see https://jwcho5576.github.io/spinn.github.io/.
Recent advances in 3D-aware GAN models have enabled the generation of realistic and controllable human body images. However, existing methods focus on the control of major body joints, neglecting the manipulation of expressive attributes, such as facial expressions, jaw poses, hand poses, and so on. In this work, we present XAGen, the first 3D generative model for human avatars capable of expressive control over body, face, and hands. To enhance the fidelity of small-scale regions like face and hands, we devise a multi-scale and multi-part 3D representation that models fine details. Based on this representation, we propose a multi-part rendering technique that disentangles the synthesis of body, face, and hands to ease model training and enhance geometric quality. Furthermore, we design multi-part discriminators that evaluate the quality of the generated avatars with respect to their appearance and fine-grained control capabilities. Experiments show that XAGen surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of realism, diversity, and expressive control abilities. Code and data will be made available at https://showlab.github.io/xagen.
tl;dr: Private sampling algorithms for multi-dimensional Gaussian distributions and product distributions
We study the problem, where given a dataset of $n$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution $P$, we seek to generate a sample from a distribution that is close to $P$ in total variation distance, under the constraint of differential privacy. We study the settings where $P$ is a multi-dimensional Gaussian distribution with different assumptions: known covariance, unknown bounded covariance, and unknown unbounded covariance. We present new differentially private sampling algorithms, and show that they achieve near-optimal sample complexity in the first two settings. Moreover, when $P$ is a product distribution on the binary hypercube, we obtain a pure-DP algorithm whereas only an approximate-DP algorithm (with slightly worse sample complexity) was previously known.
tl;dr: We introduce a setting for adversarial robust learning that interpolates between a known perturbation type and entirely unknown perturbation types by providing a PAC type analysis with a class of perturbation types.
In many real-world settings exact perturbation sets to be used by an adversary are not plausibly available to a learner. While prior literature has studied both scenarios with completely known and completely unknown perturbation sets, we propose an in-between setting of learning with respect to a class of perturbation sets. We show that in this setting we can improve on previous results with completely unknown perturbation sets, while still addressing the concerns of not having perfect knowledge of these sets in real life. In particular, we give the first positive results for the learnability of infinite Littlestone classes when having access to a perfect-attack oracle. We also consider a setting of learning with abstention, where predictions are considered robustness violations, only when the wrong prediction is made within the perturbation set. We show there are classes for which perturbation-set unaware learning without query access is possible, but abstention is required.
tl;dr: We add state-action representation learning to TD3 and significantly outperform existing methods.
In reinforcement learning (RL), representation learning is a proven tool for complex image-based tasks,
but is often overlooked for environments with low-level states, such as physical control problems. This paper introduces SALE, a novel approach for learning embeddings that model the nuanced interaction between state and action, enabling effective representation learning from low-level states. We extensively study the design space of these embeddings and highlight important design considerations. We integrate SALE and an adaptation of checkpoints for RL into TD3 to form the TD7 algorithm, which significantly outperforms existing continuous control algorithms. On OpenAI gym benchmark tasks, TD7 has an average performance gain of 276.7% and 50.7% over TD3 at 300k and 5M time steps, respectively, and works in both the online and offline settings.
GNN explanation method aims to identify an explanatory subgraph which contains the most informative components of the full graph. However, a major limitation of existing GNN explainers is that they are not robust to the structurally corrupted graphs, e.g., graphs with noisy or adversarial edges. On the one hand, existing GNN explainers mostly explore explanations based on either the raw graph features or the learned latent representations, both of which can be easily corrupted. On the other hand, the corruptions in graphs are irregular in terms of the structural properties, e.g., the size or connectivity of graphs, which makes the rigorous constraints used by previous GNN explainers unfeasible. To address these issues, we propose a robust GNN explainer called V-InfoR. Specifically, a robust graph representation extractor, which takes insights of variational inference, is proposed to infer the latent distribution of graph representations. Instead of directly using the corrupted raw features or representations of each single graph, we sample the graph representations from the inferred distribution for the downstream explanation generator, which can effectively eliminate the minor corruption. We next formulate the explanation exploration as a graph information bottleneck (GIB) optimization problem. As a more general method that does not need any rigorous structural constraints, our GIB-based method can adaptively capture both the regularity and irregularity of the severely corrupted graphs for explanation. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets indicate that V-InfoR significantly improves the GNN explanation performance for the structurally corrupted graphs. Code and dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/V-InfoR-EF88
The capacity to reason logically is a hallmark of human cognition. Humans excel at integrating multimodal information for locigal reasoning, as exemplified by the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, which is a challenging multimodal task. VQA tasks and large vision-and-language models aim to tackle reasoning problems, but the accuracy, consistency and fabrication of the generated answers is hard to evaluate in the absence of a VQA dataset that can offer formal, comprehensive and systematic complex logical reasoning questions. To address this gap, we present LoRA, a novel Logical Reasoning Augmented VQA dataset that requires formal and complex description logic reasoning based on a food-and-kitchen knowledge base. Our main objective in creating LoRA is to enhance the complex and formal logical reasoning capabilities of VQA models, which are not adequately measured by existing VQA datasets. We devise strong and flexible programs to automatically generate 200,000 diverse description logic reasoning questions based on the SROIQ Description Logic, along with realistic kitchen scenes and ground truth answers. We fine-tune the latest transformer VQA models and evaluate the zero-shot performance of the state-of-the-art large vision-and-language models on LoRA. The results reveal that LoRA presents a unique challenge in logical reasoning, setting a systematic and comprehensive evaluation standard.
tl;dr: We propose STAR, a method that uses prototype replay to tackle distribution discrepancies between single-step training sets and the complete dataset in class-incremental semantic segmentation, saving storage and achieving SOTA performance.
Existing class-incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) methods mainly tackle catastrophic forgetting and background shift, but often overlook another crucial issue. In CISS, each step focuses on different foreground classes, and the training set for a single step only includes images containing pixels of the current foreground classes, excluding images without them. This leads to an overrepresentation of these foreground classes in the single-step training set, causing the classification biased towards these classes. To address this issue, we present STAR, which preserves the main characteristics of each past class by storing a compact prototype and necessary statistical data, and aligns the class distribution of single-step training samples with the complete dataset by replaying these prototypes and repeating background pixels with appropriate frequency. Compared to the previous works that replay raw images, our method saves over 100 times the storage while achieving better performance. Moreover, STAR incorporates an old-class features maintaining (OCFM) loss, keeping old-class features unchanged while preserving sufficient plasticity for learning new classes. Furthermore, a similarity-aware discriminative (SAD) loss is employed to specifically enhance the feature diversity between similar old-new class pairs. Experiments on two public datasets, Pascal VOC 2012 and ADE20K, reveal that our model surpasses all previous state-of-the-art methods.
Whittle index policy is a heuristic to the intractable restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) problem. Although it is provably asymptotically optimal, finding Whittle indices remains difficult. In this paper, we present Neural-Q-Whittle, a Whittle index based Q-learning algorithm for RMAB with neural network function approximation, which is an example of nonlinear two-timescale stochastic approximation with Q-function values updated on a faster timescale and Whittle indices on a slower timescale. Despite the empirical success of deep Q-learning, the non-asymptotic convergence rate of Neural-Q-Whittle, which couples neural networks with two-timescale Q-learning largely remains unclear. This paper provides a finite-time analysis of Neural-Q-Whittle, where data are generated from a Markov chain, and Q-function is approximated by a ReLU neural network. Our analysis leverages a Lyapunov drift approach to capture the evolution of two coupled parameters, and the nonlinearity in value function approximation further requires us to characterize the approximation error. Combing these provide Neural-Q-Whittle with $\mathcal{O}(1/k^{2/3})$ convergence rate, where $k$ is the number of iterations.
In recent years there has been a shift from heuristics based malware detection towards machine learning, which proves to be more robust in the current heavily adversarial threat landscape. While we acknowledge machine learning to be better equipped to mine for patterns in the increasingly high amounts of similar-looking files, we also note a remarkable scarcity of the data available for similarity targeted research. Moreover, we observe that the focus in the few related works falls on quantifying similarity in malware, often overlooking the clean data. This one-sided quantification is especially dangerous in the context of detection bypass. We propose to address the deficiencies in the space of similarity research on binary files, starting from EMBER — one of the largest malware classification datasets. We enhance EMBER with similarity information as well as malware class tags, to enable further research in the similarity space. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we publish EMBERSim, an augmented version of EMBER, that includes similarity informed tags; (2) we enrich EMBERSim with automatically determined malware class tags using the open-source tool AVClass on VirusTotal data and (3) we describe and share the implementation for our class scoring technique and leaf similarity method.
tl;dr: Recommender systems for large libraries of formalized mathematics in Agda and Lean
We introduce MLFMF, a collection of data sets for benchmarking recommendation systems used to support formalization of mathematics with proof assistants. These systems help humans identify which previous entries (theorems, constructions, datatypes, and postulates) are relevant in proving a new theorem or carrying out a new construction. Each data set is derived from a library of formalized mathematics written in proof assistants Agda or Lean. The collection includes the largest Lean 4 library Mathlib, and some of the largest Agda libraries: the standard library, the library of univalent mathematics Agda-unimath, and the TypeTopology library. Each data set represents the corresponding library in two ways: as a heterogeneous network, and as a list of s-expressions representing the syntax trees of all the entries in the library. The network contains the (modular) structure of the library and the references between entries, while the s-expressions give complete and easily parsed information about every entry.
We report baseline results using standard graph and word embeddings, tree ensembles, and instance-based learning algorithms. The MLFMF data sets provide solid benchmarking support for further investigation of the numerous machine learning approaches to formalized mathematics. The methodology used to extract the networks and the s-expressions readily applies to other libraries, and is applicable to other proof assistants. With more than $250\,000$ entries in total, this is currently the largest collection of formalized mathematical knowledge in machine learnable format.
Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation policy planning.
However, traditional methods in ecology for species distribution models (SDMs) generally focus either on narrow sets of species or narrow geographical areas and there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species. A major reason for this is the limited availability of data traditionally used, due to the prohibitive amount of effort and expertise required for traditional field monitoring.
The wide availability of remote sensing data and the growing adoption of citizen science tools to collect species observations data at low cost offer an opportunity for improving biodiversity monitoring and enabling the modelling of complex ecosystems. We introduce a novel task for mapping bird species to their habitats by predicting species encounter rates from satellite images, and present SatBird, a satellite dataset of locations in the USA with labels derived from presence-absence observation data from the citizen science database eBird, considering summer (breeding) and winter seasons. We also provide a dataset in Kenya representing low-data regimes. We additionally provide environmental data and species range maps for each location. We benchmark a set of baselines on our dataset, including SOTA models for remote sensing tasks. SatBird opens up possibilities for scalably modelling properties of ecosystems worldwide.
tl;dr: We propose counterfactual data augmentation methods, guided by knowledge on the causal structure of the data, to simulate interventions on spurious features.
The reliance of text classifiers on spurious correlations can lead to poor generalization at deployment, raising concerns about their use in safety-critical domains such as healthcare. In this work, we propose to use counterfactual data augmentation, guided by knowledge of the causal structure of the data, to simulate interventions on spurious features and to learn more robust text classifiers. We show that this strategy is appropriate in prediction problems where the label is spuriously correlated with an attribute. Under the assumptions of such problems, we discuss the favorable sample complexity of counterfactual data augmentation, compared to importance re-weighting. Pragmatically, we match examples using auxiliary data, based on diff-in-diff methodology, and use a large language model (LLM) to represent a conditional probability of text. Through extensive experimentation on learning caregiver-invariant predictors of clinical diagnoses from medical narratives and on semi-synthetic data, we demonstrate that our method for simulating interventions improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy compared to baseline invariant learning algorithms.
Recent discoveries have revealed that deep neural networks might behave in a biased manner in many real-world scenarios. For instance, deep networks trained on a large-scale face recognition dataset CelebA tend to predict blonde hair for females and black hair for males. Such biases not only jeopardize the robustness of models but also perpetuate and amplify social biases, which is especially concerning for automated decision-making processes in healthcare, recruitment, etc., as they could exacerbate unfair economic and social inequalities among different groups. Existing debiasing methods suffer from high costs in bias labeling or model re-training, while also exhibiting a deficiency in terms of elucidating the origins of biases within the model. To this respect, we propose a fast model debiasing method (FMD) which offers an efficient approach to identify, evaluate and remove biases inherent in trained models. The FMD identifies biased attributes through an explicit counterfactual concept and quantifies the influence of data samples with influence functions. Moreover, we design a machine unlearning-based strategy to efficiently and effectively remove the bias in a trained model with a small counterfactual dataset.
Experiments on the Colored MNIST, CelebA, and Adult Income datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior or competing classification accuracies compared with state-of-the-art retraining-based methods while attaining significantly fewer biases and requiring much less debiasing cost. Notably, our method requires only a small external dataset and updating a minimal amount of model parameters, without the requirement of access to training data that may be too large or unavailable in practice.
As large language models have demonstrated impressive performance in many domains, recent works have adopted language models (LMs) as controllers of visual modules for vision-and-language tasks. While existing work focuses on equipping LMs with visual understanding, we propose two novel interpretable/explainable visual programming frameworks for text-to-image (T2I) generation and evaluation. First, we introduce VPGen, an interpretable step-by-step T2I generation framework that decomposes T2I generation into three steps: object/count generation, layout generation, and image generation. We employ an LM to handle the first two steps (object/count generation and layout generation), by finetuning it on text-layout pairs. Our step-by-step T2I generation framework provides stronger spatial control than end-to-end models, the dominant approach for this task. Furthermore, we leverage the world knowledge of pretrained LMs, overcoming the limitation of previous layout-guided T2I works that can only handle predefined object classes. We demonstrate that our VPGen has improved control in counts/spatial relations/scales of objects than state-of-the-art T2I generation models. Second, we introduce VPEval, an interpretable and explainable evaluation framework for T2I generation based on visual programming. Unlike previous T2I evaluations with a single scoring model that is accurate in some skills but unreliable in others, VPEval produces evaluation programs that invoke a set of visual modules that are experts in different skills, and also provides visual+textual explanations of the evaluation results. Our analysis shows that VPEval provides a more human-correlated evaluation for skill-specific and open-ended prompts than widely used single model-based evaluation. We hope that our work encourages future progress on interpretable/explainable generation and evaluation for T2I models.
tl;dr: New 2D and 3D Lagrangian fluid mechanics datasets, training and inference JAX-based codebase with four common graph neural networks, and benchmarking results.
Machine learning has been successfully applied to grid-based PDE modeling in various scientific applications. However, learned PDE solvers based on Lagrangian particle discretizations, which are the preferred approach to problems with free surfaces or complex physics, remain largely unexplored. We present LagrangeBench, the first benchmarking suite for Lagrangian particle problems, focusing on temporal coarse-graining. In particular, our contribution is: (a) seven new fluid mechanics datasets (four in 2D and three in 3D) generated with the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method including the Taylor-Green vortex, lid-driven cavity, reverse Poiseuille flow, and dam break, each of which includes different physics like solid wall interactions or free surface, (b) efficient JAX-based API with various recent training strategies and three neighbor search routines, and (c) JAX implementation of established Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) like GNS and SEGNN with baseline results. Finally, to measure the performance of learned surrogates we go beyond established position errors and introduce physical metrics like kinetic energy MSE and Sinkhorn distance for the particle distribution. Our codebase is available under the URL: [https://github.com/tumaer/lagrangebench](https://github.com/tumaer/lagrangebench).
tl;dr: TRIAGE provides systematic data characterization for regression settings; compatible with a variety of regressors
Data quality is crucial for robust machine learning algorithms, with the recent interest in data-centric AI emphasizing the importance of training data characterization. However, current data characterization methods are largely focused on classification settings, with regression settings largely understudied. To address this, we introduce TRIAGE, a novel data characterization framework tailored to regression tasks and compatible with a broad class of regressors. TRIAGE utilizes conformal predictive distributions to provide a model-agnostic scoring method, the TRIAGE score. We operationalize the score to analyze individual samples' training dynamics and characterize samples as under-, over-, or well-estimated by the model. We show that TRIAGE's characterization is consistent and highlight its utility to improve performance via data sculpting/filtering, in multiple regression settings. Additionally, beyond sample level, we show TRIAGE enables new approaches to dataset selection and feature acquisition. Overall, TRIAGE highlights the value unlocked by data characterization in real-world regression applications.
tl;dr: A dataset of multiview and in-the-wild image collections with near-perfect 3D ground-truth shapes and camera pose annotations for 3D reconstruction research.
Recent advances in neural reconstruction enable high-quality 3D object reconstruction from casually captured image collections. Current techniques mostly analyze their progress on relatively simple image collections where SfM techniques can provide ground-truth (GT) camera poses. We note that SfM techniques tend to fail on in-the-wild image collections such as image search results with varying backgrounds and illuminations. To enable systematic research progress on 3D reconstruction from casual image captures, we propose `NAVI': a new dataset of category-agnostic image collections of objects with high-quality 3D scans along with per-image 2D-3D alignments providing near-perfect GT camera parameters. These 2D-3D alignments allow us to extract accurate derivative annotations such as dense pixel correspondences, depth and segmentation maps. We demonstrate the use of NAVI image collections on different problem settings and show that NAVI enables more thorough evaluations that were not possible with existing datasets. We believe NAVI is beneficial for systematic research progress on 3D reconstruction and correspondence estimation.
tl;dr: This paper presents SGxP, a multimodal dataset and set of benchmarks focused on the discovery of genotype x phenotype relationships in bioenergy sorghum.
Large scale field-phenotyping approaches have the potential to solve important questions about the relationship of plant genotype to plant phenotype. Computational approaches to measuring the phenotype (the observable plant features) are required to address the problem at a large scale, but machine learning approaches to extract phenotypes from sensor data have been hampered by limited access to (a) sufficiently large, organized multi-sensor datasets, (b) field trials that have a large scale and significant number of genotypes, (c) full genetic sequencing of those phenotypes, and (d) datasets sufficiently organized so that algorithm centered researchers can directly address the real biological problems. To address this, we present SGxP, a novel benchmark dataset from a large-scale field trial consisting of the complete genotype of over 300 sorghum varieties, and time sequences of imagery from several field plots growing each variety, taken with RGB and laser 3D scanner imaging. To lower the barrier to entry and facilitate further developments, we provide a set of well organized, multi-sensor imagery and corresponding genomic data. We implement baseline deep learning based phenotyping approaches to create baseline results for individual sensors and multi-sensor fusion for detecting genetic mutations with known impacts. We also provide and support an open-ended challenge by identifying thousands of genetic mutations whose phenotypic impacts are currently unknown. A web interface for machine learning researchers and practitioners to share approaches, visualizations and hypotheses supports engagement with plant biologists to further the understanding of the sorghum genotype x phenotype relationship. The full dataset, leaderboard (including baseline results) and discussion forums can be found at http://sorghumsnpbenchmark.com.
tl;dr: Our work, termed MiliPoint, provides a large-scale, open dataset for the community to explore how mmWave radars can be utilised for human activity recognition.
Millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar has emerged as an attractive and cost-effective alternative for human activity sensing compared to traditional camera-based systems. mmWave radars are also non-intrusive, providing better protection for user privacy. However, as a Radio Frequency based technology, mmWave radars rely on capturing reflected signals from objects, making them more prone to noise compared to cameras. This raises an intriguing question for the deep learning community: Can we develop more effective point set-based deep learning methods for such attractive sensors?
To answer this question, our work, termed MiliPoint, delves into this idea by providing a large-scale, open dataset for the community to explore how mmWave radars can be utilised for human activity recognition. Moreover, MiliPoint stands out as it is larger in size than existing datasets, has more diverse human actions represented, and encompasses all three key tasks in human activity recognition. We have also established a range of point-based deep neural networks such as DGCNN, PointNet++ and PointTransformer, on MiliPoint, which can serve to set the ground baseline for further development.
tl;dr: Multi-person 3D Human Motion Dataset with annotated 3D environment
Forecasting human motion of multiple persons is very challenging. It requires to model the interactions between humans and the interactions with objects and the environment. For example, a person might want to make a coffee, but if the coffee machine is already occupied the person will have
to wait. These complex relations between scene geometry and persons arise
constantly in our daily lives, and models that wish to accurately forecast
human behavior will have to take them into consideration. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose Humans in Kitchens, a
large-scale multi-person human motion dataset with annotated 3D human poses, scene geometry and activities per person and frame.
Our dataset consists of over 7.3h recorded data of up to 16 persons at the same time in four kitchen scenes, with more than 4M annotated human poses, represented by a parametric 3D body model. In addition, dynamic scene geometry and objects like chair or cupboard are annotated per frame. As first benchmarks, we propose two protocols for short-term and long-term human motion forecasting.
tl;dr: A Unified Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmark.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems possess significant potential to drive societal progress. However, their deployment often faces obstacles due to substantial safety concerns. Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) emerges as a solution to optimize policies while simultaneously adhering to multiple constraints, thereby addressing the challenge of integrating reinforcement learning in safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we present an environment suite called Safety-Gymnasium, which encompasses safety-critical tasks in both single and multi-agent scenarios, accepting vector and vision-only input. Additionally, we offer a library of algorithms named Safe Policy Optimization (SafePO), comprising 16 state-of-the-art SafeRL algorithms. This comprehensive library can serve as a validation tool for the research community. By introducing this benchmark, we aim to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of safety performance, thus fostering the development of reinforcement learning for safer, more reliable, and responsible real-world applications. The website of this project can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/view/safety-gymnasium.
tl;dr: We develop a new approach for estimating the rate-distortion function from the perspective of optimal transport.
In the theory of lossy compression, the rate-distortion (R-D) function $R(D)$ describes how much a data source can be compressed (in bit-rate) at any given level of fidelity (distortion). Obtaining $R(D)$ for a given data source establishes the fundamental performance limit for all compression algorithms. We propose a new method to estimate $R(D)$ from the perspective of optimal transport. Unlike the classic Blahut--Arimoto algorithm which fixes the support of the reproduction distribution in advance, our Wasserstein gradient descent algorithm learns the support of the optimal reproduction distribution by moving particles. We prove its local convergence and analyze the sample complexity of our R-D estimator based on a connection to entropic optimal transport. Experimentally, we obtain comparable or tighter bounds than state-of-the-art neural network methods on low-rate sources while requiring considerably less tuning and computation effort. We also highlight a connection to maximum-likelihood deconvolution and introduce a new class of sources that can be used as test cases with known solutions to the R-D problem.
Human Intelligence (HI) excels at combining basic skills to solve complex tasks. This capability is vital for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and should be embedded in comprehensive AI Agents, enabling them to harness expert models for complex task-solving towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities, and can effectively use external models, tools, plugins, or APIs to tackle complex problems. In this work, we introduce OpenAGI, an open-source AGI research and development platform designed for solving multi-step, real-world tasks. Specifically, OpenAGI uses a dual strategy, integrating standard benchmark tasks for benchmarking and evaluation, and open-ended tasks including more expandable models, tools, plugins, or APIs for creative problem-solving. Tasks are presented as natural language queries to the LLM, which then selects and executes appropriate models. We also propose a Reinforcement Learning from Task Feedback (RLTF) mechanism that uses task results to improve the LLM's task-solving ability, which creates a self-improving AI feedback loop. While we acknowledge that AGI is a broad and multifaceted research challenge with no singularly defined solution path, the integration of LLMs with domain-specific expert models, inspired by mirroring the blend of general and specialized intelligence in humans, offers a promising approach towards AGI. We are open-sourcing the OpenAGI project's code, dataset, benchmarks, evaluation methods, and the UI demo to foster community involvement in AGI advancement: https://github.com/agiresearch/OpenAGI.
tl;dr: RIVAL is a novel approach that uses diffusion models to generate high-quality image variations by aligning the image generation process to the source image's inversion chain.
Recent diffusion model advancements have enabled high-fidelity images to be generated using text prompts. However, a domain gap exists between generated images and real-world images, which poses a challenge in generating high-quality variations of real-world images. Our investigation uncovers that this domain gap originates from a latents' distribution gap in different diffusion processes. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference pipeline called Real-world Image Variation by ALignment (RIVAL) that utilizes diffusion models to generate image variations from a single image exemplar. Our pipeline enhances the generation quality of image variations by aligning the image generation process to the source image's inversion chain.
Specifically, we demonstrate that step-wise latent distribution alignment is essential for generating high-quality variations.
To attain this, we design a cross-image self-attention injection for feature interaction and a step-wise distribution normalization to align the latent features. Incorporating these alignment processes into a diffusion model allows RIVAL to generate high-quality image variations without further parameter optimization. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods concerning semantic similarity and perceptual quality. This generalized inference pipeline can be easily applied to other diffusion-based generation tasks, such as image-conditioned text-to-image generation and stylization. Project page: https://rival-diff.github.io
Multi-view clustering (MVC) is a popular technique for improving clustering performance using various data sources. However, existing methods primarily focus on acquiring consistent information while often neglecting the issue of redundancy across multiple views.
This study presents a new approach called Sufficient Multi-View Clustering (SUMVC) that examines the multi-view clustering framework from an information-theoretic standpoint. Our proposed method consists of two parts. Firstly, we develop a simple and reliable multi-view clustering method SCMVC (simple consistent multi-view clustering) that employs variational analysis to generate consistent information. Secondly, we propose a sufficient representation lower bound to enhance consistent information and minimise unnecessary information among views. The proposed SUMVC method offers a promising solution to the problem of multi-view clustering and provides a new perspective for analyzing multi-view data.
To verify the effectiveness of our model, we conducted a theoretical analysis based on the Bayes Error Rate, and experiments on multiple multi-view datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SUMVC.
The widely observed 'benign overfitting phenomenon' in the neural network literature raises the challenge to the `bias-variance trade-off' doctrine in the statistical learning theory.
Since the generalization ability of the 'lazy trained' over-parametrized neural network can be well approximated by that of the neural tangent kernel regression,
the curve of the excess risk (namely, the learning curve) of kernel ridge regression attracts increasing attention recently.
However, most recent arguments on the learning curve are heuristic and are based on the 'Gaussian design' assumption.
In this paper, under mild and more realistic assumptions, we rigorously provide a full characterization of the learning curve in the asymptotic sense
under a power-law decay condition of the eigenvalues of the kernel and also the target function.
The learning curve elaborates the effect and the interplay of the choice of the regularization parameter, the source condition and the noise.
In particular, our results suggest that the 'benign overfitting phenomenon' exists in over-parametrized neural networks only when the noise level is small.
tl;dr: We propose a distributionally robust method for skeleton learning of discrete Bayesian networks with tractable algorithms and out-of-sample exact recovery guarantees.
We consider the problem of learning the exact skeleton of general discrete Bayesian networks from potentially corrupted data. Building on distributionally robust optimization and a regression approach, we propose to optimize the most adverse risk over a family of distributions within bounded Wasserstein distance or KL divergence to the empirical distribution. The worst-case risk accounts for the effect of outliers. The proposed approach applies for general categorical random variables without assuming faithfulness, an ordinal relationship or a specific form of conditional distribution. We present efficient algorithms and show the proposed methods are closely related to the standard regularized regression approach. Under mild assumptions, we derive non-asymptotic guarantees for successful structure learning with logarithmic sample complexities for bounded-degree graphs. Numerical study on synthetic and real datasets validates the effectiveness of our method.
We investigate theory and algorithms for pool-based active learning for multiclass classification using multinomial logistic regression. Using finite sample analysis, we prove that the Fisher Information Ratio (FIR) lower and upper bounds the excess risk. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose an active learning algorithm that employs regret minimization to minimize the FIR. To verify our derived excess risk bounds, we conduct experiments on synthetic datasets. Furthermore, we compare FIRAL with five other methods and found that our scheme outperforms them: it consistently produces the smallest classification error in the multiclass logistic regression setting, as demonstrated through experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and 50-class ImageNet.
tl;dr: We design replicable algorithms for statistical k-medians, statistical k-means, and statistical k-centers.
We design replicable algorithms in the context of statistical clustering under the recently introduced notion of replicability from Impagliazzo et al. [2022]. According to this definition, a clustering algorithm is replicable if, with high probability, its output induces the exact same partition of the sample space after two executions on different inputs drawn from the same distribution, when its internal randomness is shared across the executions. We propose such algorithms for the statistical $k$-medians, statistical $k$-means, and statistical $k$-centers problems by utilizing approximation routines for their combinatorial counterparts in a black-box manner. In particular, we demonstrate a replicable $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for statistical Euclidean $k$-medians ($k$-means) with $\operatorname{poly}(d)$ sample complexity. We also describe an $O(1)$-approximation algorithm with an additional $O(1)$-additive error for statistical Euclidean $k$-centers, albeit with $\exp(d)$ sample complexity. In addition, we provide experiments on synthetic distributions in 2D using the $k$-means++ implementation from sklearn as a black-box that validate our theoretical results.
Representational limits of message-passing graph neural networks (MP-GNNs), e.g., in terms of the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) test for isomorphism, are well understood. Augmenting these graph models with topological features via persistent homology (PH) has gained prominence, but identifying the class of attributed graphs that PH can recognize remains open. We introduce a novel concept of color-separating sets to provide a complete resolution to this important problem. Specifically, we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing graphs based on the persistence of their connected components, obtained from filter functions on vertex and edge colors. Our constructions expose the limits of vertex- and edge-level PH, proving that neither category subsumes the other. Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose RePHINE for learning topological features on graphs. RePHINE efficiently combines vertex- and edge-level PH, achieving a scheme that is provably more powerful than both. Integrating RePHINE into MP-GNNs boosts their expressive power, resulting in gains over standard PH on several benchmarks for graph classification.
Meta-learning has been proven an effective learning paradigm for training machine learning models with good generalization ability. Apart from the common practice of uniformly sampling the meta-training tasks, existing methods working on task scheduling strategies are mainly based on pre-defined sampling protocols or the assumed task-model correlations, and greedily make scheduling decisions, which can lead to sub-optimal performance bottlenecks of the meta-model. In this paper, we propose a novel task scheduling framework under Contextual Bandits settings, named BASS, which directly optimizes the task scheduling strategy based on the status of the meta-model. By balancing the exploitation and exploration in meta-learning task scheduling, BASS can help tackle the challenge of limited knowledge about the task distribution during the early stage of meta-training, while simultaneously exploring potential benefits for forthcoming meta-training iterations through an adaptive exploration strategy. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
tl;dr: We provide a new aspect in categorizing the physics-informed symmetric deep leaning models, and a benchmark on molecule, protein, and crystalline material tasks.
Artificial intelligence for scientific discovery has recently generated significant interest within the machine learning and scientific communities, particularly in the domains of chemistry, biology, and material discovery. For these scientific problems, molecules serve as the fundamental building blocks, and machine learning has emerged as a highly effective and powerful tool for modeling their geometric structures. Nevertheless, due to the rapidly evolving process of the field and the knowledge gap between science ({\eg}, physics, chemistry, \& biology) and machine learning communities, a benchmarking study on geometrical representation for such data has not been conducted. To address such an issue, in this paper, we first provide a unified view of the current symmetry-informed geometric methods, classifying them into three main categories: invariance, equivariance with spherical frame basis, and equivariance with vector frame basis. Then we propose a platform, coined Geom3D, which enables benchmarking the effectiveness of geometric strategies. Geom3D contains 16 advanced symmetry-informed geometric representation models and 14 geometric pretraining methods over 52 diverse tasks, including small molecules, proteins, and crystalline materials. We hope that Geom3D can, on the one hand, eliminate barriers for machine learning researchers interested in exploring scientific problems; and, on the other hand, provide valuable guidance for researchers in computational chemistry, structural biology, and materials science, aiding in the informed selection of representation techniques for specific applications. The source code is available on \href{https://github.com/chao1224/Geom3D}{the GitHub repository}.
tl;dr: We derive a principled Bayesian approach for 'RL as inference' that leads to efficient exploration.
A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited under the optimal policy. Previous approaches to approximate this quantity can be arbitrarily poor, leading to algorithms that do not implement genuine statistical inference and consequently do not perform well in challenging problems. In this work, we undertake a rigorous Bayesian treatment of the posterior probability of state-action optimality and clarify how it flows through the MDP. We first reveal that this quantity can indeed be used to generate a policy that explores efficiently, as measured by regret. Unfortunately, computing it is intractable, so we derive a new variational Bayesian approximation yielding a tractable convex optimization problem and establish that the resulting policy also explores efficiently. We call our approach VAPOR and show that it has strong connections to Thompson sampling, K-learning, and maximum entropy exploration. We conclude with some experiments demonstrating the performance advantage of a deep RL version of VAPOR.
Precise hardware performance models play a crucial role in code optimizations. They can assist compilers in making heuristic decisions or aid autotuners in identifying the optimal configuration for a given program. For example, the autotuner for XLA, a machine learning compiler, discovered 10–20\% speedup on state-of-the-art models serving substantial production traffic at Google. Although there exist a few datasets for program performance prediction, they target small sub-programs such as basic blocks or kernels. This paper introduces TpuGraphs, a performance prediction dataset on full tensor programs, represented as computational graphs, running on Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Each graph in the dataset represents the main computation of a machine learning workload, e.g., a training epoch or an inference step. Each data sample contains a computational graph, a compilation configuration, and the execution time of the graph when compiled with the configuration. The graphs in the dataset are collected from open-source machine learning programs, featuring popular model architectures (e.g., ResNet, EfficientNet, Mask R-CNN, and Transformer). TpuGraphs provides 25x more graphs than the largest graph property prediction dataset (with comparable graph sizes), and 770x larger graphs on average compared to existing performance prediction datasets on machine learning programs. This graph-level prediction task on large graphs introduces new challenges in learning, ranging from scalability, training efficiency, to model quality.
tl;dr: We propose rejection sampling procedures using Poisson processes, dual to A* sampling in a certain sense. Then, we use it to develop algorithms to optimally compress samples from any distribution, which is useful for neural data compression.
One-shot channel simulation is a fundamental data compression problem concerned with encoding a single sample from a target distribution $Q$ using a coding distribution $P$ using as few bits as possible on average. Algorithms that solve this problem find applications in neural data compression and differential privacy and can serve as a more efficient and natural alternative to quantization-based methods. Unfortunately, existing solutions are too slow or have limited applicability, preventing their widespread adaptation. In this paper, we conclusively solve one-shot channel simulation for one-dimensional problems where the target-proposal density ratio is unimodal by describing an algorithm with optimal runtime. We achieve this by constructing a rejection sampling procedure equivalent to greedily searching over the points of a Poisson process. Hence, we call our algorithm greedy Poisson rejection sampling (GPRS) and analyze the correctness and time complexity of several of its variants. Finally, we empirically verify our theorems, demonstrating that GPRS significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art method, A* coding.
tl;dr: We study sequential probability assignment in the smoothed adversary model, presenting both statistically and computationally efficient algorithms that achieve the rates depending on offline complexity measures.
We initiate the study of smoothed analysis for the sequential probability assignment problem with contexts. We study information-theoretically optimal minmax rates as well as a framework for algorithmic reduction involving the maximum likelihood estimator oracle. Our approach establishes a general-purpose reduction from minimax rates for sequential probability assignment for smoothed adversaries to minimax rates for transductive learning. This leads to optimal (logarithmic) fast rates for parametric classes and classes with finite VC dimension. On the algorithmic front, we develop an algorithm that efficiently taps into the MLE oracle, for general classes of functions. We show that under general conditions this algorithmic approach yields sublinear regret.
We introduce Functional Diffusion Processes (FDPs), which generalize score-based diffusion models to infinite-dimensional function spaces. FDPs require a new mathematical framework to describe the forward and backward dynamics, and several extensions to derive practical training objectives. These include infinite-dimensional versions of Girsanov theorem, in order to be able to compute an ELBO, and of the sampling theorem, in order to guarantee that functional evaluations in a countable set of points are equivalent to infinite-dimensional functions. We use FDPs to build a new breed of generative models in function spaces, which do not require specialized network architectures, and that can work with any kind of continuous data.
Our results on real data show that FDPs achieve high-quality image generation, using a simple MLP architecture with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than existing diffusion models.
For speaker recognition, it is difficult to extract an accurate speaker representation from speech because of its mixture of speaker traits and content. This paper proposes a disentanglement framework that simultaneously models speaker traits and content variability in speech. It is realized with the use of three Gaussian inference layers, each consisting of a learnable transition model that extracts distinct speech components. Notably, a strengthened transition model is specifically designed to model complex speech dynamics. We also propose a self-supervision method to dynamically disentangle content without the use of labels other than speaker identities. The efficacy of the proposed framework is validated via experiments conducted on the VoxCeleb and SITW datasets with 9.56\% and 8.24\% average reductions in EER and minDCF, respectively. Since neither additional model training nor data is specifically needed, it is easily applicable in practical use.
This paper investigates the logistic bandit problem, a variant of the generalized linear bandit model that utilizes a logistic model to depict the feedback from an action. While most existing research focuses on the binary logistic bandit problem, the multinomial case, which considers more than two possible feedback values, offers increased practical relevance and adaptability for use in complex decision-making problems such as reinforcement learning. In this paper, we provide an algorithm that enjoys both statistical and computational efficiency for the logistic bandit problem. In the binary case, our method improves the state-of-the-art binary logistic bandit method by reducing the per-round computation cost from $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ with respect to the time horizon $T$, while still preserving the minimax optimal guarantee up to logarithmic factors. In the multinomial case, with $K+1$ potential feedback values, our algorithm achieves an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K\sqrt{T})$ regret bound with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ computational cost per round. The result not only improves the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K\sqrt{\kappa T})$ bound for the best-known tractable algorithm—where the large constant $\kappa$ increases exponentially with the diameter of the parameter domain—but also reduces the $\mathcal{O}(T)$ computational complexity demanded by the previous method.
tl;dr: We propose a flexible modulated point process model for characterising variability in non-stationary neural spike train data
Neural spiking activity is generally variable, non-stationary, and exhibits complex dependencies on covariates, such as sensory input or behavior. These dependencies have been proposed to be signatures of specific computations, and so characterizing them with quantitative rigor is critical for understanding neural computations. Approaches based on point processes provide a principled statistical framework for modeling neural spiking activity. However, currently, they only allow the instantaneous mean, but not the instantaneous variability, of responses to depend on covariates. To resolve this limitation, we propose a scalable Bayesian approach generalizing modulated renewal processes using sparse variational Gaussian processes. We leverage pathwise conditioning for computing nonparametric priors over conditional interspike interval distributions and rely on automatic relevance determination to detect lagging interspike interval dependencies beyond renewal order. After systematically validating our method on synthetic data, we apply it to two foundational datasets of animal navigation: head direction cells in freely moving mice and hippocampal place cells in rats running along a linear track. Our model exhibits competitive or better predictive power compared to state-of-the-art baselines, and outperforms them in terms of capturing interspike interval statistics. These results confirm the importance of modeling covariate-dependent spiking variability, and further analyses of our fitted models reveal rich patterns of variability modulation beyond the temporal resolution of flexible count-based approaches.
969. Hierarchical Decomposition of Prompt-Based Continual Learning: Rethinking Obscured Sub-optimality
tl;dr: We extensively analyze state-of-the-art prompt-based continual learning from both empirical and theoretical perspectives, and propose an innovative approach to explicitly optimize its objective.
Prompt-based continual learning is an emerging direction in leveraging pre-trained knowledge for downstream continual learning, and has almost reached the performance pinnacle under supervised pre-training. However, our empirical research reveals that the current strategies fall short of their full potential under the more realistic self-supervised pre-training, which is essential for handling vast quantities of unlabeled data in practice. This is largely due to the difficulty of task-specific knowledge being incorporated into instructed representations via prompt parameters and predicted by uninstructed representations at test time. To overcome the exposed sub-optimality, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the continual learning objective in the context of pre-training, and decompose it into hierarchical components: within-task prediction, task-identity inference, and task-adaptive prediction. Following these empirical and theoretical insights, we propose Hierarchical Decomposition (HiDe-)Prompt, an innovative approach that explicitly optimizes the hierarchical components with an ensemble of task-specific prompts and statistics of both uninstructed and instructed representations, further with the coordination of a contrastive regularization strategy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of HiDe-Prompt and its robustness to pre-training paradigms in continual learning (e.g., up to 15.01% and 9.61% lead on Split CIFAR-100 and Split ImageNet-R, respectively).
tl;dr: We generalize the classical smoothness condition in optimization, and develop a new analysis approach, which gives much better results for convergence of GD, SGD, and NAG in the convex and/or non-convex setting.
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipschitz continuity of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness condition with the Hessian norm bounded by an affine function of the gradient norm, and proved convergence in the non-convex setting via gradient clipping, assuming bounded noise. In this paper, we further generalize this non-uniform smoothness condition and develop a simple, yet powerful analysis technique that bounds the gradients along the trajectory, thereby leading to stronger results for both convex and non-convex optimization problems. In particular, we obtain the classical convergence rates for (stochastic) gradient descent and Nesterov's accelerated gradient method in the convex and/or non-convex setting under this general smoothness condition. The new analysis approach does not require gradient clipping and allows heavy-tailed noise with bounded variance in the stochastic setting.
All organisms make temporal predictions, and their evolutionary fitness level depends on the accuracy of these predictions. In the context of visual perception, the motions of both the observer and objects in the scene structure the dynamics of sensory signals, allowing for partial prediction of future signals based on past ones. Here, we propose a self-supervised representation-learning framework that extracts and exploits the regularities of natural videos to compute accurate predictions. We motivate the polar architecture by appealing to the Fourier shift theorem and its group-theoretic generalization, and we optimize its parameters on next-frame prediction. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that this approach can discover the representation of simple transformation groups acting in data. When trained on natural video datasets, our framework achieves better prediction performance than traditional motion compensation and rivals conventional deep networks, while maintaining interpretability and speed. Furthermore, the polar computations can be restructured into components resembling normalized simple and direction-selective complex cell models of primate V1 neurons. Thus, polar prediction offers a principled framework for understanding how the visual system represents sensory inputs in a form that simplifies temporal prediction.
Standardized and quantified evaluation of machine behaviors is a crux of understanding LLMs. In this study, we draw inspiration from psychometric studies by leveraging human personality theory as a tool for studying machine behaviors. Originating as a philosophical quest for human behaviors, the study of personality delves into how individuals differ in thinking, feeling, and behaving. Toward building and understanding human-like social machines, we are motivated to ask: Can we assess machine behaviors by leveraging human psychometric tests in a **principled** and **quantitative** manner? If so, can we induce a specific personality in LLMs? To answer these questions, we introduce the Machine Personality Inventory (MPI) tool for studying machine behaviors; MPI follows standardized
personality tests, built upon the Big Five Personality Factors (Big Five) theory and personality assessment inventories. By systematically evaluating LLMs with MPI, we provide the first piece of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of MPI in studying LLMs behaviors. We further devise a Personality Prompting (P$^2$) method to induce LLMs with specific personalities in a **controllable** way, capable of producing diverse and verifiable behaviors. We hope this work sheds light on future studies by adopting personality as the essential indicator for various downstream tasks, and could further motivate research into equally intriguing human-like machine behaviors.
tl;dr: We propose LLMScore, a new framework that can offer interpretable evaluation scores to measure how well the generated images are aligned with text prompts for text-to-image evaluation.
Existing automatic evaluation on text-to-image synthesis can only provide an image-text matching score, without considering the object-level compositionality, which results in poor correlation with human judgments. In this work, we propose LLMScore, a new framework that offers evaluation scores with multi-granularity compositionality. LLMScore leverages the large language models (LLMs) to evaluate text-to-image models. Initially, it transforms the image into image-level and object-level visual descriptions. Then an evaluation instruction is fed into the LLMs to measure the alignment between the synthesized image and the text, ultimately generating a score accompanied by a rationale.
Our substantial analysis reveals the highest correlation of LLMScore with human judgments on a wide range of datasets (Attribute Binding Contrast, Concept Conjunction, MSCOCO, DrawBench, PaintSkills). Notably, our LLMScore achieves Kendall's tau correlation with human evaluations that is 58.8% and 31.2% higher than the commonly-used text-image matching metrics CLIP and BLIP, respectively.
tl;dr: Delay independent rates for distributed stochastic weakly convex optimization
This paper studies delayed stochastic algorithms for weakly convex optimization in a distributed network with workers connected to a master node. Recently, Xu~et~al.~2022 showed that an inertial stochastic subgradient method converges at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(\tau_{\text{max}}/\sqrt{K})$ which depends on the maximum information delay $\tau_{\text{max}}$.
In this work, we show that the delayed stochastic subgradient method ($\texttt{DSGD}$) obtains a tighter convergence rate which depends on the expected delay $\bar{\tau}$. Furthermore, for an important class of composition weakly convex problems, we develop a new delayed stochastic prox-linear ($\texttt{DSPL}$) method in which the delays only affect the high-order term in the rate and hence, are negligible after a certain number of $\texttt{DSPL}$ iterations. In addition, we demonstrate the robustness of our proposed algorithms against arbitrary delays. By incorporating a simple safeguarding step in both methods, we achieve convergence rates that depend solely on the number of workers, eliminating the effect of delays. Our numerical experiments further confirm the empirical superiority of our proposed methods.
We present a new dataset condensation framework termed Squeeze, Recover and Relabel (SRe$^2$L) that decouples the bilevel optimization of model and synthetic data during training, to handle varying scales of datasets, model architectures and image resolutions for efficient dataset condensation. The proposed method demonstrates flexibility across diverse dataset scales and exhibits multiple advantages in terms of arbitrary resolutions of synthesized images, low training cost and memory consumption with high-resolution synthesis, and the ability to scale up to arbitrary evaluation network architectures. Extensive experiments are conducted on Tiny-ImageNet and full ImageNet-1K datasets. Under 50 IPC, our approach achieves the highest 42.5\% and 60.8\% validation accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet-1K, outperforming all previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of 14.5\% and 32.9\%, respectively. Our approach also surpasses MTT in terms of speed by approximately 52$\times$ (ConvNet-4) and 16$\times$ (ResNet-18) faster with less memory consumption of 11.6$\times$ and 6.4$\times$ during data synthesis. Our code and condensed datasets of 50, 200 IPC with 4K recovery budget are available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/SRe2L.
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms such as AlphaGo and MuZero have achieved superhuman performance in many challenging tasks. However, the computational complexity of MCTS-based algorithms is influenced by the size of the search space. To address this issue, we propose a novel probability tree state abstraction (PTSA) algorithm to improve the search efficiency of MCTS. A general tree state abstraction with path transitivity is defined. In addition, the probability tree state abstraction is proposed for fewer mistakes during the aggregation step. Furthermore, the theoretical guarantees of the transitivity and aggregation error bound are justified. To evaluate the effectiveness of the PTSA algorithm, we integrate it with state-of-the-art MCTS-based algorithms, such as Sampled MuZero and Gumbel MuZero. Experimental results on different tasks demonstrate that our method can accelerate the training process of state-of-the-art algorithms with 10%-45% search space reduction.
tl;dr: We give a near linear time algorithm for computing the Chamfer distance, a common relaxation of the Earth Mover (Optimal Transport) distance, improving upon the naive quadratic runtime.
For any two point sets $A,B \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ of size up to $n$, the Chamfer distance from $A$ to $B$ is defined as $\texttt{CH}(A,B)=\sum_{a \in A} \min_{b \in B} d_X(a,b)$, where $d_X$ is the underlying distance measure (e.g., the Euclidean or Manhattan distance). The Chamfer distance is a popular measure of dissimilarity between point clouds, used in many machine learning, computer vision, and graphics applications, and admits a straightforward $O(d n^2)$-time brute force algorithm. Further, Chamfer distance is often used as a proxy for the more computationally demanding Earth-Mover (Optimal Transport) Distance. However, the \emph{quadratic} dependence on $n$ in the running time makes the naive approach intractable for large datasets.
We overcome this bottleneck and present the first $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate algorithm for estimating Chamfer distance with a near-linear running time. Specifically, our algorithm runs in time $O(nd \log (n)/\epsilon^2)$ and is implementable. Our experiments demonstrate that it is both accurate and fast on large high-dimensional datasets. We believe that our algorithm will open new avenues for analyzing large high-dimensional point clouds. We also give evidence that if the goal is to report a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate mapping from $A$ to $B$ (as opposed to just its value), then any sub-quadratic time algorithm is unlikely to exist.
tl;dr: PoET is a generative model of protein families as sequences-of-sequences. It accurately predicts variant effects and can be sampled from to generate new sequences.
Generative protein language models are a natural way to design new proteins with desired functions. However, current models are either difficult to direct to produce a protein from a specific family of interest, or must be trained on a large multiple sequence alignment (MSA) from the specific family of interest, making them unable to benefit from transfer learning across families. To address this, we propose **P**r**o**tein **E**volutionary **T**ransformer (PoET), an autoregressive generative model of whole protein families that learns to generate sets of related proteins as sequences-of-sequences across tens of millions of natural protein sequence clusters. PoET can be used as a retrieval-augmented language model to generate and score arbitrary modifications conditioned on any protein family of interest, and can extrapolate from short context lengths to generalize well even for small families. This is enabled by a unique Transformer layer; we model tokens sequentially within sequences while attending between sequences order invariantly, allowing PoET to scale to context lengths beyond those used during training. In extensive experiments on deep mutational scanning datasets, we show that PoET outperforms existing protein language models and evolutionary sequence models for variant function prediction across proteins of all MSA depths. We also demonstrate PoET's ability to controllably generate new protein sequences.
tl;dr: New methods for studying temporal integration reveal that LLMs have stereotyped integration windows that obey a simple functional form, vary substantially across layers, and become yoked to structural boundaries at late network layers.
Modern language models excel at integrating across long temporal scales needed to encode linguistic meaning and show non-trivial similarities to biological neural systems. Prior work suggests that human brain responses to language exhibit hierarchically organized "integration windows" that substantially constrain the overall influence of an input token (e.g., a word) on the neural response. However, little prior work has attempted to use integration windows to characterize computations in large language models (LLMs). We developed a simple word-swap procedure for estimating integration windows from black-box language models that does not depend on access to gradients or knowledge of the model architecture (e.g., attention weights). Using this method, we show that trained LLMs exhibit stereotyped integration windows that are well-fit by a convex combination of an exponential and a power-law function, with a partial transition from exponential to power-law dynamics across network layers. We then introduce a metric for quantifying the extent to which these integration windows vary with structural boundaries (e.g., sentence boundaries), and using this metric, we show that integration windows become increasingly yoked to structure at later network layers. None of these findings were observed in an untrained model, which as expected integrated uniformly across its input. These results suggest that LLMs learn to integrate information in natural language using a stereotyped pattern: integrating across position-yoked, exponential windows at early layers, followed by structure-yoked, power-law windows at later layers. The methods we describe in this paper provide a general-purpose toolkit for understanding temporal integration in language models, facilitating cross-disciplinary research at the intersection of biological and artificial intelligence.
tl;dr: We propose the first multi-instance partial-label learning algorithm based on the embedded-space paradigm.
In many real-world tasks, the concerned objects can be represented as a multi-instance bag associated with a candidate label set, which consists of one ground-truth label and several false positive labels. Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) is a learning paradigm to deal with such tasks and has achieved favorable performances. Existing MIPL approach follows the instance-space paradigm by assigning augmented candidate label sets of bags to each instance and aggregating bag-level labels from instance-level labels. However, this scheme may be suboptimal as global bag-level information is ignored and the predicted labels of bags are sensitive to predictions of negative instances. In this paper, we study an alternative scheme where a multi-instance bag is embedded into a single vector representation. Accordingly, an intuitive algorithm named DEMIPL, i.e., Disambiguated attention Embedding for Multi-Instance Partial-Label learning, is proposed. DEMIPL employs a disambiguation attention mechanism to aggregate a multi-instance bag into a single vector representation, followed by a momentum-based disambiguation strategy to identify the ground-truth label from the candidate label set. Furthermore, we introduce a real-world MIPL dataset for colorectal cancer classification. Experimental results on benchmark and real-world datasets validate the superiority of DEMIPL against the compared MIPL and partial-label learning approaches.
In this paper, we present StyleTTS 2, a text-to-speech (TTS) model that leverages style diffusion and adversarial training with large speech language models (SLMs) to achieve human-level TTS synthesis. StyleTTS 2 differs from its predecessor by modeling styles as a latent random variable through diffusion models to generate the most suitable style for the text without requiring reference speech, achieving efficient latent diffusion while benefiting from the diverse speech synthesis offered by diffusion models. Furthermore, we employ large pre-trained SLMs, such as WavLM, as discriminators with our novel differentiable duration modeling for end-to-end training, resulting in improved speech naturalness. StyleTTS 2 surpasses human recordings on the single-speaker LJSpeech dataset and matches it on the multispeaker VCTK dataset as judged by native English speakers. Moreover, when trained on the LibriTTS dataset, our model outperforms previous publicly available models for zero-shot speaker adaptation. This work achieves the first human-level TTS on both single and multispeaker datasets, showcasing the potential of style diffusion and adversarial training with large SLMs. The audio demos and source code are available at https://styletts2.github.io/.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful tools for image synthesis. However, they require access to vast amounts of training data, which is often costly and prohibitive. Limited data affects GANs, leading to discriminator overfitting and training instability. In this paper, we present a novel approach called NoIse-modulated Consistency rEgularization (NICE) to overcome these challenges. To this end, we introduce an adaptive multiplicative noise into the discriminator to modulate its latent features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of such a modulation in preventing discriminator overfitting by adaptively reducing the Rademacher complexity of the discriminator. However, this modulation leads to an unintended consequence of increased gradient norm, which can undermine the stability of GAN training. To mitigate this undesirable effect, we impose a constraint on the discriminator, ensuring its consistency for the same inputs under different noise modulations. The constraint effectively penalizes the first and second-order gradients of latent features, enhancing GAN stability. Experimental evidence aligns with our theoretical analysis, demonstrating the reduction of generalization error and gradient penalization of NICE. This substantiates the efficacy of NICE in reducing discriminator overfitting and improving stability of GAN training. NICE achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet and FFHQ datasets when trained with limited data, as well as in low-shot generation tasks.
Learning rich skills under the option framework without supervision of external rewards is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. Existing works mainly fall into two distinctive categories: variational option discovery that maximizes the diversity of the options through a mutual information loss (while ignoring coverage) and Laplacian-based methods that focus on improving the coverage of options by increasing connectivity of the state space (while ignoring diversity). In this paper, we show that diversity and coverage in unsupervised option discovery can indeed be unified under the same mathematical framework. To be specific, we explicitly quantify the diversity and coverage of the learned options through a novel use of Determinantal Point Process (DPP) and optimize these objectives to discover options with both superior diversity and coverage. Our proposed algorithm, ODPP, has undergone extensive evaluation on challenging tasks created with Mujoco and Atari. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both diversity- and coverage-driven categories.
984. Density of States Prediction of Crystalline Materials via Prompt-guided Multi-Modal Transformer
The density of states (DOS) is a spectral property of crystalline materials, which provides fundamental insights into various characteristics of the materials.
While previous works mainly focus on obtaining high-quality representations of crystalline materials for DOS prediction, we focus on predicting the DOS from the obtained representations by reflecting the nature of DOS: DOS determines the general distribution of states as a function of energy.
That is, DOS is not solely determined by the crystalline material but also by the energy levels, which has been neglected in previous works.
In this paper, we propose to integrate heterogeneous information obtained from the crystalline materials and the energies via a multi-modal transformer, thereby modeling the complex relationships between the atoms in the crystalline materials and various energy levels for DOS prediction.
Moreover, we propose to utilize prompts to guide the model to learn the crystal structural system-specific interactions between crystalline materials and energies.
Extensive experiments on two types of DOS, i.e., Phonon DOS and Electron DOS, with various real-world scenarios demonstrate the superiority of DOSTransformer.
The source code for DOSTransformer is available at https://github.com/HeewoongNoh/DOSTransformer.
tl;dr: This paper reveals a characteristic of DEtection Transformer (DETR) that negatively impacts its training efficacy, i.e., the cross-attention and self-attention layers in DETR decoder have contrary impacts on the object queries.
This paper reveals a characteristic of DEtection Transformer (DETR) that negatively impacts its training efficacy, i.e., the cross-attention and self-attention layers in DETR decoder have contrary impacts on the object queries (though both impacts are important). Specifically, we observe the cross-attention tends to gather multiple queries around the same object, while the self-attention disperses these queries far away. To improve the training efficacy, we propose a Divide-And-Conquer DETR (DAC-DETR) that divides the cross-attention out from this contrary for better conquering. During training, DAC-DETR employs an auxiliary decoder that focuses on learning the cross-attention layers. The auxiliary decoder, while sharing all the other parameters, has NO self-attention layers and employs one-to-many label assignment to improve the gathering effect. Experiments show that DAC-DETR brings remarkable improvement over popular DETRs. For example, under the 12 epochs training scheme on MS-COCO, DAC-DETR improves Deformable DETR (ResNet-50) by +3.4 AP and achieves 50.9 (ResNet-50) / 58.1 AP (Swin-Large) based on some popular methods (i.e., DINO and an IoU-related loss). Our code will be made available at https://github.com/huzhengdongcs/DAC-DETR.
tl;dr: We study the problem of causal effect identifiability when the knowledge of the underlying DAG is probabilistic rather than deterministically known.
Causal identification is at the core of the causal inference literature, where complete algorithms have been proposed to identify causal queries of interest. The validity of these algorithms hinges on the restrictive assumption of having access to a correctly specified causal structure. In this work, we study the setting where a probabilistic model of the causal structure is available. Specifically, the edges in a causal graph exist with uncertainties which may, for example, represent degree of belief from domain experts. Alternatively, the uncertainty about an edge may reflect the confidence of a particular statistical test. The question that naturally arises in this setting is: Given such a probabilistic graph and a specific causal effect of interest, what is the subgraph which has the highest plausibility and for which the causal effect is identifiable? We show that answering this question reduces to solving an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem which we call the edge ID problem. We propose efficient algorithms to approximate this problem and evaluate them against both real-world networks and randomly generated graphs.
tl;dr: Unlimiformer modifies pretrained encoder-decoder models with retrieval to allow unlimited input at test time.
Since the proposal of transformers, these models have been limited to bounded input lengths, because of their need to attend to every token in the input. In this work, we propose Unlimiformer: a general approach that wraps any existing pretrained encoder-decoder transformer, and offloads the cross-attention computation to a single $k$-nearest-neighbor ($k$NN) index, while the returned $k$NN distances are the attention dot-product scores. This $k$NN index can be kept on either the GPU or CPU memory and queried in sub-linear time; this way, we can index practically unlimited input sequences, while every attention head in every decoder layer retrieves its top-$k$ keys, instead of attending to every key. We evaluate Unlimiformer on several long-document and book-summarization benchmarks, showing that it can process even **500k** token-long inputs from the BookSum dataset, without any input truncation at test time. We demonstrate that Unlimiformer improves pretrained models such as BART and Longformer by extending them to unlimited inputs without additional learned weights and without modifying their code. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/abertsch72/unlimiformer , and support LLaMA-2 as well.
988. Globally solving the Gromov-Wasserstein problem for point clouds in low dimensional Euclidean spaces
tl;dr: We develop a framework for globally solving the Gromov-Wasserstein problem between two sets of points in low dimensional spaces, where the discrepancy is the squared Euclidean norm.
This paper presents a framework for computing the Gromov-Wasserstein problem between two sets of points in low dimensional spaces, where the discrepancy is the squared Euclidean norm.
The Gromov-Wasserstein problem is a generalization of the optimal transport problem that finds the assignment between two sets preserving pairwise distances as much as possible. This can be used to quantify the similarity between two formations or shapes, a common problem in AI and machine learning.
The problem can be formulated as a Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which is in general computationally intractable even for small problems. Our framework addresses this challenge by reformulating the QAP as an optimization problem with a low-dimensional domain, leveraging the fact that the problem can be expressed as a concave quadratic optimization problem with low rank. The method scales well with the number of points, and it can be used to find the global solution for large-scale problems with thousands of points.
We compare the computational complexity of our approach with state-of-the-art methods on synthetic problems and apply it to a near-symmetrical problem which is of particular interest in computational biology.
tl;dr: We propose a hypergraph-based tabular language model that captures the invariance and structure of tables, with theoretical, empirical and qualitative evidences supporting the effectiveness of learning these table properties into the representations.
Language models pretrained on large collections of tabular data have demonstrated their effectiveness in several downstream tasks.
However, many of these models do not take into account the row/column permutation invariances, hierarchical structure, etc. that exist in tabular data. To alleviate these limitations, we propose HyTrel, a tabular language model, that captures the permutation invariances and three more structural properties of tabular data by using hypergraphs--where the table cells make up the nodes and the cells occurring jointly together in each row, column, and the entire table are used to form three different types of hyperedges. We show that
HyTrel is maximally invariant under certain conditions for tabular data, i.e., two tables obtain the same representations via HyTrel
iff the two tables are identical up to permutation. Our empirical results demonstrate that HyTrel consistently outperforms other competitive baselines on four downstream tasks with minimal pretraining, illustrating the advantages of incorporating inductive biases associated with tabular data into the representations. Finally, our qualitative analyses showcase that HyTrel can assimilate the table structure to generate robust representations for the cells, rows, columns, and the entire table.
tl;dr: We demonstrate the usefulness of information theoretic concepts of redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy in quantifying multimodal datasets, models, and model selection. Our proposed estimators allow us to scale these to large, continuous domains.
The recent explosion of interest in multimodal applications has resulted in a wide selection of datasets and methods for representing and integrating information from different modalities. Despite these empirical advances, there remain fundamental research questions: How can we quantify the interactions that are necessary to solve a multimodal task? Subsequently, what are the most suitable multimodal models to capture these interactions? To answer these questions, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify the degree of redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy relating input modalities with an output task. We term these three measures as the PID statistics of a multimodal distribution (or PID for short), and introduce two new estimators for these PID statistics that scale to high-dimensional distributions. To validate PID estimation, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets where the PID is known and on large-scale multimodal benchmarks where PID estimations are compared with human annotations. Finally, we demonstrate their usefulness in (1) quantifying interactions within multimodal datasets, (2) quantifying interactions captured by multimodal models, (3) principled approaches for model selection, and (4) three real-world case studies engaging with domain experts in pathology, mood prediction, and robotic perception where our framework helps to recommend strong multimodal models for each application.
When deploying machine learning estimators in science and engineering (SAE) domains, it is critical to avoid failed estimations that can have disastrous consequences, e.g., in aero engine design. This work focuses on detecting and correcting failed state estimations before adopting them in SAE inverse problems, by utilizing simulations and performance metrics guided by physical laws. We suggest to flag a machine learning estimation when its physical model error exceeds a feasible threshold, and propose a novel approach, GEESE, to correct it through optimization, aiming at delivering both low error and high efficiency. The key designs of GEESE include (1) a hybrid surrogate error model to provide fast error estimations to reduce simulation cost and to enable gradient based backpropagation of error feedback, and (2) two generative models to approximate the probability distributions of the candidate states for simulating the exploitation and exploration behaviours. All three models are constructed as neural networks. GEESE is tested on three real-world SAE inverse problems and compared to a number of state-of-the-art optimization/search approaches. Results show that it fails the least number of times in terms of finding a feasible state correction, and requires physical evaluations less frequently in general.
tl;dr: We propose to compress data as variational Bayesian implicit neural representations with relative entropy coding that supports joint rate-distortion optimization.
Many common types of data can be represented as functions that map coordinates to signal values, such as pixel locations to RGB values in the case of an image. Based on this view, data can be compressed by overfitting a compact neural network to its functional representation and then encoding the network weights. However, most current solutions for this are inefficient, as quantization to low-bit precision substantially degrades the reconstruction quality. To address this issue, we propose overfitting variational Bayesian neural networks to the data and compressing an approximate posterior weight sample using relative entropy coding instead of quantizing and entropy coding it. This strategy enables direct optimization of the rate-distortion performance by minimizing the $\beta$-ELBO, and target different rate-distortion trade-offs for a given network architecture by adjusting $\beta$. Moreover, we introduce an iterative algorithm for learning prior weight distributions and employ a progressive refinement process for the variational posterior that significantly enhances performance. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance on image and audio compression while retaining simplicity.
Graph Self-Supervised Learning (GSSL) provides a robust pathway for acquiring embeddings without expert labelling, a capability that carries profound implications for molecular graphs due to the staggering number of potential molecules and the high cost of obtaining labels. However, GSSL methods are designed not for optimisation within a specific domain but rather for transferability across a variety of downstream tasks. This broad applicability complicates their evaluation. Addressing this challenge, we present "Molecular Graph Representation Evaluation" (MOLGRAPHEVAL), generating detailed profiles of molecular graph embeddings with interpretable and diversified attributes. MOLGRAPHEVAL offers a suite of probing tasks grouped into three categories: (i) generic graph, (ii) molecular substructure, and (iii) embedding space properties. By leveraging MOLGRAPHEVAL to benchmark existing GSSL methods against both current downstream datasets and our suite of tasks, we uncover significant inconsistencies between inferences drawn solely from existing datasets and those derived from more nuanced probing. These findings suggest that current evaluation methodologies fail to capture the entirety of the landscape.
In this paper we adapt the nearest neighbour rule to the contextual bandit problem. Our algorithm handles the fully adversarial setting in which no assumptions at all are made about the data-generation process. When combined with a sufficiently fast data-structure for (perhaps approximate) adaptive nearest neighbour search, such as a navigating net, our algorithm is extremely efficient - having a per trial running time polylogarithmic in both the number of trials and actions, and taking only quasi-linear space. We give generic regret bounds for our algorithm and further analyse them when applied to the stochastic bandit problem in euclidean space. A side result of this paper is that, when applied to the online classification problem with stochastic labels, our algorithm can, under certain conditions, have sublinear regret whilst only finding a single nearest neighbour per trial - in stark contrast to the k-nearest neighbours algorithm.
tl;dr: We propose a straightforward method for calibrating diffusion probabilistic models that reduces the values of SM objectives and increases model likelihood lower bounds.
Recently, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have achieved promising results in diverse generative tasks. A typical DPM framework includes a forward process that gradually diffuses the data distribution and a reverse process that recovers the data distribution from time-dependent data scores. In this work, we observe that the stochastic reverse process of data scores is a martingale, from which concentration bounds and the optional stopping theorem for data scores can be derived. Then, we discover a simple way for calibrating an arbitrary pretrained DPM, with which the score matching loss can be reduced and the lower bounds of model likelihood can consequently be increased. We provide general calibration guidelines under various model parametrizations. Our calibration method is performed only once and the resulting models can be used repeatedly for sampling. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets to empirically validate our proposal. Our code is available at https://github.com/thudzj/Calibrated-DPMs.
Bridging logical reasoning and deep learning is crucial for advanced AI systems. In this work, we present a new framework that addresses this goal by generating interpretable and verifiable logical rules through differentiable learning, without relying on pre-specified logical structures. Our approach builds upon SATNet, a differentiable MaxSAT solver that learns the underlying rules from input-output examples. Despite its efficacy, the learned weights in SATNet are not straightforwardly interpretable, failing to produce human-readable rules. To address this, we propose a novel specification method called ``maximum equality'', which enables the interchangeability between the learned weights of SATNet and a set of propositional logical rules in weighted MaxSAT form. With the decoded weighted MaxSAT formula, we further introduce several effective verification techniques to validate it against the ground truth rules. Experiments on stream transformations and Sudoku problems show that our decoded rules are highly reliable: using exact solvers on them could achieve 100% accuracy, whereas the original SATNet fails to give correct solutions in many cases. Furthermore, we formally verify that our decoded logical rules are functionally equivalent to the ground truth ones.
tl;dr: Improve Vision and Language models' compositional reasoning using improved captions quality and density.
Vision and Language (VL) models offer an effective method for aligning representation spaces of images and text allowing for numerous applications such as cross-modal retrieval, visual and multi-hop question answering, captioning, and many more. However, the aligned image-text spaces learned by all the popular VL models are still suffering from the so-called 'object bias' - their representations behave as 'bags of nouns' mostly ignoring or downsizing the attributes, relations, and states of objects described/appearing in texts/images. Although some great attempts at fixing these `compositional reasoning' issues were proposed in the recent literature, the problem is still far from being solved. In this paper, we uncover two factors limiting the VL models' compositional reasoning performance. These two factors are properties of the paired VL dataset used for finetuning (or pre-training) the VL model: (i) the caption quality, or in other words 'image-alignment', of the texts; and (ii) the 'density' of the captions in the sense of mentioning all the details appearing on the image. We propose a fine-tuning approach for automatically treating these factors on a standard collection of paired VL data (CC3M). Applied to CLIP, we demonstrate its significant compositional reasoning performance increase of up to $\sim27$\% over the base model, up to $\sim20$\% over the strongest baseline, and by $6.7$\% on average. Our code is provided in the Supplementary and would be released upon acceptance.
tl;dr: Learning margin Halfspaces without labels!
We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning high-dimensional halfspaces with margins in $d$-dimensional space to within desired TV distance when the ambient distribution is an unknown affine transformation of the $d$-fold product of an (unknown) symmetric one-dimensional logconcave distribution, and the halfspace is introduced by deleting at least an $\epsilon$ fraction of the data in one of the component distributions. Notably, our algorithm does not need labels and establishes the unique (and efficient) identifiability of the hidden halfspace under this distributional assumption. The sample and time complexity of the algorithm are polynomial in the dimension and $1/\epsilon$. The algorithm uses only the first two moments of *suitable re-weightings* of the empirical distribution, which we call *contrastive moments*; its analysis uses classical facts about generalized Dirichlet polynomials and relies crucially on a new monotonicity property of the moment ratio of truncations of logconcave distributions. Such algorithms, based only on first and second moments were suggested in earlier work, but hitherto eluded rigorous guarantees.
Prior work addressed the special case when the underlying distribution is Gaussian via Non-Gaussian Component Analysis. We improve on this by providing polytime guarantees based on Total Variation (TV) distance, in place of existing moment-bound guarantees that can be super-polynomial. Our work is also the first to go beyond Gaussians in this setting.
tl;dr: We investigate the mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT using an advanced rating benchmark, covering graduate-level mathematics.
We investigate the mathematical capabilities of two iterations of ChatGPT (released 9-January-2023 and 30-January-2023) and of GPT-4 by testing them on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, using a novel methodology. In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., mathlib, the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics used to benchmark language models either cover only elementary mathematics or are very small. We address this by publicly releasing two new datasets: GHOSTS and miniGHOSTS. These are the first natural-language datasets curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aim to cover graduate-level mathematics, (2) provide a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models, and (3) distinguish multiple dimensions of mathematical reasoning. These datasets test on 1636 human expert evaluations whether ChatGPT and GPT-4 can be helpful assistants to professional mathematicians by emulating use cases that arise in the daily professional activities of mathematicians. We benchmark the models on a range of fine-grained performance metrics. For advanced mathematics, this is the most detailed evaluation effort to date. We find that ChatGPT and GPT-4 can be used most successfully as mathematical assistants for querying facts, acting as mathematical search engines and knowledge base interfaces. GPT-4 can additionally be used for undergraduate-level mathematics but fails on graduate-level difficulty. Contrary to many positive reports in the media about GPT-4 and ChatGPT's exam-solving abilities (a potential case of selection bias), their overall mathematical performance is well below the level of a graduate student. Hence, if you aim to use ChatGPT to pass a graduate-level math exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!
tl;dr: This study establishes a generic learning rate for FTRL, yielding a regret bound dependent stability and penalty. It enables us to handle sparsity, game-dependency, and best-of-both-worlds in multi-armed bandits and partial monitoring.
Adaptivity to the difficulties of a problem is a key property in sequential decision-making problems to broaden the applicability of algorithms. Follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) has recently emerged as one of the most promising approaches for obtaining various types of adaptivity in bandit problems. Aiming to further generalize this adaptivity, we develop a generic adaptive learning rate, called stability-penalty-adaptive (SPA) learning rate for FTRL. This learning rate yields a regret bound jointly depending on stability and penalty of the algorithm, into which the regret of FTRL is typically decomposed. With this result, we establish several algorithms with three types of adaptivity: sparsity, game-dependency, and best-of-both-worlds (BOBW). Despite the fact that sparsity appears frequently in real problems, existing sparse multi-armed bandit algorithms with $k$-arms assume that the sparsity level $s \leq k$ is known in advance, which is often not the case in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we first establish $s$-agnostic algorithms with regret bounds of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{sT})$ in the adversarial regime for $T$ rounds, which matches the existing lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. Meanwhile, BOBW algorithms aim to achieve a near-optimal regret in both the stochastic and adversarial regimes. Leveraging the SPA learning rate and the technique for $s$-agnostic algorithms combined with a new analysis to bound the variation in FTRL output in response to changes in a regularizer, we establish the first BOBW algorithm with a sparsity-dependent bound. Additionally, we explore partial monitoring and demonstrate that the proposed SPA learning rate framework allows us to achieve a game-dependent bound and the BOBW simultaneously.
tl;dr: To formalize the impact of temporal discretization in RL, we analyze Monte-Carlo policy evaluation in finite and infinite-horizon LQR systems and identify a trade-off between approximation and statistical error.
A default assumption in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control is that observations arrive at discrete time points on a fixed clock cycle. Yet, many applications involve continuous-time systems where the time discretization, in principle, can be managed. The impact of time discretization on RL methods has not been fully characterized in existing theory, but a more detailed analysis of its effect could reveal opportunities for improving data-efficiency. We address this gap by analyzing Monte-Carlo policy evaluation for LQR systems and uncover a fundamental trade-off between approximation and statistical error in value estimation. Importantly, these two errors behave differently to time discretization, leading to an optimal choice of temporal resolution for a given data budget. These findings show that managing the temporal resolution can provably improve policy evaluation efficiency in LQR systems with finite data. Empirically, we demonstrate the trade-off in numerical simulations of LQR instances and standard RL benchmarks for non-linear continuous control.
tl;dr: We conduct a comparative study of Graph Structure Learning, analyze the pros and cons of it. Then we propose an easy-to-use library, GSLB, to promote further research.
Graph Structure Learning (GSL) has recently garnered considerable attention due to its ability to optimize both the parameters of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and the computation graph structure simultaneously. Despite the proliferation of GSL methods developed in recent years, there is no standard experimental setting or fair comparison for performance evaluation, which creates a great obstacle to understanding the progress in this field. To fill this gap, we systematically analyze the performance of GSL in different scenarios and develop a comprehensive Graph Structure Learning Benchmark (GSLB) curated from 20 diverse graph datasets and 16 distinct GSL algorithms. Specifically, GSLB systematically investigates the characteristics of GSL in terms of three dimensions: effectiveness, robustness, and complexity. We comprehensively evaluate state-of-the-art GSL algorithms in node- and graph-level tasks, and analyze their performance in robust learning and model complexity. Further, to facilitate reproducible research, we have developed an easy-to-use library for training, evaluating, and visualizing different GSL methods. Empirical results of our extensive experiments demonstrate the ability of GSL and reveal its potential benefits on various downstream tasks, offering insights and opportunities for future research. The code of GSLB is available at: https://github.com/GSL-Benchmark/GSLB.
tl;dr: We establish a new connection between the convergence and welfare of learning algorithms in multi-player games.
Computational tractability and social welfare (aka. efficiency) of equilibria are two fundamental but in general orthogonal considerations in algorithmic game theory. Nevertheless, we show that when (approximate) full efficiency can be guaranteed via a smoothness argument a la Roughgarden, Nash equilibria are approachable under a family of no-regret learning algorithms, thereby enabling fast and decentralized computation. We leverage this connection to obtain new convergence results in large games---wherein the number of players $n \gg 1$---under the well-documented property of full efficiency via smoothness in the limit. Surprisingly, our framework unifies equilibrium computation in disparate classes of problems including games with vanishing strategic sensitivity and two-player zero-sum games, illuminating en route an immediate but overlooked equivalence between smoothness and a well-studied condition in the optimization literature known as the Minty property. Finally, we establish that a family of no-regret dynamics attains a welfare bound that improves over the smoothness framework while at the same time guaranteeing convergence to the set of coarse correlated equilibria. We show this by employing the clairvoyant mirror descent algortihm recently introduced by Piliouras et al.
We introduce WordScape, a novel pipeline for the creation of cross-disciplinary, multilingual corpora comprising millions of pages with annotations for document layout detection. Relating visual and textual items on document pages has gained further significance with the advent of multimodal models. Various approaches proved effective for visual question answering or layout segmentation. However, the interplay of text, tables, and visuals remains challenging for a variety of document understanding tasks. In particular, many models fail to generalize well to diverse domains and new languages due to insufficient availability of training data. WordScape addresses these limitations. Our automatic annotation pipeline parses the Open XML structure of Word documents obtained from the web, jointly providing layout-annotated document images and their textual representations. In turn, WordScape offers unique properties as it (1) leverages the ubiquity of the Word file format on the internet, (2) is readily accessible through the Common Crawl web corpus, (3) is adaptive to domain-specific documents, and (4) offers culturally and linguistically diverse document pages with natural semantic structure and high-quality text. Together with the pipeline, we will additionally release 9.5M urls to word documents which can be processed using WordScape to create a dataset of over 40M pages. Finally, we investigate the quality of text and layout annotations extracted by WordScape, assess the impact on document understanding benchmarks, and demonstrate that manual labeling costs can be substantially reduced.
tl;dr: A differentiable nero-symbolic framwork is proposed for reasoning on large knowlege graph.
Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning utilizes two primary techniques, i.e., rule-based and KG-embedding based. The former provides precise inferences, but inferring via concrete rules is not scalable. The latter enables efficient reasoning at the cost of ambiguous inference accuracy. Neuro-symbolic reasoning seeks to amalgamate the advantages of both techniques. The crux of this approach is replacing the predicted existence of all possible triples (i.e., truth scores inferred from rules) with a suitable approximation grounded in embedding representations. However, constructing an effective approximation of all possible triples' truth scores is a challenging task, because it needs to balance the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency, while compatible with both the rule-based and KG-embedding models. To this end, we proposed a differentiable framework - DiffLogic. Instead of directly approximating all possible triples, we design a tailored filter to adaptively select essential triples based on the dynamic rules and weights. The truth scores assessed by KG-embedding are continuous, so we employ a continuous Markov logic network named probabilistic soft logic (PSL). It employs the truth scores of essential triples to assess the overall agreement among rules, weights, and observed triples. PSL enables end-to-end differentiable optimization, so we can alternately update embedding and weighted rules. On benchmark datasets, we empirically show that DiffLogic surpasses baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency.
tl;dr: ID and OOD Performance Are Sometimes Inversely Correlated on Real-world Datasets
Several studies have compared the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of models in computer vision and NLP. They report a frequent positive correlation and some surprisingly never even observe an inverse correlation indicative of a necessary trade-off. The possibility of inverse patterns is important to determine whether ID performance can serve as a proxy for OOD generalization capabilities.
This paper shows that inverse correlations between ID and OOD performance do happen with multiple real-world datasets, not only in artificial worst-case settings. We explain theoretically how these cases arise and how past studies missed them because of improper methodologies that examined a biased selection of models.
Our observations lead to recommendations that contradict those found in much of the current literature.
- High OOD performance sometimes requires trading off ID performance.
- Focusing on ID performance alone may not lead to optimal OOD performance. It may produce diminishing (eventually negative) returns in OOD performance.
- In these cases, studies on OOD generalization that use ID performance for model selection (a common recommended practice) will necessarily miss the best-performing models, making these studies blind to a whole range of phenomena.
tl;dr: To address the multi-hypothesis issue, We propose a diffusion-based framework for category-level object pose estimation.
Object pose estimation plays a vital role in embodied AI and computer vision, enabling intelligent agents to comprehend and interact with their surroundings. Despite the practicality of category-level pose estimation, current approaches encounter challenges with partially observed point clouds, known as the multihypothesis issue. In this study, we propose a novel solution by reframing categorylevel object pose estimation as conditional generative modeling, departing from traditional point-to-point regression. Leveraging score-based diffusion models, we estimate object poses by sampling candidates from the diffusion model and aggregating them through a two-step process: filtering out outliers via likelihood estimation and subsequently mean-pooling the remaining candidates. To avoid the costly integration process when estimating the likelihood, we introduce an alternative method that distils an energy-based model from the original score-based model, enabling end-to-end likelihood estimation. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the REAL275 dataset, surpassing 50% and 60% on strict 5 ◦ 2cm and 5 ◦ 5cm metrics, respectively. Furthermore, our method demonstrates strong generalization to novel categories without the need for fine-tuning and can readily adapt to object pose tracking tasks, yielding comparable results to the current state-of-the-art baselines. Our checkpoints and demonstrations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/genpose.
tl;dr: We propose a framework to compose iterative generative processes: GFlowNets and diffusion models.
High training costs of generative models and the need to fine-tune them for specific tasks have created a strong interest in model reuse and composition.
A key challenge in composing iterative generative processes, such as GFlowNets and diffusion models, is that to realize the desired target distribution, all steps of the generative process need to be coordinated, and satisfy delicate balance conditions.
In this work, we propose Compositional Sculpting: a general approach for defining compositions of iterative generative processes. We then introduce a method for sampling from these compositions built on classifier guidance.
We showcase ways to accomplish compositional sculpting in both GFlowNets and diffusion models. We highlight two binary operations $\\unicode{x2014}$ the $\\textit{harmonic mean}\\unicode{x00A0}(p_1 \\otimes p_2$) and the $\\textit{contrast}\\unicode{x00A0}(p_1 \\,\\unicode{x25D1}\\,\\, p_2$) between pairs, and the generalization of these operations to multiple component distributions.
We offer empirical results on image and molecular generation tasks. Project codebase: https://github.com/timgaripov/compositional-sculpting.
tl;dr: Train agents to master diverse tasks in Neural MMO 2.0
Neural MMO 2.0 is a massively multi-agent and multi-task environment for reinforcement learning research. This version features a novel task-system that broadens the range of training settings and poses a new challenge in generalization: evaluation on and against tasks, maps, and opponents never seen during training. Maps are procedurally generated with 128 agents in the standard setting and 1-1024 supported overall. Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite of its predecessor with three-fold improved performance, effectively addressing simulation bottlenecks in online training. Enhancements to compatibility enable training with standard reinforcement learning frameworks designed for much simpler environments. Neural MMO 2.0 is free and open-source with comprehensive documentation available at neuralmmo.github.io and an active community Discord. To spark initial research on this new platform, we are concurrently running a competition at NeurIPS 2023.
Closed-form differential equations, including partial differential equations and higher-order ordinary differential equations, are one of the most important tools used by scientists to model and better understand natural phenomena. Discovering these equations directly from data is challenging because it requires modeling relationships between various derivatives that are not observed in the data (equation-data mismatch) and it involves searching across a huge space of possible equations. Current approaches make strong assumptions about the form of the equation and thus fail to discover many well-known phenomena. Moreover, many of them resolve the equation-data mismatch by estimating the derivatives, which makes them inadequate for noisy and infrequent observations. To this end, we propose D-CIPHER, which is robust to measurement artifacts and can uncover a new and very general class of differential equations. We further design a novel optimization procedure, CoLLie, to help D-CIPHER search through this class efficiently. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that it can discover many well-known equations that are beyond the capabilities of current methods.
tl;dr: Policy finetuning using a non-reactive exploration policy with theoretical guarantees
In some applications of reinforcement learning,
a dataset of pre-collected experience is already available
but it is also possible to acquire some additional online data to help improve the quality of the policy.
However, it may be preferable to gather additional data with a single, non-reactive exploration policy
and avoid the engineering costs associated with switching policies.
In this paper we propose an algorithm with provable guarantees
that can leverage an offline dataset to design a single non-reactive policy for exploration.
We theoretically analyze the algorithm and measure the quality of the final policy
as a function of the local coverage of the original dataset and the amount of additional data collected.
tl;dr: We introduce the concept of consolidating causal mechanisms to transform large-scale SCM while preserving consistent interventional behaviour.
Structural causal models (SCMs) are a powerful tool for understanding the complex causal relationships that underlie many real-world systems. As these systems grow in size, the number of variables and complexity of interactions between them does, too. Thus, becoming convoluted and difficult to analyze. This is particularly true in the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, where an ever increasing amount of data demands for new methods to simplify and compress large scale SCM. While methods for marginalizing and abstracting SCM already exist today, they may destroy the causality of the marginalized model. To alleviate this, we introduce the concept of consolidating causal mechanisms to transform large-scale SCM while preserving consistent interventional behaviour. We show consolidation is a powerful method for simplifying SCM, discuss reduction of computational complexity and give a perspective on generalizing abilities of consolidated SCM.
tl;dr: We present a general theory when the symmetry of an equivariant network does not match the symmetry of the ground truth function.
Although equivariant machine learning has proven effective at many tasks, success depends heavily on the assumption that the ground truth function is symmetric over the entire domain matching the symmetry in an equivariant neural network. A missing piece in the equivariant learning literature is the analysis of equivariant networks when symmetry exists only partially in the domain. In this work, we present a general theory for such a situation. We propose pointwise definitions of correct, incorrect, and extrinsic equivariance, which allow us to quantify continuously the degree of each type of equivariance a function displays. We then study the impact of various degrees of incorrect or extrinsic symmetry on model error. We prove error lower bounds for invariant or equivariant networks in classification or regression settings with partially incorrect symmetry. We also analyze the potentially harmful effects of extrinsic equivariance. Experiments validate these results in three different environments.
tl;dr: A novel MeGraph model that alternates local and hierarchical information aggregation in a multi-scale mega graph shows effectiveness in capturing long-range interactions.
Graph neural networks, which typically exchange information between local neighbors, often struggle to capture long-range interactions (LRIs) within the graph. Building a graph hierarchy via graph pooling methods is a promising approach to address this challenge; however, hierarchical information propagation cannot entirely take over the role of local information aggregation. To balance locality and hierarchy, we integrate the local and hierarchical structures, represented by intra- and inter-graphs respectively, of a multi-scale graph hierarchy into a single mega graph. Our proposed MeGraph model consists of multiple layers alternating between local and hierarchical information aggregation on the mega graph. Each layer first performs local-aware message-passing on graphs of varied scales via the intra-graph edges, then fuses information across the entire hierarchy along the bidirectional pathways formed by inter-graph edges. By repeating this fusion process, local and hierarchical information could intertwine and complement each other. To evaluate our model, we establish a new Graph Theory Benchmark designed to assess LRI capture ability, in which MeGraph demonstrates dominant performance. Furthermore, MeGraph exhibits superior or equivalent performance to state-of-the-art models on the Long Range Graph Benchmark. The experimental results on commonly adopted real-world datasets further demonstrate the broad applicability of MeGraph.
1015. What functions can Graph Neural Networks compute on random graphs? The role of Positional Encoding
We aim to deepen the theoretical understanding of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs, with a focus on their expressive power.
Existing analyses relate this notion to the graph isomorphism problem, which is mostly relevant for graphs of small sizes, or studied graph classification or regression tasks, while prediction tasks on \emph{nodes} are far more relevant on large graphs. Recently, several works showed that, on very general random graphs models, GNNs converge to certains functions as the number of nodes grows.
In this paper, we provide a more complete and intuitive description of the function space generated by equivariant GNNs for node-tasks, through general notions of convergence that encompass several previous examples. We emphasize the role of input node features, and study the impact of \emph{node Positional Encodings} (PEs), a recent line of work that has been shown to yield state-of-the-art results in practice. Through the study of several examples of PEs on large random graphs, we extend previously known universality results to significantly more general models. Our theoretical results hint at some normalization tricks, which is shown numerically to have a positive impact on GNN generalization on synthetic and real data. Our proofs contain new concentration inequalities of independent interest.
tl;dr: Theoretically understand Q-value divergence in offline RL. A simple but effective solution is provided with machanism explained.
The divergence of the Q-value estimation has been a prominent issue offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), where the agent has no access to real dynamics. Traditional beliefs attribute this instability to querying out-of-distribution actions when bootstrapping value targets. Though this issue can be alleviated with policy constraints or conservative Q estimation, a theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism causing the divergence has been absent. In this work, we aim to thoroughly comprehend this mechanism and attain an improved solution. We first identify a fundamental pattern, \emph{self-excitation}, as the primary cause of Q-value estimation divergence in offline RL. Then, we propose a novel Self-Excite Eigenvalue Measure (SEEM) metric based on Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) to measure the evolving property of Q-network at training, which provides an intriguing explanation of the emergence of divergence. For the first time, our theory can reliably decide whether the training will diverge at an early stage, and even predict the order of the growth for the estimated Q-value, the model's norm, and the crashing step when an SGD optimizer is used. The experiments demonstrate perfect alignment with this theoretic analysis. Building on our insights, we propose to resolve divergence from a novel perspective, namely improving the model's architecture for better extrapolating behavior. Through extensive empirical studies, we identify LayerNorm as a good solution to effectively avoid divergence without introducing detrimental bias, leading to superior performance. Experimental results prove that it can still work in some most challenging settings, i.e. using only 1$\%$ transitions of the dataset, where all previous methods fail. Moreover, it can be easily plugged into modern offline RL methods and achieve SOTA results on many challenging tasks. We also give unique insights into its effectiveness.
Generalization bounds are valuable both for theory and applications. On the one hand, they shed light on the mechanisms that underpin the learning processes; on the other, they certify how well a learned model performs against unseen inputs. In this work we build upon a recent breakthrough in compression theory to develop a new framework yielding tight generalization bounds of wide practical applicability. The core idea is to embed any given learning algorithm into a suitably-constructed meta-algorithm (here called Pick-to-Learn, P2L) in order to instill desirable compression properties. When applied to the MNIST classification dataset and to a synthetic regression problem, P2L not only attains generalization bounds that compare favorably with the state of the art (test-set and PAC-Bayes bounds), but it also learns models with better post-training performance.
tl;dr: In this work, we provide novel certification for distributional individual fairness which is an important, practical notion of fairness.
Providing formal guarantees of algorithmic fairness is of paramount importance to socially responsible deployment of machine learning algorithms. In this work, we study formal guarantees, i.e., certificates, for individual fairness (IF) of neural networks. We start by introducing a novel convex approximation of IF constraints that exponentially decreases the computational cost of providing formal guarantees of local individual fairness. We highlight that prior methods are constrained by their focus on global IF certification and can therefore only scale to models with a few dozen hidden neurons, thus limiting their practical impact. We propose to certify \textit{distributional} individual fairness which ensures that for a given empirical distribution and all distributions within a $\gamma$-Wasserstein ball, the neural network has guaranteed individually fair predictions. Leveraging developments in quasi-convex optimization, we provide novel and efficient certified bounds on distributional individual fairness and show that our method allows us to certify and regularize neural networks that are several orders of magnitude larger than those considered by prior works. Moreover, we study real-world distribution shifts and find our bounds to be a scalable, practical, and sound source of IF guarantees.
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This paper explores the potential of building scalable techniques to facilitate autonomous cooperation among communicative agents, and provides insight into their “cognitive” processes. To address the challenges of achieving autonomous cooperation, we propose a novel communicative agent framework named role-playing . Our approach involves using inception prompting to guide chat agents toward task completion while maintaining consistency with human intentions. We showcase how role-playing can be used to generate conversational data for studying the behaviors and capabilities of a society of agents, providing a valuable resource for investigating conversational language models. In particular, we conduct comprehensive studies on instruction-following cooperation in multi-agent settings. Our contributions include introducing a novel communicative agent framework, offering a scalable approach for studying the cooperative behaviors and capabilities of multi-agent systems, and open-sourcing our library to support research on communicative agents and beyond: https://github.com/camel-ai/camel.
tl;dr: We systematically investigate graph transformations that enable standard message passing to simulate state-of-the-art graph neural networks without loss of expressiveness.
We systematically investigate graph transformations that enable standard message passing to simulate state-of-the-art graph neural networks (GNNs) without loss of expressivity. Using these, many state-of-the-art GNNs can be implemented with message passing operations from standard libraries, eliminating many sources of implementation issues and allowing for better code optimization. We distinguish between weak and strong simulation: weak simulation achieves the same expressivity only after several message passing steps while strong simulation achieves this after every message passing step. Our contribution leads to a direct way to translate common operations of non-standard GNNs to graph transformations that allow for strong or weak simulation. Our empirical evaluation shows competitive predictive performance of message passing on transformed graphs for various molecular benchmark datasets, in several cases surpassing the original GNNs.
tl;dr: We show very small amount of human feedback is sufficient for aligning a diffusion model's sample generation with specified requirements.
Diffusion models have recently shown remarkable success in high-quality image generation. Sometimes, however, a pre-trained diffusion model exhibits partial misalignment in the sense that the model can generate good images, but it sometimes outputs undesirable images. If so, we simply need to prevent the generation of the bad images, and we call this task censoring. In this work, we present censored generation with a pre-trained diffusion model using a reward model trained on minimal human feedback. We show that censoring can be accomplished with extreme human feedback efficiency and that labels generated with a mere few minutes of human feedback are sufficient.
We propose a family of recursive cutting-plane algorithms to solve feasibility problems with constrained memory, which can also be used for first-order convex optimization. Precisely, in order to find a point within a ball of radius $\epsilon$ with a separation oracle in dimension $d$---or to minimize $1$-Lipschitz convex functions to accuracy $\epsilon$ over the unit ball---our algorithms use $\mathcal O(\frac{d^2}{p}\ln \frac{1}{\epsilon})$ bits of memory, and make $\mathcal O((C\frac{d}{p}\ln \frac{1}{\epsilon})^p)$ oracle calls. The family is parametrized by $p\in[d]$ and provides an oracle-complexity/memory trade-off in the sub-polynomial regime $\ln\frac{1}{\epsilon}\gg\ln d$. While several works gave lower-bound trade-offs (impossibility results)---we explicit here their dependence with $\ln\frac{1}{\epsilon}$, showing that these also hold in any sub-polynomial regime---to the best of our knowledge this is the first class of algorithms that provides a positive trade-off between gradient descent and cutting-plane methods in any regime with $\epsilon\leq 1/\sqrt d$. The algorithms divide the $d$ variables into $p$ blocks and optimize over blocks sequentially, with approximate separation vectors constructed using a variant of Vaidya's method. In the regime $\epsilon \leq d^{-\Omega(d)}$, our algorithm with $p=d$ achieves the information-theoretic optimal memory usage and improves the oracle-complexity of gradient descent.
This paper proposes a new easy-to-implement parameter-free gradient-based optimizer: DoWG (Distance over Weighted Gradients). We prove that DoWG is efficient---matching the convergence rate of optimally tuned gradient descent in convex optimization up to a logarithmic factor without tuning any parameters, and universal---automatically adapting to both smooth and nonsmooth problems. While popular algorithms following the AdaGrad framework compute a running average of the squared gradients, DoWG maintains a new distance-based weighted version of the running average, which is crucial to achieve the desired properties. To complement our theory, we also show empirically that DoWG trains at the edge of stability, and validate its effectiveness on practical machine learning tasks.
We address the problem of designing a sublinear-time spectral clustering oracle for graphs that exhibit strong clusterability. Such graphs contain $k$ latent clusters, each characterized by a large inner conductance (at least $\varphi$) and a small outer conductance (at most $\varepsilon$). Our aim is to preprocess the graph to enable clustering membership queries, with the key requirement that both preprocessing and query answering should be performed in sublinear time, and the resulting partition should be consistent with a $k$-partition that is close to the ground-truth clustering. Previous oracles have relied on either a $\textrm{poly}(k)\log n$ gap between inner and outer conductances or exponential (in $k/\varepsilon$) preprocessing time. Our algorithm relaxes these assumptions, albeit at the cost of a slightly higher misclassification ratio. We also show that our clustering oracle is robust against a few random edge deletions. To validate our theoretical bounds, we conducted experiments on synthetic networks.
tl;dr: We design an asymmetric LSH in the Fourier frequency domain, for soft set containment search.
In many search applications related to passage retrieval, text entailment, and subgraph search, the query and each 'document' is a set of elements, with a document being relevant if it contains the query. These elements are not represented by atomic IDs, but by embedded representations, thereby extending set containment to *soft* set containment. Recent applications address soft set containment by encoding sets into fixed-size vectors and checking for elementwise *vector* *dominance*. This 0/1 property can be relaxed to an asymmetric *hinge* *distance* for scoring and ranking candidate documents. Here we focus on data-sensitive, trainable indices for fast retrieval of relevant documents. Existing LSH methods are designed for mostly symmetric or few simple asymmetric distance functions, which are not suitable for hinge distance. Instead, we transform hinge distance into a proposed *dominance* *similarity* measure, to which we then apply a Fourier transform, thereby expressing dominance similarity as an expectation of inner products of functions in the frequency domain. Next, we approximate the expectation with an importance-sampled estimate. The overall consequence is that now we can use a traditional LSH, but in the frequency domain. To ensure that the LSH uses hash bits efficiently, we learn hash functions that are sensitive to both corpus and query distributions, mapped to the frequency domain. Our experiments show that the proposed asymmetric dominance similarity is critical to the targeted applications, and that our LSH, which we call FourierHashNet, provides a better query time vs. retrieval quality trade-off, compared to several baselines. Both the Fourier transform and the trainable hash codes contribute to performance gains.
We examine the relationship between learnability and robust learnability for the problem of distribution learning.
We show that learnability implies robust learnability if the adversary can only perform additive contamination (and consequently, under Huber contamination), but not if the adversary is allowed to perform subtractive contamination.
Thus, contrary to other learning settings (e.g., PAC learning of function classes), realizable learnability does not imply agnostic learnability.
We also explore related implications in the context of compression schemes and differentially private learnability.
1027. T2I-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Open-world Compositional Text-to-image Generation
Despite the stunning ability to generate high-quality images by recent text-to-image models, current approaches often struggle to effectively compose objects with different attributes and relationships into a complex and coherent scene. We propose T2I-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for open-world compositional text-to-image generation, consisting of 6,000 compositional text prompts from 3 categories (attribute binding, object relationships, and complex compositions) and 6 sub-categories (color binding, shape binding, texture binding, spatial relationships, non-spatial relationships, and complex compositions). We further propose several evaluation metrics specifically designed to evaluate compositional text-to-image generation and explore the potential and limitations of multimodal LLMs for evaluation. We introduce a new approach, Generative mOdel finetuning with Reward-driven Sample selection (GORS), to boost the compositional text-to-image generation abilities of pretrained text-to-image models. Extensive experiments and evaluations are conducted to benchmark previous methods on T2I-CompBench, and to validate the effectiveness of our proposed evaluation metrics and GORS approach. Project page is available at https://karine-h.github.io/T2I-CompBench/.
1028. Strategic Behavior in Two-sided Matching Markets with Prediction-enhanced Preference-formation
Two-sided matching markets have long existed to pair agents in the absence of regulated exchanges. A common example is school choice, where a matching mechanism uses student and school preferences to assign students to schools. In such settings, forming preferences is both difficult and critical. Prior work has suggested various prediction mechanisms that help agents make decisions about their preferences. Although often deployed together, these matching and prediction mechanisms are almost always analyzed separately. The present work shows that at the intersection of the two lies a previously unexplored type of strategic behavior: agents returning to the market (e.g., schools) can attack future predictions by interacting short-term non-optimally with their matches. Here, we first introduce this type of strategic behavior, which we call an adversarial interaction attack. Next, we construct a formal economic model that captures the feedback loop between prediction mechanisms designed to assist agents and the matching mechanism used to pair them. Finally, in a simplified setting, we prove that returning agents can benefit from using adversarial interaction attacks and gain progressively more as the trust in and accuracy of predictions increases. We also show that this attack increases inequality in the student population.
tl;dr: We propose a probabilistic integration of embeddings in logic programming using soft-unification.
A fundamental challenge in neuro-symbolic AI is to devise primitives that fuse the logical and neural concepts. The Neural Theorem Prover has proposed the notion of soft-unification to turn the symbolic comparison between terms (i.e. unification) into a comparison in embedding space. It has been shown that soft-unification is a powerful mechanism that can be used to learn logic rules in an end-to-end differentiable manner. We study soft-unification from a conceptual point and outline several desirable properties of this operation. These include non-redundancy in the proof, well-defined proof scores, and non-sparse gradients. Unfortunately, these properties are not satisfied by previous systems such as the Neural Theorem Prover. Therefore, we introduce a more principled framework called DeepSoftLog based on probabilistic rather than fuzzy semantics. Our experiments demonstrate that DeepSoftLog can outperform the state-of-the-art on neuro-symbolic benchmarks, highlighting the benefits of these properties.
We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous)
halfspaces with Random Classification Noise under the Gaussian distribution.
We establish nearly-matching algorithmic and Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound results
revealing a surprising information-computation gap for this basic problem.
Specifically, the sample complexity of this learning problem is
$\widetilde{\Theta}(d/\epsilon)$, where $d$ is the dimension and $\epsilon$ is the excess error.
Our positive result is a computationally efficient learning algorithm with sample complexity
$\tilde{O}(d/\epsilon + d/\max(p, \epsilon))^2)$, where $p$ quantifies the bias of the target halfspace.
On the lower bound side, we show that any efficient SQ algorithm (or low-degree test)
for the problem requires sample complexity at least
$\Omega(d^{1/2}/(\max(p, \epsilon))^2)$.
Our lower bound suggests that this quadratic dependence on $1/\epsilon$ is inherent for efficient algorithms.
tl;dr: We construct a challenging feature selection benchmark evaluated on downstream tabular deep learning models and propose an input-gradient-based analogue of LASSO for neural networks.
Academic tabular benchmarks often contain small sets of curated features. In contrast, data scientists typically collect as many features as possible into their datasets, and even engineer new features from existing ones. To prevent over-fitting in subsequent downstream modeling, practitioners commonly use automated feature selection methods that identify a reduced subset of informative features. Existing benchmarks for tabular feature selection consider classical downstream models, toy synthetic datasets, or do not evaluate feature selectors on the basis of downstream performance. We construct a challenging feature selection benchmark evaluated on downstream neural networks including transformers, using real datasets and multiple methods for generating extraneous features. We also propose an input-gradient-based analogue of LASSO for neural networks that outperforms classical feature selection methods on challenging problems such as selecting from corrupted or second-order features.
tl;dr: Single-Loop Methods for Constrained Optimization
We consider a non-convex constrained optimization problem, where the objective function is weakly convex and the constraint function is either convex or weakly convex. To solve this problem, we consider the classical switching subgradient method, which is an intuitive and easily implementable first-order method whose oracle complexity was only known for convex problems. This paper provides the first analysis on the oracle complexity of the switching subgradient method for finding a nearly stationary point of non-convex problems. Our results are derived separately for convex and weakly convex constraints. Compared to existing approaches, especially the double-loop methods, the switching gradient method can be applied to non-smooth problems and achieves the same complexity using only a single loop, which saves the effort on tuning the number of inner iterations.
Accessible high-quality data is the bread and butter of machine learning research, and the demand for data has exploded as larger and more advanced ML models are built across different domains. Yet, real data often contain sensitive information, are subject to various biases, and are costly to acquire, which compromise their quality and accessibility. Synthetic data have thus emerged as a complement to, sometimes even a replacement for, real data for ML training. However, the landscape of synthetic data research has been fragmented due to the diverse range of data modalities, such as tabular, time series, and images, and the wide array of use cases, including privacy preservation, fairness considerations, and data augmentation. This fragmentation poses practical challenges when comparing and selecting synthetic data generators in for different problem settings. To this end, we develop Synthcity, an open-source Python library that allows researchers and practitioners to perform one-click benchmarking of synthetic data generators across data modalities and use cases. Beyond benchmarking, Synthcity serves as a centralized toolkit for accessing cutting-edge data generators. In addition, Synthcity’s flexible plug-in style API makes it easy to incorporate additional data generators into the framework. Using examples of tabular data generation and data augmentation, we illustrate the general applicability of Synthcity, and the insight one can obtain.
tl;dr: We propose a comprehensive simulator, KuaiSim, which covers three levels of recommendation tasks.
Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based recommender systems (RSs) have garnered considerable attention due to their ability to learn optimal recommendation policies and maximize long-term user rewards.
However, deploying RL models directly in online environments and generating authentic data through A/B tests can pose challenges and require substantial resources.
Simulators offer an alternative approach by providing training and evaluation environments for RS models, reducing reliance on real-world data.
Existing simulators have shown promising results but also have limitations such as simplified user feedback, lacking consistency with real-world data, the challenge of simulator evaluation, and difficulties in migration and expansion across RSs.
To address these challenges, we propose KuaiSim, a comprehensive user environment that provides user feedback with multi-behavior and cross-session responses.
The resulting simulator can support three levels of recommendation problems: the request level list-wise recommendation task, the whole-session level sequential recommendation task, and the cross-session level retention optimization task.
For each task, KuaiSim also provides evaluation protocols and baseline recommendation algorithms that further serve as benchmarks for future research.
We also restructure existing competitive simulators on the Kuairand Dataset and compare them against KuaiSim to future assess their performance and behavioral differences.
Furthermore, to showcase KuaiSim's flexibility in accommodating different datasets, we demonstrate its versatility and robustness when deploying it on the ML-1m dataset. The implementation code is available online to ease reproducibility \footnote{https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/KuaiSim}.
tl;dr: We propose a general framework to model four distinct categories of latent state variables within the RL system with block-wise identifiability.
Extracting a stable and compact representation of the environment is crucial for efficient reinforcement learning in high-dimensional, noisy, and non-stationary environments. Different categories of information coexist in such environments -- how to effectively extract and disentangle the information remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose IFactor, a general framework to model four distinct categories of latent state variables that capture various aspects of information within the RL system, based on their interactions with actions and rewards. Our analysis establishes block-wise identifiability of these latent variables, which not only provides a stable and compact representation but also discloses that all reward-relevant factors are significant for policy learning. We further present a practical approach to learning the world model with identifiable blocks, ensuring the removal of redundancies but retaining minimal and sufficient information for policy optimization. Experiments in synthetic worlds demonstrate that our method accurately identifies the ground-truth latent variables, substantiating our theoretical findings. Moreover, experiments in variants of the DeepMind Control Suite and RoboDesk showcase the superior performance of our approach over baselines.
Intention-oriented object detection aims to detect desired objects based on specific intentions or requirements. For instance, when we desire to "lie down and rest", we instinctively seek out a suitable option such as a "bed" or a "sofa" that can fulfill our needs. Previous work in this area is limited either by the number of intention descriptions or by the affordance vocabulary available for intention objects. These limitations make it challenging to handle intentions in open environments effectively. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive dataset called Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects (RIO). In particular, RIO is specifically designed to incorporate diverse real-world scenarios and a wide range of object categories. It offers the following key features: 1) intention descriptions in RIO are represented as natural sentences rather than a mere word or verb phrase, making them more practical and meaningful; 2) the intention descriptions are contextually relevant to the scene, enabling a broader range of potential functionalities associated with the objects; 3) the dataset comprises a total of 40,214 images and 130,585 intention-object pairs. With the proposed RIO, we evaluate the ability of some existing models to reason intention-oriented objects in open environments.
1037. Hokoff: Real Game Dataset from Honor of Kings and its Offline Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks
tl;dr: We propose Hokoff, a comprehensive set of pre-collected datasets that covers both offline RL and offline MARL, accompanied by a robust framework, to facilitate further research.
The advancement of Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) critically depends on the availability of high-quality, pre-collected offline datasets that represent real-world complexities and practical applications. However, existing datasets often fall short in their simplicity and lack of realism. To address this gap, we propose Hokoff, a comprehensive set of pre-collected datasets that covers both offline RL and offline MARL, accompanied by a robust framework, to facilitate further research. This data is derived from Honor of Kings, a recognized Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game known for its intricate nature, closely resembling real-life situations. Utilizing this framework, we benchmark a variety of offline RL and offline MARL algorithms. We also introduce a novel baseline algorithm tailored for the inherent hierarchical action space of the game. We reveal the incompetency of current offline RL approaches in handling task complexity, generalization and multi-task learning.
tl;dr: We combine distributional reinforcement learning with decision-aware model learning to design models which can plan for risk-sensitive objectives.
We consider the problem of learning models for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We theoretically demonstrate that proper value equivalence, a method of learning models which can be used to plan optimally in the risk-neutral setting, is not sufficient to plan optimally in the risk-sensitive setting. We leverage distributional reinforcement learning to introduce two new notions of model equivalence, one which is general and can be used to plan for any risk measure, but is intractable; and a practical variation which allows one to choose which risk measures they may plan optimally for. We demonstrate how our models can be used to augment any model-free risk-sensitive algorithm, and provide both tabular and large-scale experiments to demonstrate our method’s ability.
tl;dr: Existing concept negation methods are insufficient when it comes to handling interdependent concepts, which are essential for confining the output space of generative diffusion models that produce unbounded outputs.
Generative models produce unbounded outputs, necessitating the use of refusal techniques to confine their output space. Employing generative refusals is crucial in upholding the ethical and copyright integrity of synthesized content, particularly when working with widely adopted diffusion models. "Concept negation'' presents a promising paradigm to achieve generative refusals, as it effectively defines and governs the model's output space based on concepts, utilizing natural language interfaces that are readily comprehensible to humans. However, despite the valuable contributions of prior research to the field of concept negation, it still suffers from significant limitations. The existing concept negation methods, which operate based on the composition of score or noise predictions from the diffusion process, are limited to independent concepts (e.g., ``a blonde girl`` without ``glasses``) and fail to consider the interconnected nature of concepts in reality (e.g., ``Mickey mouse eats ice cream`` without ``Disney characters``). Keeping the limitations in mind, we propose a novel framework, called $ProtoRe$, to improve the flexibility of concept negation via test-time negative concept identification along with purification in the feature space. $ProtoRe$ works by incorporating CLIP's language-contrastive knowledge to identify the prototype of negative concepts, extract the negative features from outputs using the prototype as a prompt, and further refine the attention maps by retrieving negative features. Our evaluation on multiple benchmarks shows that $ProtoRe$ outperforms state-of-the-art methods under various settings, in terms of the effectiveness of purification and the fidelity of generative images.
tl;dr: We extend the traditional near neighbor search problem to sets of vectors, and show both empirical and theoretical speed up over the best alternative methods.
We study the problem of $\text{\emph{vector set search}}$ with $\text{\emph{vector set queries}}$. This task is analogous to traditional near-neighbor search, with the exception that both the query and each element in the collection are $\text{\textit{sets}}$ of vectors. We identify this problem as a core subroutine for semantic search applications and find that existing solutions are unacceptably slow. Towards this end, we present a new approximate search algorithm, DESSERT ($\text{\bf D}$ESSERT $\text{\bf E}$ffeciently $\text{\bf S}$earches $\text{\bf S}$ets of $\text{\bf E}$mbeddings via $\text{\bf R}$etrieval $\text{\bf T}$ables). DESSERT is a general tool with strong theoretical guarantees and excellent empirical performance. When we integrate DESSERT into ColBERT, a state-of-the-art semantic search model, we find a 2-5x speedup on the MS MARCO and LoTTE retrieval benchmarks with minimal loss in recall, underscoring the effectiveness and practical applicability of our proposal.
tl;dr: We provide, for the first time, fast computational guarantees on distributed (non-covex) low-rank matrix recovery.
We explore the matrix sensing problem from near-isotropic linear measurements, distributed across a network of agents modeled as an undirected graph, with no centralized node. We provide the first study of statistical, computational/communication guarantees for a decentralized gradient algorithm that solves the (nonconvex) Burer-Monteiro type decomposition associated to the low-rank matrix estimation. With small random initialization, the algorithm displays an approximate two-phase convergence: (i) a spectral phase that aligns the iterates' column space with the underlying low-rank matrix, mimicking centralized spectral initialization (not directly implementable over networks); and (ii) a local refinement phase that diverts the iterates from certain degenerate saddle points, while ensuring swift convergence to the underlying low-rank matrix. Central to our analysis is a novel "in-network" Restricted Isometry Property which accommodates for the decentralized nature of the optimization, revealing an intriguing interplay between sample complexity and network connectivity, topology, and communication complexity.
`Scale the model, scale the data, scale the compute' is the reigning sentiment in the world of generative AI today. While the impact of model scaling has been extensively studied, we are only beginning to scratch the surface of data scaling and its consequences. This is especially of critical importance in the context of vision-language datasets such as LAION. These datasets are continually growing in size and are built based on large-scale internet dumps such as the Common Crawl, which is known to have numerous drawbacks ranging from quality, legality, and content. The datasets then serve as the backbone for large generative models, contributing to the operationalization and perpetuation of harmful societal and historical biases and stereotypes. In this paper, we investigate the effect of scaling datasets on hateful content through a comparative audit of two datasets: LAION-400M and LAION-2B. Our results show that hate content increased by nearly **12%** with dataset scale, measured both qualitatively and quantitatively using a metric that we term as Hate Content Rate (HCR). We also found that filtering dataset contents based on Not Safe For Work (NSFW) values calculated based on images alone does not exclude all the harmful content in alt-text. Instead, we found that trace amounts of hateful, targeted, and aggressive text remain even when carrying out conservative filtering. We end with a reflection and a discussion of the significance of our results for dataset curation and usage in the AI community.
Code and the meta-data assets curated in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/vinayprabhu/hate_scaling.
Content warning: This paper contains examples of hateful text that might be disturbing, distressing, and/or offensive.
tl;dr: We provide the first rigorous theoretical insights on why the popular "greedy pruning+finetuning" pipeline leads to smaller models with good generalization, in the context of the overparameterized matrix sensing problem.
Pruning schemes have been widely used in practice to reduce the complexity of trained models with a massive number of parameters. In fact, several practical studies have shown that if the pruned model is fine-tuned with some gradient-based updates it generalizes well to new samples. Although the above pipeline, which we refer to as pruning + fine-tuning, has been extremely successful in lowering the complexity of trained models, there is very little known about the theory behind this success. In this paper we address this issue by investigating the pruning + fine-tuning framework on the overparameterized matrix sensing problem with the ground truth denoted $U_\star \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times r}$ and the overparameterized model $U \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times k}$ with $k \gg r$. We study the approximate local minima of the mean square error, augmented with a smooth version of a group Lasso regularizer, $\sum_{i=1}^{k} \lVert Ue_i \rVert_2 $. In particular, we provably show that pruning all the columns below a certain explicit $\ell_2$-norm threshold results in a solution $U_{\text{prune}}$ which has the minimum number of columns $r$, yet close to the ground truth in training loss. Moreover, in the subsequent fine-tuning phase, gradient descent initialized at $U_{\text{prune}}$ converges at a linear rate to its limit. While our analysis provides insights into the role of regularization in pruning, we also show that running gradient descent in the absence of regularization results in models which {are not suitable for greedy pruning}, i.e., many columns could have their $\ell_2$ norm comparable to that of the maximum. Lastly, we show that our results also extend for the training and pruning of two-layer neural networks with quadratic activation functions. To the best of our knowledge, our results provide the first rigorous insights on why greedy pruning + fine-tuning leads to smaller models which also generalize well.
1044. Would I have gotten that reward? Long-term credit assignment by counterfactual contribution analysis
To make reinforcement learning more sample efficient, we need better credit assignment methods that measure an action’s influence on future rewards. Building upon Hindsight Credit Assignment (HCA), we introduce Counterfactual Contribution Analysis (COCOA), a new family of model-based credit assignment algorithms. Our algorithms achieve precise credit assignment by measuring the contribution of actions upon obtaining subsequent rewards, by quantifying a counterfactual query: ‘Would the agent still have reached this reward if it had taken another action?’. We show that measuring contributions w.r.t. rewarding _states_, as is done in HCA, results in spurious estimates of contributions, causing HCA to degrade towards the high-variance REINFORCE estimator in many relevant environments. Instead, we measure contributions w.r.t. rewards or learned representations of the rewarding objects, resulting in gradient estimates with lower variance. We run experiments on a suite of problems specifically designed to evaluate long-term credit assignment capabilities. By using dynamic programming, we measure ground-truth policy gradients and show that the improved performance of our new model-based credit assignment methods is due to lower bias and variance compared to HCA and common baselines. Our results demonstrate how modeling action contributions towards rewarding outcomes can be leveraged for credit assignment, opening a new path towards sample-efficient reinforcement learning.
tl;dr: We propose corruption-robust algorithms that incorporate uncertainty-related weights to address offline RL under adversarial corruption and general function approximation.
We investigate the problem of corruption robustness in offline reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation, where an adversary can corrupt each sample in the offline dataset, and the corruption level $\zeta\geq0$ quantifies the cumulative corruption amount over $n$ episodes and $H$ steps. Our goal is to find a policy that is robust to such corruption and minimizes the suboptimality gap with respect to the optimal policy for the uncorrupted Markov decision processes (MDPs). Drawing inspiration from the uncertainty-weighting technique from the robust online RL setting \citep{he2022nearly,ye2022corruptionrobust}, we design a new uncertainty weight iteration procedure to efficiently compute on batched samples and propose a corruption-robust algorithm for offline RL. Notably, under the assumption of single policy coverage and the knowledge of $\zeta$, our proposed algorithm achieves a suboptimality bound that is worsened by an additive factor of $\mathcal O(\zeta \cdot (\text CC(\lambda,\hat{\mathcal F},\mathcal Z_n^H))^{1/2} (C(\hat{\mathcal F},\mu))^{-1/2} n^{-1})$ due to the corruption. Here $\text CC(\lambda,\hat{\mathcal F},\mathcal Z_n^H)$ is the coverage coefficient that depends on the regularization parameter $\lambda$, the confidence set $\hat{\mathcal F}$, and the dataset $\mathcal Z_n^H$, and $C(\hat{\mathcal F},\mu)$ is a coefficient that depends on $\hat{\mathcal F}$ and the underlying data distribution $\mu$. When specialized to linear MDPs, the corruption-dependent error term reduces to $\mathcal O(\zeta d n^{-1})$ with $d$ being the dimension of the feature map, which matches the existing lower bound for corrupted linear MDPs. This suggests that our analysis is tight in terms of the corruption-dependent term.
tl;dr: Self-Refine is a novel approach that allows LLMs to iteratively refine outputs and incorporate feedback along multiple dimensions to improve performance on diverse tasks.
Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an initial output using an LLMs; then, the same LLMs provides *feedback* for its output and uses it to *refine* itself, iteratively. Self-Refine does not require any supervised training data, additional training, or reinforcement learning, and instead uses a single LLM as the generator, refiner and the feedback provider. We evaluate Self-Refine across 7 diverse tasks, ranging from dialog response generation to mathematical reasoning, using state-of-the-art (GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) LLMs. Across all evaluated tasks, outputs generated with Self-Refine are preferred by humans and automatic metrics over those generated with the same LLM using conventional one-step generation, improving by $\sim$20\% absolute on average in task performance. Our work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 can be further improved at test-time using our simple, standalone approach.
tl;dr: We propose a brand-new adapter-style tuning strategy, i.e., GraphAdapter, for the Vision-Language Models.
Adapter-style efficient transfer learning (ETL) has shown excellent performance in the tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) under the low-data regime, where only a few additional parameters are introduced to excavate the task-specific knowledge based on the general and powerful representation of VLMs. However, most adapter-style works face two limitations: (i) modeling task-specific knowledge with a single modality only; and (ii) overlooking the exploitation of the inter-class relationships in downstream tasks, thereby leading to sub-optimal solutions. To mitigate that, we propose an effective adapter-style tuning strategy, dubbed GraphAdapter, which performs the textual adapter by explicitly modeling the dual-modality structure knowledge (i.e., the correlation of different semantics/classes in textual and visual modalities) with a dual knowledge graph. In particular, the dual knowledge graph is established with two sub-graphs, i.e., a textual knowledge sub-graph, and a visual knowledge sub-graph, where the nodes and edges represent the semantics/classes and their correlations in two modalities, respectively. This enables the textual feature of each prompt to leverage the task-specific structure knowledge from both textual and visual modalities, yielding a more effective classifier for downstream tasks. Extensive experimental results on 11 benchmark datasets reveal that our GraphAdapter significantly outperforms the previous adapter-based methods.
As the model size grows rapidly, fine-tuning the large pre-trained language model has become increasingly difficult due to its extensive memory usage.
Previous works usually focus on reducing the number of trainable parameters in the network.
While the model parameters do contribute to memory usage, the primary memory bottleneck during training arises from storing feature maps, also known as activations, as they are crucial for gradient calculation.
Notably, machine learning models are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent.
We argue that in stochastic optimization, models can handle noisy gradients as long as the gradient estimator is unbiased with reasonable variance.
Following this motivation, we propose a new family of unbiased estimators called \sas, for matrix production with reduced variance, which only requires storing the sub-sampled activations for calculating the gradient.
Our work provides both theoretical and experimental evidence that, in the context of tuning transformers, our proposed estimators exhibit lower variance compared to existing ones.
By replacing the linear operation with our approximated one in transformers, we can achieve up to 2.7X peak memory reduction with almost no accuracy drop and enables up to $6.4\times$ larger batch size.
Under the same hardware, \sas enables better down-streaming task performance by applying larger models and/or faster training speed with larger batch sizes.
The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WTACRS-A5C5/.
tl;dr: A latent text diffusion model which improves the generation diversity and reduces repetition in generation.
Autoregressive models for text sometimes generate repetitive and low-quality output because errors accumulate during the steps of generation. This issue is often attributed to exposure bias -- the difference between how a model is trained, and how it is used during inference. Denoising diffusion models provide an alternative approach in which a model can revisit and revise its output. However, they can be computationally expensive and prior efforts on text have led to models that produce less fluent output compared to autoregressive models, especially for longer text and paragraphs. In this paper, we propose PLANNER, a model that combines latent semantic diffusion with autoregressive generation, to generate fluent text while exercising global control over paragraphs. The model achieves this by combining an autoregressive "decoding" module with a "planning" module that uses latent diffusion to generate semantic paragraph embeddings in a coarse-to-fine manner. The proposed method is evaluated on various conditional generation tasks, and results on semantic generation, text completion and summarization show its effectiveness in generating high-quality long-form text in an efficient manner.
tl;dr: We can compute normalising constants of squared neural networks to construct probability distributions with interesting and useful properties.
Flexible models for probability distributions are an essential ingredient in many machine learning tasks. We develop and investigate a new class of probability distributions, which we call a Squared Neural Family (SNEFY), formed by squaring the 2-norm of a neural network and normalising it with respect to a base measure. Following the reasoning similar to the well established connections between infinitely wide neural networks and Gaussian processes, we show that SNEFYs admit closed form normalising constants in many cases of interest, thereby resulting in flexible yet fully tractable density models. SNEFYs strictly generalise classical exponential families, are closed under conditioning, and have tractable marginal distributions. Their utility is illustrated on a variety of density estimation, conditional density estimation, and density estimation with missing data tasks.
We study the problem of Federated Learning (FL) under client subsampling and data heterogeneity with an objective function that has potentially unbounded smoothness. This problem is motivated by empirical evidence that the class of relaxed smooth functions, where the Lipschitz constant of the gradient scales linearly with the gradient norm, closely resembles the loss functions of certain neural networks such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with possibly exploding gradient. We introduce EPISODE++, the first algorithm to solve this problem. It maintains historical statistics for each client to construct control variates and decide clipping behavior for sampled clients in the current round. We prove that EPISODE++ achieves linear speedup in the number of participating clients, reduced communication rounds, and resilience to data heterogeneity. Our upper bound proof relies on novel techniques of recursively bounding the client updates under unbounded smoothness and client subsampling, together with a refined high probability analysis. In addition, we prove a lower bound showing that the convergence rate of a special case of clipped minibatch SGD (without randomness in the stochastic gradient and with randomness in client subsampling) suffers from an explicit dependence on the maximum gradient norm of the objective in a sublevel set, which may be large. This effectively demonstrates that applying gradient clipping to minibatch SGD in our setting does not eliminate the problem of exploding gradients. Our lower bound is based on new constructions of hard instances tailored to client subsampling and a novel analysis of the trajectory of the algorithm in the presence of clipping. Lastly, we provide an experimental evaluation of EPISODE++ when training RNNs on federated text classification tasks, demonstrating that EPISODE++ outperforms strong baselines in FL. The code is available at https://github.com/MingruiLiu-ML-Lab/episode_plusplus.
tl;dr: we introduce a pretrained small scorer, Cappy, designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of multi-task LLMs.
Large language models (LLMs) such as T0, FLAN, and OPT-IML excel in multi-tasking under a unified instruction-following paradigm, where they also exhibit remarkable generalization abilities to unseen tasks. Despite their impressive performance, these LLMs, with sizes ranging from several billion to hundreds of billions of parameters, demand substantial computational resources, making their training and inference expensive and inefficient. Furthermore, adapting these models to downstream applications, particularly complex tasks, is often unfeasible due to the extensive hardware requirements for finetuning, even when utilizing parameter-efficient approaches such as prompt tuning. Additionally, the most powerful multi-task LLMs, such as OPT-IML-175B and FLAN-PaLM-540B, are not publicly accessible, severely limiting their customization potential. To address these challenges, we introduce a pretrained small scorer, \textit{Cappy}, designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of multi-task LLMs. With merely 360 million parameters, Cappy functions either independently on classification tasks or serve as an auxiliary component for LLMs, boosting their performance. Moreover, Cappy enables efficiently integrating downstream supervision without requiring LLM finetuning nor the access to their parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that, when working independently on 11 language understanding tasks from PromptSource, Cappy outperforms LLMs that are several orders of magnitude larger. Besides, on 45 complex tasks from BIG-Bench, Cappy boosts the performance of the advanced multi-task LLM, FLAN-T5, by a large margin. Furthermore, Cappy is flexible to cooperate with other LLM adaptations, including finetuning and in-context learning, offering additional performance enhancement.
We present ProtoConcepts, a method for interpretable image classification combining deep learning and case-based reasoning using prototypical parts. Existing work in prototype-based image classification uses a "this looks like that'' reasoning process, which dissects a test image by finding prototypical parts and combining evidence from these prototypes to make a final classification. However, all of the existing prototypical part-based image classifiers provide only one-to-one comparisons, where a single training image patch serves as a prototype to compare with a part of our test image. With these single-image comparisons, it can often be difficult to identify the underlying concept being compared (e.g., "is it comparing the color or the shape?''). Our proposed method modifies the architecture of prototype-based networks to instead learn prototypical concepts which are visualized using multiple image patches. Having multiple visualizations of the same prototype allows us to more easily identify the concept captured by that prototype (e.g., "the test image and the related training patches are all the same shade of blue''), and allows our model to create richer, more interpretable visual explanations. Our experiments show that our ``this looks like those'' reasoning process can be applied as a modification to a wide range of existing prototypical image classification networks while achieving comparable accuracy on benchmark datasets.
tl;dr: This work focuses on few-shot learning with auxiliary data to improve model generalization, presenting two methods inspired by multi-armed bandits.
Few-shot learning is valuable in many real-world applications, but learning a generalizable model without overfitting to the few labeled datapoints is challenging.
In this work, we focus on Few-shot Learning with Auxiliary Data (FLAD), a training paradigm that assumes access to auxiliary data during few-shot learning in hopes of improving generalization.
Previous works have proposed automated methods for mixing auxiliary and target data, but these methods typically scale linearly (or worse) with the number of auxiliary datasets, limiting their practicality.
In this work we relate FLAD to the explore-exploit dilemma that is central to the multi-armed bandit setting and derive algorithms whose computational complexity is independent of the number of auxiliary datasets, allowing us to scale to 100x more auxiliary datasets than prior methods.
We propose two algorithms -- EXP3-FLAD and UCB1-FLAD -- and compare them with prior FLAD methods that either explore or exploit, finding that the combination of exploration and exploitation is crucial.
Through extensive experimentation we find that our methods outperform all pre-existing FLAD methods by 4% and lead to the first 3 billion parameter language models that outperform the 175 billion parameter GPT-3.
Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of better, more efficient mixing strategies for FLAD may provide a viable path towards substantially improving generalization in few-shot learning.
tl;dr: We present efficient equivariant transfer learning algorithms for non-equivariant pretrained models.
Efficient transfer learning algorithms are key to the success of foundation models on diverse downstream tasks even with limited data. Recent works of Basu et al. (2023) and Kaba et al. (2022) propose group averaging (equitune) and optimization-based methods, respectively, over features from group-transformed inputs to obtain equivariant outputs from non-equivariant neural networks. While Kaba et al. (2022) are only concerned with training from scratch, we find that equitune performs poorly on equivariant zero-shot tasks despite good finetuning results. We hypothesize that this is because pretrained models provide better quality features for certain transformations than others and simply averaging them is deleterious. Hence, we propose λ-equitune that averages the features using importance weights, λs. These weights are learned directly from the data using a small neural network, leading to excellent zero-shot and finetuned results that outperform equitune. Further, we prove that λ-equitune is equivariant and a universal approximator of equivariant functions. Additionally, we show that the method of Kaba et al. (2022) used with appropriate loss functions, which we call equizero, also gives excellent zero-shot and finetuned performance. Both equitune and equizero are special cases of λ- equitune. To show the simplicity and generality of our method, we validate on a wide range of diverse applications and models such as 1) image classification using CLIP, 2) deep Q-learning, 3) fairness in natural language generation (NLG), 4) compositional generalization in languages, and 5) image classification using pretrained CNNs such as Resnet and Alexnet.
tl;dr: We find that predictions for atypical (or rare) points are more miscalibrated (overconfident), and have low accuracy; thus, we propose that models should use atypicality, and simple atypicality-aware methods yield significant performance gains.
While most machine learning models can provide confidence in their predictions, confidence is insufficient to understand a prediction's reliability. For instance, the model may have a low confidence prediction if the input is not well-represented in the training dataset or if the input is inherently ambiguous. In this work, we investigate the relationship between how atypical~(rare) a sample or a class is and the reliability of a model's predictions. We first demonstrate that atypicality is strongly related to miscalibration and accuracy. In particular, we empirically show that predictions for atypical inputs or atypical classes are more overconfident and have lower accuracy. Using these insights, we show incorporating atypicality improves uncertainty quantification and model performance for discriminative neural networks and large language models. In a case study, we show that using atypicality improves the performance of a skin lesion classifier across different skin tone groups without having access to the group attributes. Overall, we propose that models should use not only confidence but also atypicality to improve uncertainty quantification and performance. Our results demonstrate that simple post-hoc atypicality estimators can provide significant value.
tl;dr: we provide the first mean-field analysis of neural networks that acheives polynomial width, polynomial runtime, and a strictly better sample complexity than NTK
Despite recent theoretical progress on the non-convex optimization of two-layer neural networks, it is still an open question whether gradient descent on neural networks without unnatural modifications can achieve better sample complexity than kernel methods. This paper provides a clean mean-field analysis of projected gradient flow on polynomial-width two-layer neural networks. Different from prior works, our analysis does not require unnatural modifications of the optimization algorithm. We prove that with sample size $n = O(d^{3.1})$ where $d$ is the dimension of the inputs, the network trained with projected gradient flow converges in polynomial time to a non-trivial error that is not achievable by kernel methods using $n \ll d^4$ samples, hence demonstrating a clear separation between unmodified gradient descent and NTK. As a corollary, we show that projected gradient descent with a positive learning rate and a polynomial number of iterations converges to low error with the same sample complexity.
1058. From Distribution Learning in Training to Gradient Search in Testing for Combinatorial Optimization
tl;dr: This paper proposes a training to testing framework for solving combinatorial optimization problems, which learns solution distribution during training and then conducts a gradient-based search within the solution space during testing.
Extensive experiments have gradually revealed the potential performance bottleneck of modeling Combinatorial Optimization (CO) solving as neural solution prediction tasks. The neural networks, in their pursuit of minimizing the average objective score across the distribution of historical problem instances, diverge from the core target of CO of seeking optimal solutions for every test instance. This calls for an effective search on each problem instance, while the model should serve to provide supporting knowledge that benefits the search. To this end, we propose T2TCO (Training to Testing) framework that first leverages the generative modeling to estimate the high-quality solution distribution for each instance during training, and then conducts a gradient-based search within the solution space during testing. The proposed neural search paradigm consistently leverages generative modeling, specifically diffusion, for graduated solution improvement. It disrupts the local structure of the given solution by introducing noise and reconstructs a lower-cost solution guided by the optimization objective. Experimental results on Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Maximal Independent Set (MIS) show the significant superiority of T2TCO, demonstrating an average performance gain of 49.15% for TSP solving and 17.27% for MIS solving compared to the previous state-of-the-art.
Graph convolutional networks (GCN) with one or two hidden layers have been widely used in handling graph data that are prevalent in various disciplines. Many studies showed that the gain of making GCNs deeper is tiny or even negative. This implies that the complexity of graph data is often limited and shallow models are often sufficient to extract expressive features for various tasks such as node classification. Therefore, in this work, we present a framework called graph convolutional kernel machine (GCKM) for graph-based machine learning. GCKMs are built upon kernel functions integrated with graph convolution. An example is the graph convolutional kernel support vector machine (GCKSVM) for node classification, for which we analyze the generalization error bound and discuss the impact of the graph structure. Compared to GCNs, GCKMs require much less effort in architecture design, hyperparameter tuning, and optimization. More importantly, GCKMs are guaranteed to obtain globally optimal solutions and have strong generalization ability and high interpretability. GCKMs are composable, can be extended to large-scale data, and are applicable to various tasks (e.g., node or graph classification, clustering, feature extraction, dimensionality reduction). The numerical results on benchmark datasets show that, besides the aforementioned advantages, GCKMs have at least competitive accuracy compared to GCNs.
tl;dr: This work provides an initial analysis on the connection between uncertainty quantification / selective prediction and differential privacy.
Training reliable deep learning models which avoid making overconfident but incorrect predictions is a longstanding challenge. This challenge is further exacerbated when learning has to be differentially private: protection provided to sensitive data comes at the price of injecting additional randomness into the learning process. In this work, we conduct a thorough empirical investigation of selective classifiers---that can abstain under uncertainty---under a differential privacy constraint. We find that some popular selective prediction approaches are ineffective in a differentially private setting because they increase the risk of privacy leakage. At the same time, we identify that a recent approach that only uses checkpoints produced by an off-the-shelf private learning algorithm stands out as particularly suitable under DP. Further, we show that differential privacy does not just harm utility but also degrades selective classification performance. To analyze this effect across privacy levels, we propose a novel evaluation mechanism which isolates selective prediction performance across model utility levels at full coverage. Our experimental results show that recovering the performance level attainable by non-private models is possible but comes at a considerable coverage cost as the privacy budget decreases.
tl;dr: We show that combining pretrained GNNs on the OCP dataset with kernel mean embeddings transfer to other chemical datasets, laying the groundwork for foundation models in chemistry
Interatomic potentials learned using machine learning methods have been successfully applied to atomistic simulations.
However, accurate models require large training datasets, while generating reference calculations is computationally demanding. To bypass this difficulty, we propose a transfer learning algorithm that leverages the ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to represent chemical environments together with kernel mean embeddings. We extract a feature map from GNNs pre-trained on the OC20 dataset and use it to learn the potential energy surface from system-specific datasets of catalytic processes. Our method is further enhanced by incorporating into the kernel the chemical species information, resulting in improved performance and interpretability. We test our approach on a series of realistic datasets of increasing complexity, showing excellent generalization and transferability performance, and improving on methods that rely on GNNs or ridge regression alone, as well as similar fine-tuning approaches.
Motivated by a recent literature on the double-descent phenomenon in machine learning, we consider highly over-parameterized models in causal inference, including synthetic control with many control units. In such models, there may be so many free parameters that the model fits the training data perfectly. We first investigate high-dimensional linear regression for imputing wage data and estimating average treatment effects, where we find that models with many more covariates than sample size can outperform simple ones. We then document the performance of high-dimensional synthetic control estimators with many control units. We find that adding control units can help improve imputation performance even beyond the point where the pre-treatment fit is perfect. We provide a unified theoretical perspective on the performance of these high-dimensional models. Specifically, we show that more complex models can be interpreted as model-averaging estimators over simpler ones, which we link to an improvement in average performance. This perspective yields concrete insights into the use of synthetic control when control units are many relative to the number of pre-treatment periods.
Deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks (AA). For an image recognition task, this means that a small perturbation of the original can result in the image being misclassified. Design of such attacks as well as methods of adversarial training against them are subject of intense research. We re-cast the problem using techniques of Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) and obtain novel contributions leveraging recent insights from DRO sensitivity analysis. We consider a set of distributional threat models. Unlike the traditional pointwise attacks, which assume a uniform bound on perturbation of each input data point, distributional threat models allow attackers to perturb inputs in a non-uniform way. We link these more general attacks with questions of out-of-sample performance and Knightian uncertainty. To evaluate the distributional robustness of neural networks, we propose a first-order AA algorithm and its multistep version. Our attack algorithms include Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) as special cases. Furthermore, we provide a new asymptotic estimate of the adversarial accuracy against distributional threat models. The bound is fast to compute and first-order accurate, offering new insights even for the pointwise AA. It also naturally yields out-of-sample performance guarantees. We conduct numerical experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet datasets using DNNs on RobustBench to illustrate our theoretical results. Our code is available at https://github.com/JanObloj/W-DRO-Adversarial-Methods.
A/B testing is critical for modern technological companies to evaluate the effectiveness of newly developed products against standard baselines. This paper studies optimal designs that aim to maximize the amount of information obtained from online experiments to estimate treatment effects accurately. We propose three optimal allocation strategies in a dynamic setting where treatments are sequentially assigned over time. These strategies are designed to minimize the variance of the treatment effect estimator when data follow a non Markov decision process or a (time-varying) Markov decision process. We further develop estimation procedures based on existing off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods and conduct extensive experiments in various environments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies. In theory, we prove the optimality of the proposed treatment allocation design and establish upper bounds for the mean squared errors of the resulting treatment effect estimators.
In protein biophysics, the separation between the functionally important residues (forming the active site or binding surface) and those that create the overall structure (the fold) is a well-established and fundamental concept. Identifying and modifying those functional sites is critical for protein engineering but computationally non-trivial, and requires significant domain knowledge. To automate this process from a data-driven perspective, we propose a disentangled Wasserstein autoencoder with an auxiliary classifier, which isolates the function-related patterns from the rest with theoretical guarantees. This enables one-pass protein sequence editing and improves the understanding of the resulting sequences and editing actions involved. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply it to T-cell receptors (TCRs), a well-studied structure-function case. We show that our method can be used to alter the function of TCRs without changing the structural backbone, outperforming several competing methods in generation quality and efficiency, and requiring only 10\% of the running time needed by baseline models. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that utilizes disentangled representations for TCR engineering.
Robustness to Byzantine attacks is a necessity for various distributed training scenarios. When the training reduces to the process of solving a minimization problem, Byzantine robustness is relatively well-understood. However, other problem formulations, such as min-max problems or, more generally, variational inequalities, arise in many modern machine learning and, in particular, distributed learning tasks. These problems significantly differ from the standard minimization ones and, therefore, require separate consideration. Nevertheless, only one work [Abidi et al., 2022] addresses this important question in the context of Byzantine robustness. Our work makes a further step in this direction by providing several (provably) Byzantine-robust methods for distributed variational inequality, thoroughly studying their theoretical convergence, removing the limitations of the previous work, and providing numerical comparisons supporting the theoretical findings.
tl;dr: We provide the first batched algorithm for contextual linear bandits with large action spaces achieving: regret bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$; $O(\log\log T)$ batches; polynomial time complexity in $d,T$.
In this paper, we provide the first efficient batched algorithm for contextual linear bandits with large action spaces. Unlike existing batched algorithms that rely on action elimination, which are not implementable for large action sets, our algorithm only uses a linear optimization oracle over the action set to design the policy. The proposed algorithm achieves a regret upper bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ with high probability, and uses $O(\log\log T)$ batches, matching the lower bound on the number of batches (Gao et al., 2019). When specialized to linear bandits, our algorithm can achieve a high probability gap-dependent regret bound of $\tilde{O}(1/\Delta_{\min})$ with the optimal $\log T$ number of batches, where $\Delta_{\min}$ is the minimum reward gap between a suboptimal arm and the optimal. Our result is achieved via a novel soft elimination approach, that entails $\text{``}$shaping$\text{"}$ the action sets at each batch so that we can efficiently identify (near) optimal actions.
We consider a contextual bandit problem with $S $ contexts and $K $ actions. In each round $t=1,2,\dots$ the learner
observes a random context and chooses an action based on its past experience. The learner then observes a random reward whose mean is a function of the context and the action for the round. Under the assumption that the contexts can be lumped into $r\le \min(S ,K)$ groups such that the mean reward for the various actions is the same for any two contexts that are in the same group, we give an algorithm that outputs an $\epsilon$-optimal policy after using at most $\widetilde O(r (S +K )/\epsilon^2)$ samples with high probability and provide a matching $\widetilde\Omega(r (S +K )/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound. In the regret minimization setting, we give an algorithm whose cumulative regret up to time $T$ is bounded by $\widetilde O(\sqrt{r ^3(S +K )T})$. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show the near-optimal sample complexity in the PAC setting and $\widetilde O{\sqrt{\text{poly}(r)(S+K)T}}$ minimax regret in the online setting for this problem. We also show our algorithms can be applied to more general low-rank bandits and get improved regret bounds in some scenarios.
tl;dr: We introduce a private feature selection algorithm based on Kendall rank correlation and show that it improves practical private linear regression.
Existing work on differentially private linear regression typically assumes that end users can precisely set data bounds or algorithmic hyperparameters. End users often struggle to meet these requirements without directly examining the data (and violating privacy). Recent work has attempted to develop solutions that shift these burdens from users to algorithms, but they struggle to provide utility as the feature dimension grows. This work extends these algorithms to higher-dimensional problems by introducing a differentially private feature selection method based on Kendall rank correlation. We prove a utility guarantee for the setting where features are normally distributed and conduct experiments across 25 datasets. We find that adding this private feature selection step before regression significantly broadens the applicability of ``plug-and-play'' private linear regression algorithms at little additional cost to privacy, computation, or decision-making by the end user.
We study the complexity of Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA) in the Statistical Query (SQ) model.
Prior work developed a methodology to prove SQ lower bounds for NGCA that have been applicable to a wide range of contexts.
In particular, it was known that for any univariate distribution $A$ satisfying certain conditions,
distinguishing between a standard multivariate Gaussian and a distribution that behaves like $A$ in a random hidden direction and like a standard Gaussian in the orthogonal complement, is SQ-hard.
The required conditions were that (1) $A$ matches many low-order moments with a standard Gaussian,
and (2) the chi-squared norm of $A$ with respect to the standard Gaussian is finite.
While the moment-matching condition is clearly necessary for hardness, the chi-squared condition was only required for technical reasons.
In this work, we establish that the latter condition is indeed not necessary.
In particular, we prove near-optimal SQ lower bounds for NGCA under the moment-matching condition only.
tl;dr: We show new conditional hardness results for low rank approximation of entrywise transformed matrix products.
Inspired by fast algorithms in natural language processing, we study low rank approximation in the entrywise transformed setting where we want to find a good rank $k$ approximation to $f(U \cdot V)$, where $U, V^\top \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$ are given, $r = O(\log(n))$, and $f(x)$ is a general scalar function. Previous work in sublinear low rank approximation has shown that if both (1) $U = V^\top$ and (2) $f(x)$ is a PSD kernel function, then there is an $O(nk^{\omega-1})$ time constant relative error approximation algorithm, where $\omega \approx 2.376$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication. We give the first conditional time hardness results for this problem, demonstrating that both conditions (1) and (2) are in fact necessary for getting better than $n^{2-o(1)}$ time for a relative error low rank approximation for a wide class of functions. We give novel reductions from the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) that rely on lower bounding the leverage scores of flat sparse vectors and hold even when the rank of the transformed matrix $f(UV)$ and the target rank are $n^{o(1)}$, and when $U = V^\top$. Furthermore, even when $f(x) = x^p$ is a simple polynomial, we give runtime lower bounds in the case when $U \neq V^\top$ of the form $\Omega(\min(n^{2-o(1)}, \Omega(2^p)))$. Lastly, we demonstrate that our lower bounds are tight by giving an $O(n \cdot \text{poly}(k, 2^p, 1/\epsilon))$ time relative error approximation algorithm and a fast $O(n \cdot \text{poly}(k, p, 1/\epsilon))$ additive error approximation using fast tensor-based sketching. Additionally, since our low rank algorithms rely on matrix-vector product subroutines, our lower bounds extend to show that computing $f(UV)W$, for even a small matrix $W$, requires $\Omega(n^{2-o(1)})$ time.
Location estimation is one of the most basic questions in parametric statistics.
Suppose we have a known distribution density $f$, and we get $n$ i.i.d. samples from $f(x-\mu)$ for some unknown shift $\mu$.
The task is to estimate $\mu$ to high accuracy with high probability.
The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is known to be asymptotically optimal as $n \to \infty$, but what is possible for finite $n$?
In this paper, we give two location estimators that are optimal under different criteria: 1) an estimator that has minimax-optimal estimation error subject to succeeding with probability $1-\delta$ and 2) a confidence interval estimator which, subject to its output interval containing $\mu$ with probability at least $1-\delta$, has the minimum expected squared interval width among all shift-invariant estimators.
The latter construction can be generalized to minimizing the expectation of any loss function on the interval width.
Various stuff and things in visual data possess specific traits, which can be learned by deep neural networks and are implicitly represented as the visual prior, e.g., object location and shape, in the model. Such prior potentially impacts many vision tasks. For example, in conditional image synthesis, spatial conditions failing to adhere to the prior can result in visually inaccurate synthetic results. This work aims to explicitly learn the visual prior and enable the customization of sampling. Inspired by advances in language modeling, we propose to learn Visual prior via Generative Pre-Training, dubbed VisorGPT. By discretizing visual locations, e.g., bounding boxes, human pose, and instance masks, into sequences, VisorGPT can model visual prior through likelihood maximization. Besides, prompt engineering is investigated to unify various visual locations and enable customized sampling of sequential outputs from the learned prior. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VisorGPT in modeling visual prior and extrapolating to novel scenes, potentially motivating that discrete visual locations can be integrated into the learning paradigm of current language models to further perceive visual world. Code is available at https://sierkinhane.github.io/visor-gpt.
tl;dr: We propose a flexible splitting method that can solve regularized OT problems fast on GPU.
We present an efficient algorithm for regularized optimal transport. In contrast to
previous methods, we use the Douglas-Rachford splitting technique to develop
an efficient solver that can handle a broad class of regularizers. The algorithm
has strong global convergence guarantees, low per-iteration cost, and can exploit
GPU parallelization, making it considerably faster than the state-of-the-art for
many problems. We illustrate its competitiveness in several applications, including
domain adaptation and learning of generative models.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient and practical single-loop algorithm for nonconvex bilevel optimization under time-varying objective functions with novel theoretical analysis
Bilevel optimization has become a powerful tool in a wide variety of machine learning problems. However, the current nonconvex bilevel optimization considers an offline dataset and static functions, which may not work well in emerging online applications with streaming data and time-varying functions. In this work, we study online bilevel optimization (OBO) where the functions can be time-varying and the agent continuously updates the decisions with online streaming data. To deal with the function variations and the unavailability of the true hypergradients in OBO, we propose a single-loop online bilevel optimizer with window averaging (SOBOW), which updates the outer-level decision based on a window average of the most recent hypergradient estimations stored in the memory. Compared to existing algorithms, SOBOW is computationally efficient and does not need to know previous functions. To handle the unique technical difficulties rooted in single-loop update and function variations for OBO, we develop a novel analytical technique that disentangles the complex couplings between decision variables, and carefully controls the hypergradient estimation error. We show that SOBOW can achieve a sublinear bilevel local regret under mild conditions. Extensive experiments across multiple domains corroborate the effectiveness of SOBOW.
tl;dr: We propose novel core-set construction algorithms for producing a summary of the data which is both diverse and fair, along with experiments supporting our theoretical results.
We study core-set construction algorithms for the task of Diversity Maximization under fairness/partition constraint. Given a set of points $P$ in a metric space partitioned into $m$ groups, and given $k_1,\ldots,k_m$, the goal of this problem is to pick $k_i$ points from each group $i$ such that the overall diversity of the $k=\sum_i k_i$ picked points is maximized. We consider two natural diversity measures: sum-of-pairwise distances and sum-of-nearest-neighbor distances, and show improved core-set construction algorithms with respect to these measures. More precisely, we show the first constant factor core-set w.r.t. sum-of-pairwise distances whose size is independent of the size of the dataset and the aspect ratio. Second, we show the first core-set w.r.t. the sum-of-nearest-neighbor distances. Finally, we run several experiments showing the effectiveness of our core-set approach. In particular, we apply constrained diversity maximization to summarize a set of timed messages that takes into account the messages' recency. Specifically, the summary should include more recent messages compared to older ones. This is a real task in one of the largest communication platforms, affecting the experience of hundreds of millions daily active users. By utilizing our core-set method for this task, we achieve a 100x speed-up while losing the diversity by only a few percent. Moreover, our approach allows us to improve the space usage of the algorithm in the streaming setting.
Transformers are widely used deep learning architectures. Existing transformers are mostly designed for sequences (texts or time series), images or videos, and graphs. This paper proposes a novel transformer model for massive (up to a million) point samples in continuous space. Such data are ubiquitous in environment sciences (e.g., sensor observations), numerical simulations (e.g., particle-laden flow, astrophysics), and location-based services (e.g., POIs and trajectories). However, designing a transformer for massive spatial points is non-trivial due to several challenges, including implicit long-range and multi-scale dependency on irregular points in continuous space, a non-uniform point distribution, the potential high computational costs of calculating all-pair attention across massive points, and the risks of over-confident predictions due to varying point density. To address these challenges, we propose a new hierarchical spatial transformer model, which includes multi-resolution representation learning within a quad-tree hierarchy and efficient spatial attention via coarse approximation. We also design an uncertainty quantification branch to estimate prediction confidence related to input feature noise and point sparsity. We provide a theoretical analysis of computational time complexity and memory costs. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets show that our method outperforms multiple baselines in prediction accuracy and our model can scale up to one million points on one NVIDIA A100 GPU. The code is available at https://github.com/spatialdatasciencegroup/HST
tl;dr: Using task loss to learn parameterized prediction loss, which are then used to train prediction models
Deep learning models are often used with some downstream task. Models solely trained to achieve accurate predictions may struggle to perform well on the desired downstream tasks. We propose using the task loss to learn a metric which parameterizes a loss to train the model. This approach does not alter the optimal prediction model itself, but rather changes the model learning to emphasize the information important for the downstream task. This enables us to achieve the best of both worlds: a prediction model trained in the original prediction space while also being valuable for the desired downstream task. We validate our approach through experiments conducted in two main settings: 1) decision-focused model learning scenarios involving portfolio optimization and budget allocation, and 2) reinforcement learning in noisy environments with distracting states.
tl;dr: This article derives information-theoretic threshold for exact recovery in node-attributed SBM with general interactions, and proposes an algorithm based on joint-likelihood maximisation to recover the communities.
Classic network clustering tackles the problem of identifying sets of nodes (communities) that have similar connection patterns. However, in many scenarios nodes also have attributes that are correlated and can also be used to identify node clusters. Thus, network information (edges) and node information (attributes) can be jointly leveraged to design high-performance clustering algorithms. Under a general model for the network and node attributes, this work establishes an information-theoretic criteria for the exact recovery of community labels and characterizes a phase transition determined by the Chernoff-Hellinger divergence of the model. The criteria shows how network and attribute information can be exchanged in order to have exact recovery (e.g., more reliable network information requires less reliable attribute information). This work also presents an iterative clustering algorithm that maximizes the joint likelihood, assuming that the probability distribution of network interactions and node attributes belong to exponential families. This covers a broad range of possible interactions (e.g., edges with weights) and attributes (e.g., non-Gaussian models) while also exploring the connection between exponential families and Bregman divergences. Extensive numerical experiments using synthetic and real data indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms algorithms that leverage only network or only attribute information as well as recently proposed algorithms that perform clustering using both sources of information. The contributions of this work provide insights into the fundamental limits and practical techniques for inferring community labels on node-attributed networks.
tl;dr: This paper develop a provably efficient scalable algorithm for safe MARL with general utilities in the absence of the full observability assumption.
We investigate safe multi-agent reinforcement learning, where agents seek to collectively maximize an aggregate sum of local objectives while satisfying their own safety constraints. The objective and constraints are described by general utilities, i.e., nonlinear functions of the long-term state-action occupancy measure, which encompass broader decision-making goals such as risk, exploration, or imitations. The exponential growth of the state-action space size with the number of agents presents challenges for global observability, further exacerbated by the global coupling arising from agents' safety constraints. To tackle this issue, we propose a primal-dual method utilizing shadow reward and $\kappa$-hop neighbor truncation under a form of correlation decay property, where $\kappa$ is the communication radius. In the exact setting, our algorithm converges to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) at the rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(T^{-2/3}\right)$. In the sample-based setting, we demonstrate that, with high probability, our algorithm requires $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\epsilon^{-3.5}\right)$ samples to achieve an $\epsilon$-FOSP with an approximation error of $\mathcal{O}(\phi_0^{2\kappa})$, where $\phi_0\in (0,1)$. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through extensive numerical experiments.
tl;dr: Our truncation-based algorithm supports online learning and mean-of-medians-based algorithm requires only one estimator per epoch, distinguishing it from existing truncation-based approaches.
This paper investigates the problem of generalized linear bandits with heavy-tailed rewards, whose $(1+\epsilon)$-th moment is bounded for some $\epsilon\in (0,1]$. Although there exist methods for generalized linear bandits, most of them focus on bounded or sub-Gaussian rewards and are not well-suited for many real-world scenarios, such as financial markets and web-advertising. To address this issue, we propose two novel algorithms based on truncation and mean of medians. These algorithms achieve an almost optimal regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(dT^{\frac{1}{1+\epsilon}})$, where $d$ is the dimension of contextual information and $T$ is the time horizon. Our truncation-based algorithm supports online learning, distinguishing it from existing truncation-based approaches. Additionally, our mean-of-medians-based algorithm requires only $O(\log T)$ rewards and one estimator per epoch, making it more practical. Moreover, our algorithms improve the regret bounds by a logarithmic factor compared to existing algorithms when $\epsilon=1$. Numerical experimental results confirm the merits of our algorithms.
tl;dr: We describe the low-dimensional features learned by large depth DNNs, using a Taylor expansion of the representation cost around infinite depth.
Previous work has shown that DNNs with
large depth $L$ and $L_{2}$-regularization are biased towards learning
low-dimensional representations of the inputs, which can be interpreted
as minimizing a notion of rank $R^{(0)}(f)$ of the learned function
$f$, conjectured to be the Bottleneck rank. We compute finite depth
corrections to this result, revealing a measure $R^{(1)}$ of regularity
which bounds the pseudo-determinant of the Jacobian $\left\|Jf(x)\right\|\_\+$
and is subadditive under composition and addition. This formalizes
a balance between learning low-dimensional representations and minimizing
complexity/irregularity in the feature maps, allowing the network
to learn the `right' inner dimension. Finally, we prove the conjectured
bottleneck structure in the learned features as $L\to\infty$: for
large depths, almost all hidden representations are approximately
$R^{(0)}(f)$-dimensional, and almost all weight matrices $W_{\ell}$
have $R^{(0)}(f)$ singular values close to 1 while the others are
$O(L^{-\frac{1}{2}})$. Interestingly, the use of large learning rates
is required to guarantee an order $O(L)$ NTK which in turns guarantees
infinite depth convergence of the representations of almost all layers.
Distributed representations provide a vector space that captures meaningful relationships between data instances. The distributed nature of these representations, however, entangles together multiple attributes or concepts of data instances (e.g., the topic or sentiment of a text, characteristics of the author (age, gender, etc), etc). Recent work has proposed the task of concept erasure, in which rather than making a concept predictable, the goal is to remove an attribute from distributed representations while retaining other information from the original representation space as much as possible. In this paper, we propose a new distance metric learning-based objective, the Kernelized Rate-Distortion Maximizer (KRaM), for performing concept erasure. KRaM fits a transformation of representations to match a specified distance measure (defined by a labeled concept to erase) using a modified rate-distortion function. Specifically, KRaM's objective function aims to make instances with similar concept labels dissimilar in the learned representation space while retaining other information. We find that optimizing KRaM effectively erases various types of concepts—categorical, continuous, and vector-valued variables—from data representations across diverse domains. We also provide a theoretical analysis of several properties of KRaM's objective. To assess the quality of the learned representations, we propose an alignment score to evaluate their similarity with the original representation space. Additionally, we conduct experiments to showcase KRaM's efficacy in various settings, from erasing binary gender variables in word embeddings to vector-valued variables in GPT-3 representations.
tl;dr: We lower the privacy cost and the compute cost of DP hyperparameter tuning
Tuning the hyperparameters of differentially private (DP) machine learning (ML) algorithms often requires use of sensitive data and this may leak private information via hyperparameter values. Recently, Papernot and Steinke (2022) proposed a certain class of DP hyperparameter tuning algorithms, where the number of random search samples is randomized. Commonly, these algorithms still considerably increase the DP privacy parameter $\varepsilon$ over non-tuned DP ML model training and can be computationally heavy as evaluating each hyperparameter candidate requires a new training run. We focus on lowering both the DP bounds and the compute cost of these methods by using only a random subset of the sensitive data for the hyperparameter tuning and by appropriately extrapolating the optimal values to a larger dataset. We carry out a Rényi differential privacy analysis for the proposed method and experimentally show that it consistently leads to better privacy-utility trade-off than the baseline method by Papernot and Steinke.
tl;dr: Interactive Multi-Fidelity Learning for cost-effective LLM fine-tuning
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks. However, their suitability for domain-specific tasks, is limited due to their immense scale at deployment, susceptibility to misinformation, and more importantly, high data annotation costs. We propose a novel Interactive Multi-Fidelity Learning (IMFL) framework for cost-effective development of small domain-specific LMs under limited annotation budgets. Our approach formulates the domain-specific fine-tuning process as a multi-fidelity learning problem, focusing on identifying the optimal acquisition strategy that balances between low-fidelity automatic LLM annotations and high-fidelity human annotations to maximize model performance. We further propose an exploration-exploitation query strategy that enhances annotation diversity and informativeness, incorporating two innovative designs: 1) prompt retrieval that selects in-context examples from human-annotated samples to improve LLM annotation, and 2) variable batch size that controls the order for choosing each fidelity to facilitate knowledge distillation, ultimately enhancing annotation quality. Extensive experiments on financial and medical tasks demonstrate that IMFL achieves superior performance compared with single fidelity annotations. Given a limited budget of human annotation, IMFL significantly outperforms the $\bf 3\times$ human annotation baselines in all four tasks and achieves very close performance as $\bf 5\times$ human annotation on two of the tasks. These promising results suggest that the high human annotation costs in domain-specific tasks can be significantly reduced by employing IMFL, which utilizes fewer human annotations, supplemented with cheaper and faster LLM (e.g., GPT-3.5) annotations to achieve comparable performance.
1086. Neural Polarizer: A Lightweight and Effective Backdoor Defense via Purifying Poisoned Features
Recent studies have demonstrated the susceptibility of deep neural networks to backdoor attacks. Given a backdoored model, its prediction of a poisoned sample with trigger will be dominated by the trigger information, though trigger information and benign information coexist. Inspired by the mechanism of the optical polarizer that a polarizer could pass light waves with particular polarizations while filtering light waves with other polarizations, we propose a novel backdoor defense method by inserting a learnable neural polarizer into the backdoored model as an intermediate layer, in order to purify the poisoned sample via filtering trigger information while maintaining benign information. The neural polarizer is instantiated as one lightweight linear transformation layer, which is learned through solving a well designed bi-level optimization problem, based on a limited clean dataset. Compared to other fine-tuning-based defense methods which often adjust all parameters of the backdoored model, the proposed method only needs to learn one additional layer, such that it is more efficient and requires less clean data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in removing backdoors across various neural network architectures and datasets, especially in the case of very limited clean data. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/SCLBD/BackdoorBench}{https://github.com/SCLBD/BackdoorBench} (PyTorch) and \href{https://github.com/JulieCarlon/NPD-MindSpore}{https://github.com/JulieCarlon/NPD-MindSpore} (MindSpore).
tl;dr: Theoretical characterization of the robustness of removal-based feature attributions with empirical implications.
To explain predictions made by complex machine learning models, many feature attribution methods have been developed that assign importance scores to input features. Some recent work challenges the robustness of these methods by showing that they are sensitive to input and model perturbations, while other work addresses this issue by proposing robust attribution methods. However, previous work on attribution robustness has focused primarily on gradient-based feature attributions, whereas the robustness of removal-based attribution methods is not currently well understood. To bridge this gap, we theoretically characterize the robustness properties of removal-based feature attributions. Specifically, we provide a unified analysis of such methods and derive upper bounds for the difference between intact and perturbed attributions, under settings of both input and model perturbations. Our empirical results on synthetic and real-world data validate our theoretical results and demonstrate their practical implications, including the ability to increase attribution robustness by improving the model’s Lipschitz regularity.
tl;dr: We prove identifiability for causal representation learning with nonparametric causal model and mixing function from single-node perfect interventions on unknown targets.
We study causal representation learning, the task of inferring latent causal variables and their causal relations from high-dimensional functions (“mixtures”) of the variables. Prior work relies on weak supervision, in the form of counterfactual pre- and post-intervention views or temporal structure; places restrictive assumptions, such as linearity, on the mixing function or latent causal model; or requires partial knowledge of the generative process, such as the causal graph or intervention targets. We instead consider the general setting in which both the causal model and the mixing function are nonparametric. The learning signal takes the form of multiple datasets, or environments, arising from unknown interventions in the underlying causal model. Our goal is to identify both the ground truth latents and their causal graph up to a set of ambiguities which we show to be irresolvable from interventional data. We study the fundamental setting of two causal variables and prove that the observational distribution and one perfect intervention per node suffice for identifiability, subject to a genericity condition. This condition rules out spurious solutions that involve fine-tuning of the intervened and observational distributions, mirroring similar conditions for nonlinear cause-effect inference. For an arbitrary number of variables, we show that at least one pair of distinct perfect interventional domains per node guarantees identifiability. Further, we demonstrate that the strengths of causal influences among the latent variables are preserved by all equivalent solutions, rendering the inferred representation appropriate for drawing causal conclusions from new data. Our study provides the first identifiability results for the general nonparametric setting with unknown interventions, and elucidates what is possible and impossible for causal representation learning without more direct supervision.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient meta-learning framework for scalable neural fields learning that involves online data pruning of the context set.
We introduce an efficient optimization-based meta-learning technique for large-scale neural field training by realizing significant memory savings through automated online context point selection. This is achieved by focusing each learning step on the subset of data with the highest expected immediate improvement in model quality, resulting in the almost instantaneous modeling of global structure and subsequent refinement of high-frequency details. We further improve the quality of our meta-learned initialization by introducing a bootstrap correction resulting in the minimization of any error introduced by reduced context sets while simultaneously mitigating the well-known myopia of optimization-based meta-learning. Finally, we show how gradient re-scaling at meta-test time allows the learning of extremely high-quality neural fields in significantly shortened optimization procedures. Our framework is model-agnostic, intuitive, straightforward to implement, and shows significant reconstruction improvements for a wide range of signals. We provide an extensive empirical evaluation on nine datasets across multiple multiple modalities, demonstrating state-of-the-art results while providing additional insight through careful analysis of the algorithmic components constituting our method. Code is available at https://github.com/jihoontack/GradNCP
1090. Maximum Average Randomly Sampled: A Scale Free and Non-parametric Algorithm for Stochastic Bandits
tl;dr: A data-dependent UCB algorithm for multi-armed bandits that eliminates the need for prior scale parameter knowledge, constructing upper confidence bounds based on randomly sampled rewards, with a derived regret bound
Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) methods are one of the most effective methods in dealing with the exploration-exploitation trade-off in online decision-making problems. The confidence bounds utilized in UCB methods tend to be constructed based on concentration equalities which are usually dependent on a parameter of scale (e.g. a bound on the payoffs, a variance, or a subgaussian parameter) that must be known in advance. The necessity of knowing a scale parameter a priori and the fact that the confidence bounds only use the tail information can deteriorate the performance of the UCB methods.
Here we propose a data-dependent UCB algorithm called MARS (Maximum Average Randomly Sampled) in a non-parametric setup for multi-armed bandits with symmetric rewards. The algorithm does not depend on any scaling, and the data-dependent upper confidence bound is constructed based on the maximum average of randomly sampled rewards inspired by the work of Hartigan in the 1960s and 70s. A regret bound for the multi-armed bandit problem is derived under the same assumptions as for the $\psi$-UCB method without incorporating any correction factors. The method is illustrated and compared with baseline algorithms in numerical experiments.
Motivated by alternating game-play in two-player games, we study an altenating variant of the \textit{Online Linear Optimization} (OLO). In alternating OLO, a \textit{learner} at each round $t \in [n]$ selects a vector $x^t$ and then an \textit{adversary} selects a cost-vector $c^t \in [-1,1]^n$. The learner then experiences cost $(c^t + c^{t-1})^\top x^t$ instead of $(c^t)^\top x^t$ as in standard OLO. We establish that under this small twist, the $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret is no longer valid. More precisely, we present two online learning algorithms for alternating OLO that respectively admit $\mathcal{O}((\log n)^{4/3} T^{1/3})$ regret for the $n$-dimensional simplex and $\mathcal{O}(\rho \log T)$ regret for the ball of radius $\rho>0$. Our results imply that in alternating game-play, an agent can always guarantee $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}((\log n)^{4/3} T^{1/3})$ regardless the strategies of the other agent while the regret bound improves to $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ in case the agent admits only two actions.
We consider online reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where it is assumed that the action-values of all policies can be expressed as linear functions of state-action features. This class is known to be more general than linear MDPs, where the transition kernel and the reward function are assumed to be linear functions of the feature vectors. As our first contribution, we show that the difference between the two classes is the presence of states in linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs where for any policy, all the actions have approximately equal values, and skipping over these states by following an arbitrarily fixed policy in those states transforms the problem to a linear MDP. Based on this observation, we derive a novel (computationally inefficient) learning algorithm for linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs that simultaneously learns what states should be skipped over and runs another learning algorithm on the linear MDP hidden in the problem. The method returns an $\epsilon$-optimal policy after $\text{polylog}(H, d)/\epsilon^2$ interactions with the MDP, where $H$ is the time horizon and $d$ is the dimension of the feature vectors, giving the first polynomial-sample-complexity online RL algorithm for this setting. The results are proved for the misspecified case, where the sample complexity is shown to degrade gracefully with the misspecification error.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel method for teaching humans how to effectively collaborate with AI agents through natural language rules learned from data and evaluate on user studies.
People are relying on AI agents to assist them with various tasks. The human must know when to rely on the agent, collaborate with the agent, or ignore its suggestions. In this work, we propose to learn rules grounded in data regions and described in natural language that illustrate how the human should collaborate with the AI. Our novel region discovery algorithm finds local regions in the data as neighborhoods in an embedding space that corrects the human prior. Each region is then described using an iterative and contrastive procedure where a large language model describes the region. We then teach these rules to the human via an onboarding stage. Through user studies on object detection and question-answering tasks, we show that our method can lead to more accurate human-AI teams. We also evaluate our region discovery and description algorithms separately.
tl;dr: We establish tight upper and lower (population) risk bounds for Gradient Descent in the setting of linear classification with separable data.
We study the generalization properties of unregularized gradient methods applied to separable linear classification---a setting that has received considerable attention since the pioneering work of Soudry et al. (2018).
We establish tight upper and lower (population) risk bounds for gradient descent in this setting, for any smooth loss function, expressed in terms of its tail decay rate.
Our bounds take the form $\Theta(r_{\ell,T}^2 / \gamma^2 T + r_{\ell,T}^2 / \gamma^2 n)$,
where $T$ is the number of gradient steps, $n$ is size of the training set, $\gamma$ is the data margin, and $r_{\ell,T}$ is a complexity term that depends on the tail decay rate of the loss function (and on $T$).
Our upper bound greatly improves the existing risk bounds due to Shamir (2021) and Schliserman and Koren (2022), that either applied to specific loss functions or imposed extraneous technical assumptions, and applies to virtually any convex and smooth loss function.
Our risk lower bound is the first in this context and establish the tightness of our general upper bound for any given tail decay rate and in all parameter regimes.
The proof technique used to show these results is also markedly simpler compared to previous work, and is straightforward to extend to other gradient methods; we illustrate this by providing analogous results for Stochastic Gradient Descent.
1095. An Information-Theoretic Evaluation of Generative Models in Learning Multi-modal Distributions
The evaluation of generative models has received significant attention in the machine learning community. When applied to a multi-modal distribution which is common among image datasets, an intuitive evaluation criterion is the number of modes captured by the generative model. While several scores have been proposed to evaluate the quality and diversity of a model's generated data, the correspondence between existing scores and the number of modes in the distribution is unclear. In this work, we propose an information-theoretic diversity evaluation method for multi-modal underlying distributions. We utilize the R\'enyi Kernel Entropy (RKE) as an evaluation score based on quantum information theory to measure the number of modes in generated samples. To interpret the proposed evaluation method, we show that the RKE score can output the number of modes of a mixture of sub-Gaussian components. We also prove estimation error bounds for estimating the RKE score from limited data, suggesting a fast convergence of the empirical RKE score to the score for the underlying data distribution. Utilizing the RKE score, we conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art generative models over standard image datasets. The numerical results indicate that while the recent algorithms for training generative models manage to improve the mode-based diversity over the earlier architectures, they remain incapable of capturing the full diversity of real data. Our empirical results provide a ranking of widely-used generative models based on the RKE score of their generated samples.
Neural ordinary differential equation (Neural ODE) is an elegant yet powerful framework to learn the temporal dynamics for time series modeling.
However, we observe that existing Neural ODE forecasting models suffer from two disadvantages:
i) controlling the latent states only through the linear transformation over the local change of the observed signals may be inadequate;
ii) lacking the ability to capture the inherent periodical property in time series forecasting tasks;
To overcome the two issues,
we introduce a new neural ODE framework called \textbf{Neural Lad}, a \textbf{Neural} \textbf{La}tent \textbf{d}ynamics model in which the latent representations evolve with an ODE enhanced by the change of observed signal and seasonality-trend characterization. We incorporate the local change of input signal into the latent dynamics in an attention-based manner and design a residual architecture over basis expansion to depict the periodicity in the underlying dynamics. To accommodate the multivariate time series forecasting, we extend the Neural Lad through learning an adaptive relationship between multiple time series.
Experiments demonstrate that our model can achieve better or comparable performance against existing neural ODE families and transformer variants in various datasets. Remarkably, the empirical superiority of Neural Lad is consistent across short and long-horizon forecasting for both univariate, multivariate and even irregular sampled time series.
Simultaneous sequence generation is a pivotal task for real-time scenarios, such as streaming speech recognition, simultaneous machine translation and simultaneous speech translation, where the target sequence is generated while receiving the source sequence. The crux of achieving high-quality generation with low latency lies in identifying the optimal moments for generating, accomplished by learning a mapping between the source and target sequences. However, existing methods often rely on task-specific heuristics for different sequence types, limiting the model’s capacity to adaptively learn the source-target mapping and hindering the exploration of multi-task learning for various simultaneous tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified segment-to-segment framework (Seg2Seg) for simultaneous sequence generation, which learns the mapping in an adaptive and unified manner. During the process of simultaneous generation, the model alternates between waiting for a source segment and generating a target segment, making the segment serve as the natural bridge between the source and target. To accomplish this, Seg2Seg introduces a latent segment as the pivot between source to target and explores all potential source-target mappings via the proposed expectation training, thereby learning the optimal moments for generating. Experiments on multiple simultaneous generation tasks demonstrate that Seg2Seg achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits better generality across various tasks.
tl;dr: We embed a new SE(3) × ℤ × Sₙ-equivariant architecture in a diffusion model, solving planning problems for embodied agents.
Embodied agents operate in a structured world, often solving tasks with spatial, temporal, and permutation symmetries. Most algorithms for planning and model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) do not take this rich geometric structure into account, leading to sample inefficiency and poor generalization. We introduce the Equivariant Diffuser for Generating Interactions (EDGI), an algorithm for MBRL and planning that is equivariant with respect to the product of the spatial symmetry group SE(3), the discrete-time translation group ℤ, and the object permutation group Sₙ. EDGI follows the Diffuser framework by Janner et al. (2022) in treating both learning a world model and planning in it as a conditional generative modeling problem, training a diffusion model on an offline trajectory dataset. We introduce a new SE(3) × ℤ × Sₙ-equivariant diffusion model that supports multiple representations. We integrate this model in a planning loop, where conditioning and classifier guidance let us softly break the symmetry for specific tasks as needed. On object manipulation and navigation tasks, EDGI is substantially more sample efficient and generalizes better across the symmetry group than non-equivariant models.
Pseudo-labeling has emerged as a popular and effective approach for utilizing unlabeled data. However, in the context of semi-supervised multi-label learning (SSMLL), conventional pseudo-labeling methods encounter difficulties when dealing with instances associated with multiple labels and an unknown label count. These limitations often result in the introduction of false positive labels or the neglect of true positive ones. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel solution called Class-Aware Pseudo-Labeling (CAP) that performs pseudo-labeling in a class-aware manner. The proposed approach introduces a regularized learning framework incorporating class-aware thresholds, which effectively control the assignment of positive and negative pseudo-labels for each class. Notably, even with a small proportion of labeled examples, our observations demonstrate that the estimated class distribution serves as a reliable approximation. Motivated by this finding, we develop a class-distribution-aware thresholding strategy to ensure the alignment of pseudo-label distribution with the true distribution. The correctness of the estimated class distribution is theoretically verified, and a generalization error bound is provided for our proposed method. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets confirm the efficacy of CAP in addressing the challenges of SSMLL problems.
tl;dr: We propose and analyze hybrid search, an extension of subgoal search with completeness guarantees and improved performance
Solving complex planning problems has been a long-standing challenge in computer science. Learning-based subgoal search methods have shown promise in tackling these problems, but they often suffer from a lack of completeness guarantees, meaning that they may fail to find a solution even if one exists. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to augment a subgoal search method to achieve completeness in discrete action spaces. Specifically, we augment the high-level search with low-level actions to execute a multi-level (hybrid) search, which we call complete subgoal search. This solution achieves the best of both worlds: the practical efficiency of high-level search and the completeness of low-level search. We apply the proposed search method to a recently proposed subgoal search algorithm and evaluate the algorithm trained on offline data on complex planning problems. We demonstrate that our complete subgoal search not only guarantees completeness but can even improve performance in terms of search expansions for instances that the high-level could solve without low-level augmentations. Our approach makes it possible to apply subgoal-level planning for systems where completeness is a critical requirement.
Robust loss functions are essential for training deep neural networks in the presence of noisy labels. Some robust loss functions use Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as its necessary component. For example, the recently proposed Active Passive Loss (APL) uses MAE as its passive loss function. However, MAE treats every sample equally, slows down the convergence and can make training difficult. In this work, we propose a new class of theoretically robust passive loss functions different from MAE, namely *Normalized Negative Loss Functions* (NNLFs), which focus more on memorized clean samples. By replacing the MAE in APL with our proposed NNLFs, we improve APL and propose a new framework called *Active Negative Loss* (ANL). Experimental results on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that the new set of loss functions created by our ANL framework can outperform state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at
https://github.com/Virusdoll/Active-Negative-Loss.
tl;dr: We provide the first efficient algorithm for estimating parameters of general exponential families in high dimensions using samples truncated to very general sets.
Missing data problems have many manifestations across many scientific fields. A fundamental type of missing data problem arises when samples are \textit{truncated}, i.e., samples that lie in a subset of the support are not observed. Statistical estimation from truncated samples is a classical problem in statistics which dates back to Galton, Pearson, and Fisher. A recent line of work provides the first efficient estimation algorithms for the parameters of a Gaussian distribution and for linear regression with Gaussian noise.
In this paper we generalize these results to log-concave exponential families. We provide an estimation algorithm that shows that \textit{extrapolation} is possible for a much larger class of distributions while it maintains a polynomial sample and time complexity on average. Our algorithm is based on Projected Stochastic Gradient Descent and is not only applicable in a more general setting but is also simpler and more efficient than recent algorithms. Our work also has interesting implications for learning general log-concave distributions and sampling given only access to truncated data.
tl;dr: Benchmarking and enhancing video-language foundation models with action knowledge
Action knowledge involves the understanding of textual, visual, and temporal aspects of actions. We introduce the **Action Dynamics Benchmark (ActionBench)** containing two carefully designed probing tasks: Action Antonym and Video Reversal, which targets multimodal alignment capabilities and temporal understanding skills of the model, respectively. Despite recent video-language models’ (VidLM) impressive performance on various benchmark tasks, our diagnostic tasks reveal their surprising deficiency (near-random performance) in action knowledge, suggesting that current models rely on object recognition abilities as a shortcut for action understanding. To remedy this, we propose a novel framework, **Paxion**, along with a new **Discriminative Video Dynamics Modeling (DVDM)** objective. The Paxion framework utilizes a **Knowledge Patcher** network to encode new action knowledge and a **Knowledge Fuser** component to integrate the Patcher into frozen VidLMs without compromising their existing capabilities. Due to limitations of the widely-used Video-Text Contrastive (VTC) loss for learning action knowledge, we introduce the DVDM objective to train the Knowledge Patcher. DVDM forces the model to encode the correlation between the action text and the correct ordering of video frames. Our extensive analyses show that Paxion and DVDM together effectively fill the gap in action knowledge understanding (~50% → 80%), while maintaining or improving performance on a wide spectrum of both object- and action-centric downstream tasks.
tl;dr: We created a data-structure for data on alternative grid structures (check our HexagDLy as a base example). We explored this in the context of convolutional networks, and found some cases where quincux convolutions can help algorithm performance.
The use of non-Cartesian grids is a niche but important topic in sub-fields of the numerical sciences such as simulation and scientific visualization. However, non-Cartesian approaches are virtually unexplored in machine learning. This is likely due to the difficulties in the representation of data on non-Cartesian domains and the lack of support for standard machine learning operations on non-Cartesian data. This paper proposes a new data structure called the lattice tensor which generalizes traditional tensor spatio-temporal operations to lattice tensors, enabling the use of standard machine learning algorithms on non-Cartesian data. However, data need not reside on a non-Cartesian structure, we use non-Dyadic downsampling schemes to bring Cartesian data into a non-Cartesian space for further processing. We introduce a software library that implements the lattice tensor container (with some common machine learning operations), and demonstrate its effectiveness. Our method provides a general framework for machine learning on non-Cartesian domains, addressing the challenges mentioned above and filling a gap in the current literature.
Algorithms for the minimum-cost bipartite matching can be used to estimate Wasserstein distance between two distributions.
Given two sets $A$ and $B$ of $n$ points in a $2$-dimensional Euclidean space, one can use a fast implementation of the Hungarian method to compute a minimum-cost bipartite matching of $A$ and $B$ in $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ time. Let $\Delta$ be the spread, i.e., the ratio of the distance of the farthest to the closest pair of points in $A\cup B$. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to compute a minimum-cost bipartite matching of $A$ and $B$ with a similar worst-case execution time of $\tilde{O}(n^2 \log \Delta)$. However, when $A$ and $B$ are drawn independently and identically from a fixed distribution that is not known to the algorithm, the execution time of our algorithm is, in expectation, $\tilde{O}(n^{7/4}\log \Delta)$.
To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first one to achieve a sub-quadratic execution time even for stochastic point sets with real-valued coordinates.
Our algorithm extends to any dimension $d$, where it runs in $\tilde{O}(n^{2-\frac{1}{2d}}\Phi(n))$ time for stochastic point sets $A$ and $B$; here $\Phi(n)$ is the query/update time of a dynamic weighted nearest neighbor data structure.
Our algorithm can be seen as a careful adaptation of the Hungarian method in the geometric divide-and-conquer framework.
Variational inequalities are a broad and flexible class of problems that includes minimization, saddle point, and fixed point problems as special cases. Therefore, variational inequalities are used in various applications ranging from equilibrium search to adversarial learning. With the increasing size of data and models, today's instances demand parallel and distributed computing for real-world machine learning problems, most of which can be represented as variational inequalities. Meanwhile, most distributed approaches have a significant bottleneck -- the cost of communications. The three main techniques to reduce the total number of communication rounds and the cost of one such round are the similarity of local functions, compression of transmitted information, and local updates. In this paper, we combine all these approaches. Such a triple synergy did not exist before for variational inequalities and saddle problems, nor even for minimization problems. The methods presented in this paper have the best theoretical guarantees of communication complexity and are significantly ahead of other methods for distributed variational inequalities. The theoretical results are confirmed by adversarial learning experiments on synthetic and real datasets.
tl;dr: We present the first framework to solve inverse problems with a pre-trained latent diffusion model, which is the backbone of large-scale foundational generative models such as Stable Diffusion.
We present the first framework to solve linear inverse problems leveraging pre-trained \textit{latent} diffusion models. Previously proposed algorithms (such as DPS and DDRM) only apply to \textit{pixel-space} diffusion models. We theoretically analyze our algorithm showing provable sample recovery in a linear model setting. The algorithmic insight obtained from our analysis extends to more general settings often considered in practice. Experimentally, we outperform previously proposed posterior sampling algorithms in a wide variety of problems including random inpainting, block inpainting, denoising, deblurring, destriping, and super-resolution.
tl;dr: We combine certified and adversarial training, reducing over-regularization, and thus leading to state-of-the-art performance in certified accuracy.
Training certifiably robust neural networks remains a notoriously hard problem.
While adversarial training optimizes under-approximations of the worst-case loss, which leads to insufficient regularization for certification, sound certified training methods, optimize loose over-approximations, leading to over-regularization and poor (standard) accuracy.
In this work, we propose TAPS, an (unsound) certified training method that combines IBP and PGD training to optimize more precise, although not necessarily sound, worst-case loss approximations, reducing over-regularization and increasing certified and standard accuracies.
Empirically, TAPS achieves a new state-of-the-art in many settings, e.g., reaching a certified accuracy of $22$% on TinyImageNet for $\ell_\infty$-perturbations with radius $\epsilon=1/255$. We make our implementation and networks public at https://github.com/eth-sri/taps.
tl;dr: First optimal and adaptive dynamic regret upper bound in non-stationary dueling bandits under SST and STI, and proof of impossibility of same results outside of SST and STI.
The $K$-armed dueling bandits problem, where the feedback is in the form of noisy pairwise preferences, has been widely studied due its applications in information retrieval, recommendation systems, etc. Motivated by concerns that user preferences/tastes can evolve over time, we consider the problem of _dueling bandits with distribution shifts_. Specifically, we study the recent notion of _significant shifts_ (Suk and Kpotufe, 2022), and ask whether one can design an _adaptive_ algorithm for the dueling problem with $O(\sqrt{K\tilde{L}T})$ dynamic regret,
where $\tilde{L}$ is the (unknown) number of significant shifts in preferences. We show that the answer to this question depends on the properties of underlying preference distributions. Firstly, we give an impossibility result that rules out any algorithm with $O(\sqrt{K\tilde{L}T})$ dynamic regret under the well-studied Condorcet and SST classes of preference distributions. Secondly, we show that $\text{SST}\cap \text{STI}$ is the largest amongst popular classes of preference distributions where it is possible to design such an algorithm. Overall, our results provides an almost complete resolution of the above question for the hierarchy of distribution classes.
1110. Local Convergence of Gradient Methods for Min-Max Games: Partial Curvature Generically Suffices
We study the convergence to local Nash equilibria of gradient methods for two-player zero-sum differentiable games.
It is well-known that, in the continuous-time setting, such dynamics converge locally when $S \succ 0$ and may diverge when $S=0$, where $S\succeq 0$ is the symmetric part of the Jacobian at equilibrium that accounts for the "potential" component of the game. We show that these dynamics also converge as soon as $S$ is nonzero (*partial curvature*) and the eigenvectors of the antisymmetric part $A$ are in general position with respect to the kernel of $S$.
We then study the convergence rate when $S \ll A$ and prove that it typically depends on the *average* of the eigenvalues of $S$, instead of the minimum as an analogy with minimization problems would suggest.
To illustrate our results, we consider the problem of computing mixed Nash equilibria of continuous games. We show that, thanks to partial curvature, conic particle methods -- which optimize over both weights and supports of the mixed strategies -- generically converge faster than fixed-support methods.
For min-max games, it is thus beneficial to add degrees of freedom "with curvature": this can be interpreted as yet another benefit of over-parameterization.
tl;dr: We develop a metric on the input space of message passing neural networks that allows deriving generalization and stability to subsampling theorems
We present an approach for analyzing message passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) based on an extension of graphon analysis to a so called graphon-signal analysis. A MPNN is a function that takes a graph and a signal on the graph (a graph-signal) and returns some value. Since the input space of MPNNs is non-Euclidean, i.e., graphs can be of any size and topology, properties such as generalization are less well understood for MPNNs than for Euclidean neural networks. We claim that one important missing ingredient in past work is a meaningful notion of graph-signal similarity measure, that endows the space of inputs to MPNNs with a regular structure. We present such a similarity measure, called the graphon-signal cut distance, which makes the space of all graph-signals a dense subset of a compact metric space -- the graphon-signal space. Informally, two deterministic graph-signals are close in cut-distance if they ``look like'' they were sampled from the same random graph-signal model. Hence, our cut distance is a natural notion of graph-signal similarity, which allows comparing any pair of graph-signals of any size and topology. We prove that MPNNs are Lipschitz continuous functions over the graphon-signal metric space. We then give two applications of this result: 1) a generalization bound for MPNNs, and, 2) the stability of MPNNs to subsampling of graph-signals. Our results apply to any regular enough MPNN on any distribution of graph-signals, making the analysis rather universal.
Dosing models often use differential equations to model biological dynamics. Neural differential equations in particular can learn to predict the derivative of a process, which permits predictions at irregular points of time. However, this temporal flexibility often comes with a high sensitivity to noise, whereas medical problems often present high noise and limited data. Moreover, medical dosing models must generalize reliably over individual patients and changing treatment policies. To address these challenges, we introduce the Neural Eigen Stochastic Differential Equation algorithm (NESDE). NESDE provides individualized modeling (using a hypernetwork over patient-level parameters); generalization to new treatment policies (using decoupled control); tunable expressiveness according to the noise level (using piecewise linearity); and fast, continuous, closed-form prediction (using spectral representation). We demonstrate the robustness of NESDE in both synthetic and real medical problems, and use the learned dynamics to publish simulated medical gym environments.
tl;dr: We design an efficient online resource allocation policy to maximize the $\alpha$-fair utilities.
We consider a fair resource allocation problem in the no-regret setting against an unrestricted adversary. The objective is to allocate resources equitably among several agents in an online fashion so that the difference of the aggregate $\alpha$-fair utilities of the agents achieved by an optimal static clairvoyant allocation and the online policy grows sublinearly with time. The problem inherits its difficulty from the non-separable nature of the global $\alpha$-fairness function. Previously, it was shown that no online policy could achieve a sublinear standard regret in this problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient online resource allocation policy, called Online Fair Allocation ($\texttt{OFA}$), that achieves sublinear $c_\alpha$-approximate regret with approximation factor $c_\alpha=(1-\alpha)^{-(1-\alpha)}\leq 1.445,$ for $0\leq \alpha < 1$. Our upper bound on the $c_\alpha$-regret for this problem exhibits a surprising \emph{phase transition} phenomenon -- transitioning from a power-law to a constant at the critical exponent $\alpha=\frac{1}{2}.$ Our result also resolves an open problem in designing an efficient no-regret policy for the online job scheduling problem in certain parameter regimes. Along the way, we introduce new algorithmic and analytical techniques, including greedy estimation of the future gradients for non-additive global reward functions and bootstrapping second-order regret bounds, which may be of independent interest.
Gaussian process regression is widely used because of its ability to provide well-calibrated uncertainty estimates and handle small or sparse datasets. However, it struggles with high-dimensional data. One possible way to scale this technique to higher dimensions is to leverage the implicit low-dimensional manifold upon which the data actually lies, as postulated by the manifold hypothesis. Prior work ordinarily requires the manifold structure to be explicitly provided though, i.e. given by a mesh or be known to be one of the well-known manifolds like the sphere. In contrast, in this paper we propose a Gaussian process regression technique capable of inferring implicit structure directly from data (labeled and unlabeled) in a fully differentiable way. For the resulting model, we discuss its convergence to the Matérn Gaussian process on the assumed manifold. Our technique scales up to hundreds of thousands of data points, and may improve the predictive performance and calibration of the standard Gaussian process regression in high-dimensional settings.
tl;dr: Tracking any point in videos demands spatial context features
We tackle the problem of Persistent Independent Particles (PIPs), also called Tracking Any Point (TAP), in videos, which specifically aims at estimating persistent long-term trajectories of query points in videos. Previous methods attempted to estimate these trajectories independently to incorporate longer image sequences, therefore, ignoring the potential benefits of incorporating spatial context features.
We argue that independent video point tracking also demands spatial context features.
To this end, we propose a novel framework Context-PIPs, which effectively improves point trajectory accuracy by aggregating spatial context features in videos. Context-PIPs contains two main modules: 1) a SOurse Feature Enhancement (SOFE) module, and 2) a TArget Feature Aggregation (TAFA) module. Context-PIPs significantly improves PIPs all-sided, reducing 11.4\% Average Trajectory Error of Occluded Points (ATE-Occ) on CroHD and increasing 11.8\% Average Percentage of Correct Keypoint (A-PCK) on TAP-Vid-Kinectics. Demos are available at \url{https://wkbian.github.io/Projects/Context-PIPs/}.
tl;dr: We propose a self-supervised representation learning method to improve performance by implicitly applying the idea of contrastive learning using an asymmetric network architecture.
In self-supervised representation learning, Siamese networks are a natural architecture for learning transformation-invariance by bringing representations of positive pairs closer together. But it is prone to collapse into a degenerate solution. To address the issue, in contrastive learning, a contrastive loss is used to prevent collapse by moving representations of negative pairs away from each other. But it is known that algorithms with negative sampling are not robust to a reduction in the number of negative samples. So, on the other hand, there are algorithms that do not use negative pairs. Many positive-only algorithms adopt asymmetric network architecture consisting of source and target encoders as a key factor in coping with collapse. By exploiting the asymmetric architecture, we introduce a methodology to implicitly incorporate the idea of contrastive learning. As its implementation, we present a novel method guided stop-gradient. We apply our method to benchmark algorithms SimSiam and BYOL and show that our method stabilizes training and boosts performance. We also show that the algorithms with our method work well with small batch sizes and do not collapse even when there is no predictor. The code is available in the supplementary material.
tl;dr: We propose a prompt-augmented temporal point process to continuously learn the streaming event sequence. We formalize a novel and realistic experimental setup, where our method sets state-of-the-art performance across two real user behavior datasets.
Neural Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) are the prevalent paradigm for modeling continuous-time event sequences, such as user activities on the web and financial transactions. In real world applications, the event data typically comes in a streaming manner, where the distribution of the patterns may shift over time. Under the privacy and memory constraints commonly seen in real scenarios, how to continuously monitor a TPP to learn the streaming event sequence is an important yet under-investigated problem. In this work, we approach this problem by adopting Continual Learning (CL), which aims to enable a model to continuously learn a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. While CL for event sequence is less well studied, we present a simple yet effective framework, PromptTPP, by integrating the base TPP with a continuous-time retrieval prompt pool. In our proposed framework, prompts are small learnable parameters, maintained in a memory space and jointly optimized with the base TPP so that the model is properly instructed to learn event streams arriving sequentially without buffering past examples or task-specific attributes. We formalize a novel and realistic experimental setup for modeling event streams, where PromptTPP consistently sets state-of-the-art performance across two real user behavior datasets.
tl;dr: A new class of dual-space diffusion models that generate samples on constrained sets/manifolds while retaining all tractability as in standard Euclidean-space diffusion models
Modern successes of diffusion models in learning complex, high-dimensional data distributions are attributed, in part, to their capability to construct diffusion processes with analytic transition kernels and score functions. The tractability results in a simulation-free framework with stable regression losses, from which reversed, generative processes can be learned at scale. However, when data is confined to a constrained set as opposed to a standard Euclidean space, these desirable characteristics appear to be lost based on prior attempts. In this work, we propose Mirror Diffusion Models (MDM), a new class of diffusion models that generate data on convex constrained sets without losing any tractability. This is achieved by learning diffusion processes in a dual space constructed from a mirror map, which, crucially, is a standard Euclidean space. We derive efficient computation of mirror maps for popular constrained sets, such as simplices and $\ell_2$-balls, showing significantly improved performance of MDM over existing methods. For safety and privacy purposes, we also explore constrained sets as a new mechanism to embed invisible but quantitative information (i.e., watermarks) in generated data, for which MDM serves as a compelling approach. Our work brings new algorithmic opportunities for learning tractable diffusion on complex domains.
Models of many real-life applications, such as queueing models of communication networks or computing systems, have a countably infinite state-space. Algorithmic and learning procedures that have been developed to produce optimal policies mainly focus on finite state settings, and do not directly apply to these models. To overcome this lacuna, in this work we study the problem of optimal control of a family of discrete-time countable state-space Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) governed by an unknown parameter $\theta\in\Theta$,
and defined on a countably-infinite state-space $\mathcal X=\mathbb{Z}_+^d$, with finite action space $\mathcal A$, and an unbounded cost function. We take a Bayesian perspective with the random unknown parameter $\boldsymbol{\theta}^*$ generated via a given fixed prior distribution on $\Theta$. To optimally control the unknown MDP, we propose an algorithm based on Thompson sampling with dynamically-sized episodes: at the beginning of each episode, the posterior distribution formed via Bayes' rule is used to produce a parameter estimate, which then decides the policy applied during the episode. To ensure the stability of the Markov chain obtained by following the policy chosen for each parameter, we impose ergodicity assumptions. From this condition and using the solution of the average cost Bellman equation, we establish an $\tilde O(dh^d\sqrt{|\mathcal A|T})$ upper bound on the Bayesian regret of our algorithm, where $T$ is the time-horizon. Finally, to elucidate the applicability of our algorithm, we consider two different queueing models with unknown dynamics, and show that our algorithm can be applied to develop approximately optimal control algorithms.
tl;dr: We develop a method to debias pretrained unconditional generative models, such that they produce an even number of sample for each group.
Generative models are being increasingly used in science and industry applications. Unfortunately, they often perpetuate the biases present in their training sets, such as societal biases causing certain groups to be underrepresented in the data. For instance, image generators may overwhelmingly produce images of white people due to few non-white samples in their training data. It is imperative to debias generative models so they synthesize an equal number of instances for each group, while not requiring retraining of the model to avoid prohibitive expense. We thus propose a *distribution mapping module* that produces samples from a *fair noise distribution*, such that the pretrained generative model produces *semantically uniform* outputs - an equal number of instances for each group - when conditioned on these samples. This does *not* involve retraining the generator, nor does it require *any* real training data. Experiments on debiasing generators trained on popular real-world datasets show that our method outperforms existing approaches.
tl;dr: We theoretically analyzes the inductive biases of deep CNNs, including downsampling, multi-channeling, weight sharing, and locality, showing CNNs' efficiency in learning sparse functions and their separation with LCNs and FCNs.
In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of the inductive biases in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We start by examining the universality of CNNs, i.e., the ability to approximate any continuous functions. We prove that a depth of $\mathcal{O}(\log d)$ suffices for deep CNNs to achieve this universality, where $d$ in the input dimension. Additionally, we establish that learning sparse functions with CNNs requires only $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\log^2d)$ samples, indicating that deep CNNs can efficiently capture {\em long-range} sparse correlations. These results are made possible through a novel combination of the multichanneling and downsampling when increasing the network depth.
We also delve into the distinct roles of weight sharing and locality in CNNs. To this end, we compare the performance of CNNs, locally-connected networks (LCNs), and fully-connected networks (FCNs) on a simple regression task, where LCNs can be viewed as CNNs without weight sharing. On the one hand, we prove that LCNs require ${\Omega}(d)$ samples while CNNs need only $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\log^2d)$ samples, highlighting the critical role of weight sharing. On the other hand, we prove that FCNs require $\Omega(d^2)$ samples, whereas LCNs need only $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(d)$ samples, underscoring the importance of locality. These provable separations quantify the difference between the two biases, and the major observation behind our proof is that weight sharing and locality break different symmetries in the learning process.
tl;dr: We show that it is possible to construct polynomial-time no-regret dynamics with respect to all linear strategy transformations in extensive-form games, thus giving an efficient algorithm converging to a stronger notion of sequential rationality.
No-regret learners seek to minimize the difference between the loss they cumulated through the actions they played, and the loss they would have cumulated in hindsight had they consistently modified their behavior according to some strategy transformation function. The size of the set of transformations considered by the learner determines a natural notion of rationality. As the set of transformations each learner considers grows, the strategies played by the learners recover more complex game-theoretic equilibria, including correlated
equilibria in normal-form games and extensive-form correlated equilibria in extensive-form games. At the extreme, a no-swap-regret agent is one that minimizes regret against the set of all functions from the set of strategies to itself. While it is known that the no-swap-regret condition can be attained efficiently in nonsequential (normal-form) games, understanding what is the strongest notion of rationality that can be attained efficiently in the worst case in sequential (extensive-form) games is a longstanding open problem. In this paper we provide a positive result, by showing that it is possible, in any sequential game, to retain polynomial-time (in the game tree size) iterations while achieving sublinear regret with respect to all linear transformations of the mixed strategy space, a notion called no-linear-swap regret. This notion of hindsight rationality is as strong as no-swap-regret in nonsequential games, and stronger than no-trigger-regret in sequential games—thereby proving the existence of a subset of extensive-form correlated equilibria robust to linear deviations, which we call linear-deviation correlated equilibria, that can be approached efficiently.
The McKean-Vlasov equation (MVE) describes the collective behavior of particles subject to drift, diffusion, and mean-field interaction. In physical systems, the interaction term can be singular, i.e. it diverges when two particles collide. Notable examples of such interactions include the Coulomb interaction, fundamental in plasma physics, and the Biot-Savart interaction, present in the vorticity formulation of the 2D Navier-Stokes equation (NSE) in fluid dynamics. Solving MVEs that involve singular interaction kernels presents a significant challenge, especially when aiming to provide rigorous theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose a novel approach based on the concept of entropy dissipation in the underlying system. We derive a potential function that effectively controls the KL divergence between a hypothesis solution and the ground truth. Building upon this theoretical foundation, we introduce the Entropy-dissipation Informed Neural Network (EINN) framework for solving MVEs. In EINN, we utilize neural networks (NN) to approximate the underlying velocity field and minimize the proposed potential function. By leveraging the expressive power of NNs, our approach offers a promising avenue for tackling the complexities associated with singular interactions. To assess the empirical performance of our method, we compare EINN with SOTA NN-based MVE solvers. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in solving MVEs across various example problems.
A major challenge in reinforcement learning is to develop practical, sample-efficient algorithms for exploration in high-dimensional domains where generalization and function approximation is required. Low-Rank Markov Decision Processes---where transition probabilities admit a low-rank factorization based on an unknown feature embedding---offer a simple, yet expressive framework for RL with function approximation, yet existing algorithms either (1) are computationally intractable, or (2) require restrictive statistical assumptions such as latent variable structure or access to model-based function approximation. In this work, we propose the first provably sample-efficient algorithm for exploration in Low-Rank MDPs that is both computationally efficient and model-free, allowing for general function approximation while requiring no structural assumptions beyond a reachability condition that we show is substantially weaker than that assumed in prior work. Our algorithm, SpanRL, uses the notion of a barycentric spanner for the feature embedding as an efficiently computable basis for exploration, performing efficient spanner computation by interleaving representation learning and policy optimization subroutines. Our analysis---which is appealingly simple and modular---carefully combines several techniques, including a new approach to error-tolerant barycentric spanner computation, and a new analysis of a certain minimax representation learning objective found in prior work.
1125. Improvements on Uncertainty Quantification for Node Classification via Distance Based Regularization
tl;dr: Distance minimization improves out distribution detection
Deep neural networks have achieved significant success in the last decades, but they are not well-calibrated and often produce unreliable predictions. A large number of literature relies on uncertainty quantification to evaluate the reliability of a learning model, which is particularly important for applications of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and misclassification detection. We are interested in uncertainty quantification for interdependent node-level classification. We start our analysis based on graph posterior networks (GPNs) that optimize the uncertainty cross-entropy (UCE)-based loss function. We describe the theoretical limitations of the widely-used UCE loss. To alleviate the identified drawbacks, we propose a distance-based regularization that encourages clustered OOD nodes to remain clustered in the latent space. We conduct extensive comparison experiments on eight standard datasets and demonstrate that the proposed regularization outperforms the state-of-the-art in both OOD detection and misclassification detection.
tl;dr: This paper presents a self-supervised learning model to analyze animal tracking data and to reveal the factors that underlie animal behavior across different timescales.
Unconstrained and natural behavior consists of dynamics that are complex and unpredictable, especially when trying to predict what will happen multiple steps into the future. While some success has been found in building representations of animal behavior under constrained or simplified task-based conditions, many of these models cannot be applied to free and naturalistic settings where behavior becomes increasingly hard to model. In this work, we develop a multi-task representation learning model for animal behavior that combines two novel components: (i) an action-prediction objective that aims to predict the distribution of actions over future timesteps, and (ii) a multi-scale architecture that builds separate latent spaces to accommodate short- and long-term dynamics. After demonstrating the ability of the method to build representations of both local and global dynamics in robots in varying environments and terrains, we apply our method to the MABe 2022 Multi-Agent Behavior challenge, where our model ranks first overall on both mice and fly benchmarks. In all of these cases, we show that our model can build representations that capture the many different factors that drive behavior and solve a wide range of downstream tasks.
1127. CS4ML: A general framework for active learning with arbitrary data based on Christoffel functions
tl;dr: We introduce a general framework for active learning in regression problems that allows for general types of data and optimal sampling via so-called generalized Christoffel functions.
We introduce a general framework for active learning in regression problems. Our framework extends the standard setup by allowing for general types of data, rather than merely pointwise samples of the target function. This generalization covers many cases of practical interest, such as data acquired in transform domains (e.g., Fourier data), vector-valued data (e.g., gradient-augmented data), data acquired along continuous curves, and, multimodal data (i.e., combinations of different types of measurements). Our framework considers random sampling according to a finite number of sampling measures and arbitrary nonlinear approximation spaces (model classes). We introduce the concept of \textit{generalized Christoffel functions} and show how these can be used to optimize the sampling measures. We prove that this leads to near-optimal sample complexity in various important cases. This paper focuses on applications in scientific computing, where active learning is often desirable, since it is usually expensive to generate data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework for gradient-augmented learning with polynomials, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using generative models and adaptive sampling for solving PDEs using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs).
tl;dr: We study the efficiency (measured by distortion) of two families of explainable randomized voting rules and show that they can be significantly more efficient than deterministic voting rules while still being explainable.
With a rapid growth in the deployment of AI tools for making critical decisions (or aiding humans in doing so), there is a growing demand to be able to explain to the stakeholders how these tools arrive at a decision. Consequently, voting is frequently used to make such decisions due to its inherent explainability. Recent work suggests that using randomized (as opposed to deterministic) voting rules can lead to significant efficiency gains measured via the distortion framework. However, rules that use intricate randomization can often become too complex to explain to the stakeholders; losing explainability can eliminate the key advantage of voting over black-box AI tools, which may outweigh the efficiency gains.
We study the efficiency gains which can be unlocked by using voting rules that add a simple randomization step to a deterministic rule, thereby retaining explainability. We focus on two such families of rules, randomized positional scoring rules and random committee member rules, and show, theoretically and empirically, that they indeed achieve explainability and efficiency simultaneously to some extent.
1129. Energy Transformer
tl;dr: We propose a network, which describes the forward pass in a transformer as a gradient decent on an energy function.
Our work combines aspects of three promising paradigms in machine learning, namely, attention mechanism, energy-based models, and associative memory. Attention is the power-house driving modern deep learning successes, but it lacks clear theoretical foundations. Energy-based models allow a principled approach to discriminative and generative tasks, but the design of the energy functional is not straightforward. At the same time, Dense Associative Memory models or Modern Hopfield Networks have a well-established theoretical foundation, and allow an intuitive design of the energy function. We propose a novel architecture, called the Energy Transformer (or ET for short), that uses a sequence of attention layers that are purposely designed to minimize a specifically engineered energy function, which is responsible for representing the relationships between the tokens. In this work, we introduce the theoretical foundations of ET, explore its empirical capabilities using the image completion task, and obtain strong quantitative results on the graph anomaly detection and graph classification tasks.
We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively request the expert at each round to compare two actions and receive noisy preference feedback. The learner's objective is two-fold: to minimize regret associated with the executed actions, while simultaneously, minimizing the number of comparison queries made to the expert. In this paper, we assume that the learner has access to a function class that can represent the expert's preference model under appropriate link functions and present an algorithm that leverages an online regression oracle with respect to this function class. For the contextual bandit setting, our algorithm achieves a regret bound that combines the best of both worlds, scaling as $O(\min\\{\sqrt{T}, d/\Delta\\})$, where $T$ represents the number of interactions, $d$ represents the eluder dimension of the function class, and $\Delta$ represents the minimum preference of the optimal action over any suboptimal action under all contexts. Our algorithm does not require the knowledge of $\Delta$, and the obtained regret bound is comparable to what can be achieved in the standard contextual bandits setting where the learner observes reward signals at each round. Additionally, our algorithm makes only $O(\min\\{T, d^2/\Delta^2\\})$ queries to the expert. We then extend our algorithm to the imitation learning setting, where the agent engages with an unknown environment in episodes of length $H$, and provide similar guarantees regarding regret and query complexity. Interestingly, with preference-based feedback, our imitation learning algorithm can learn a policy outperforming a sub-optimal expert, matching the result from interactive imitation learning algorithms [Ross and Bagnell, 2014] that require access to the expert's actions and also reward signals.
Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization (SSDG) aims to learn a model that is generalizable to an unseen target domain with only a few labels, and most existing SSDG methods assume that unlabeled training and testing samples are all known classes. However, a more realistic scenario is that known classes may be mixed with some unknown classes in unlabeled training and testing data. To deal with such a scenario, we propose the Class-Wise Adaptive Exploration and Exploitation (CWAEE) method. In particular, we explore unlabeled training data by using one-vs-rest classifiers and class-wise adaptive thresholds to detect known and unknown classes, and exploit them by adopting consistency regularization on augmented samples based on Fourier Transformation to improve the unseen domain generalization. The experiments conducted on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our method.
tl;dr: Our deep learning framework effectively corrects off-resonance blurring in MRI scans, leveraging a physics-informed model trained solely on synthetic data to improve image quality, perform fat/water separation, and enable faster scans.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a powerful medical imaging modality that offers diagnostic information without harmful ionizing radiation. Unlike optical imaging, MRI sequentially samples the spatial Fourier domain (k-space) of the image.
Measurements are collected in multiple shots, or readouts, and in each shot, data along a smooth trajectory is sampled.
Conventional MRI data acquisition relies on sampling k-space row-by-row in short intervals, which is slow and inefficient. More efficient, non-Cartesian sampling trajectories (e.g., Spirals) use longer data readout intervals, but are more susceptible to magnetic field inhomogeneities, leading to off-resonance artifacts. Spiral trajectories cause off-resonance blurring in the image, and the mathematics of this blurring resembles that of optical blurring, where magnetic field variation corresponds to depth and readout duration to aperture size. Off-resonance blurring is a system issue with a physics-based, accurate forward model. We present a physics-informed deep learning framework for off-resonance correction in MRI, which is trained exclusively on synthetic, noise-like data with representative marginal statistics. Our approach allows for fat/water separation and is compatible with parallel imaging acceleration. Through end-to-end training using synthetic randomized data (i.e., noise-like images, coil sensitivities, field maps), we train the network to reverse off-resonance effects across diverse anatomies and contrasts without retraining. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through results on phantom and in-vivo data. This work has the potential to facilitate the clinical adoption of non-Cartesian sampling trajectories, enabling efficient, rapid, and motion-robust MRI scans. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/mikgroup/ResoNet.
1133. Sorting with Predictions
tl;dr: We explore sorting in the algorithms-with-predictions setting, and design algorithms with asymptotically optimal comparison complexity.
We explore the fundamental problem of sorting through the lens of learning-augmented algorithms, where algorithms can leverage possibly erroneous predictions to improve their efficiency. We consider two different settings: In the first setting, each item is provided a prediction of its position in the sorted list. In the second setting, we assume there is a ``quick-and-dirty'' way of comparing items, in addition to slow-and-exact comparisons. For both settings, we design new and simple algorithms using only $O(\sum_i \log \eta_i)$ exact comparisons, where $\eta_i$ is a suitably defined prediction error for the $i$th element. In particular, as the quality of predictions deteriorates, the number of comparisons degrades smoothly from $O(n)$ to $O(n\log n)$. We prove that this comparison complexity is theoretically optimal with respect to the examined error measures. An experimental evaluation against existing adaptive and non-adaptive sorting algorithms demonstrates the potential of applying learning-augmented algorithms in sorting tasks.
tl;dr: To learn sparse parities from offline samples, one must be rich, knowledgeable, patient, or lucky. Deep learning naturally interpolates along this tradeoff frontier.
In modern deep learning, algorithmic choices (such as width, depth, and learning rate) are known to modulate nuanced resource tradeoffs. This work investigates how these complexities necessarily arise for feature learning in the presence of computational-statistical gaps. We begin by considering offline sparse parity learning, a supervised classification problem which admits a statistical query lower bound for gradient-based training of a multilayer perceptron. This lower bound can be interpreted as a *multi-resource tradeoff frontier*:
successful learning can only occur if one is sufficiently rich (large model), knowledgeable (large dataset), patient (many training iterations), or lucky (many random guesses). We show, theoretically and experimentally, that sparse initialization and increasing network width yield significant improvements in sample efficiency in this setting. Here, width plays the role of parallel search: it amplifies the probability of finding "lottery ticket" neurons, which learn sparse features more sample-efficiently. Finally, we show that the synthetic sparse parity task can be useful as a proxy for real problems requiring axis-aligned feature learning. We demonstrate improved sample efficiency on tabular classification benchmarks by using wide, sparsely-initialized MLP models; these networks sometimes outperform tuned random forests.
The accurate predictions and principled uncertainty measures provided by GP regression incur $O(n^3)$ cost which is prohibitive for modern-day large-scale applications. This has motivated extensive work on computationally efficient approximations. We introduce a new perspective by exploring robustness properties and limiting behaviour of GP nearest-neighbour (GPnn) prediction. We demonstrate through theory and simulation that as the data-size $n$ increases, accuracy of estimated parameters and GP model assumptions become increasingly irrelevant to GPnn predictive accuracy. Consequently, it is sufficient to spend small amounts of work on parameter estimation in order to achieve high MSE accuracy, even in the presence of gross misspecification. In contrast, as $n \rightarrow \infty$, uncertainty calibration and NLL are shown to remain sensitive to just one parameter, the additive noise-variance; but we show that this source of inaccuracy can be corrected for, thereby achieving both well-calibrated uncertainty measures and accurate predictions at remarkably low computational cost. We exhibit a very simple GPnn regression algorithm with stand-out performance compared to other state-of-the-art GP approximations as measured on large UCI datasets. It operates at a small fraction of those other methods' training costs, for example on a basic laptop taking about 30 seconds to train on a dataset of size $n = 1.6 \times 10^6$.
We propose a novel framework for analyzing the dynamics of distribution shift in real-world systems that captures the feedback loop between learning algorithms and the distributions on which they are deployed. Prior work largely models feedback-induced distribution shift as adversarial or via an overly simplistic distribution-shift structure. In contrast, we propose a coupled partial differential equation model that captures fine-grained changes in the distribution over time by accounting for complex dynamics that arise due to strategic responses to algorithmic decision-making, non-local endogenous population interactions, and other exogenous sources of distribution shift. We consider two common settings in machine learning: cooperative settings with information asymmetries, and competitive settings where a learner faces strategic users. For both of these settings, when the algorithm retrains via gradient descent, we prove asymptotic convergence of the retraining procedure to a steady-state, both in finite and in infinite dimensions, obtaining explicit rates in terms of the model parameters. To do so we derive new results on the convergence of coupled PDEs that extends what is known on multi-species systems. Empirically, we show that our approach captures well-documented forms of distribution shifts like polarization and disparate impacts that simpler models cannot capture.
tl;dr: We propose an algorithm for agnostic active binary classification with good competitive ratio.
For some hypothesis classes and input distributions, \emph{active}
agnostic learning needs exponentially fewer samples than passive
learning; for other classes and distributions, it offers little to
no improvement. The most popular algorithms for agnostic active
learning express their performance in terms of a parameter called
the disagreement coefficient, but it is known that these algorithms
are inefficient on some inputs.
We take a different approach to agnostic active learning, getting an
algorithm that is \emph{competitive} with the optimal algorithm for
any binary hypothesis class $H$ and distribution $\mathcal{D}_X$ over $X$.
In particular, if any algorithm can use $m^*$ queries to get
$O(\eta)$ error, then our algorithm uses $O(m^* \log H)$ queries to
get $O(\eta)$ error. Our algorithm lies in the vein of the
splitting-based approach of Dasgupta [2004], which gets a similar
result for the realizable ($\eta = 0$) setting.
We also show that it is NP-hard to do better than our algorithm's
$O(\log H)$ overhead in general.
tl;dr: We formulate the problem of continual domain generalization over temporal drift and propose an evolving standardization method for this problem.
The capability of generalizing to out-of-distribution data is crucial for the deployment of machine learning models in the real world. Existing domain generalization (DG) mainly embarks on offline and discrete scenarios, where multiple source domains are simultaneously accessible and the distribution shift among domains is abrupt and violent. Nevertheless, such setting may not be universally applicable to all real-world applications, as there are cases where the data distribution gradually changes over time due to various factors, e.g., the process of aging. Additionally, as the domain constantly evolves, new domains will continually emerge. Re-training and updating models with both new and previous domains using existing DG methods can be resource-intensive and inefficient. Therefore, in this paper, we present a problem formulation for Continual Domain Generalization over Temporal Drift (CDGTD). CDGTD addresses the challenge of gradually shifting data distributions over time, where domains arrive sequentially and models can only access the data of the current domain. The goal is to generalize to unseen domains that are not too far into the future. To this end, we propose an Evolving Standardization (EvoS) method, which characterizes the evolving pattern of feature distribution and mitigates the distribution shift by standardizing features with generated statistics of corresponding domain. Specifically, inspired by the powerful ability of transformers to model sequence relations, we design a multi-scale attention module (MSAM) to learn the evolving pattern under sliding time windows of different lengths. MSAM can generate statistics of current domain based on the statistics of previous domains and the learned evolving pattern. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets including images and texts validate the efficacy of our EvoS.
tl;dr: 4D video in a fast training and rendering speed.
In this paper, we propose the Masked Space-Time Hash encoding (MSTH), a novel method for efficiently reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from multi-view or monocular videos. Based on the observation that dynamic scenes often contain substantial static areas that result in redundancy in storage and computations, MSTH represents a dynamic scene as a weighted combination of a 3D hash encoding and a 4D hash encoding. The weights for the two components are represented by a learnable mask which is guided by an uncertainty-based objective to reflect the spatial and temporal importance of each 3D position. With this design, our method can reduce the hash collision rate by avoiding redundant queries and modifications on static areas, making it feasible to represent a large number of space-time voxels by hash tables with small size.Besides, without the requirements to fit the large numbers of temporally redundant features independently, our method is easier to optimize and converge rapidly with only twenty minutes of training for a 300-frame dynamic scene. We evaluate our method on extensive dynamic scenes. As a result, MSTH obtains consistently better results than previous state-of-the-art methods with only 20 minutes of training time and 130 MB of memory storage.
tl;dr: We prove that a simple path-following optimization scheme globally converges to the global minimum of the population loss in the bivariate setting of DAG Learning.
Recently, a new class of non-convex optimization problems motivated by the statistical problem of learning an acyclic directed graphical model from data has attracted significant interest. While existing work uses standard first-order optimization schemes to solve this problem, proving the global optimality of such approaches has proven elusive. The difficulty lies in the fact that unlike other non-convex problems in the literature, this problem is not "benign", and possesses multiple spurious solutions that standard approaches can easily get trapped in. In this paper, we prove that a simple path-following optimization scheme globally converges to the global minimum of the population loss in the bivariate setting.
Queueing systems are widely applicable stochastic models with use cases in communication networks, healthcare, service systems, etc.
Although their optimal control has been extensively studied, most existing approaches assume perfect knowledge of the system parameters. Of course, this assumption rarely holds in practice where there is parameter uncertainty, thus motivating a recent line of work on bandit learning for queueing systems. This nascent stream of research focuses on the asymptotic performance of the proposed algorithms.
In this paper, we argue that an asymptotic metric, which focuses on late-stage performance, is insufficient to capture the intrinsic statistical complexity of learning in queueing systems which typically occurs in the early stage. Instead, we propose the *Cost of Learning in Queueing (CLQ)*, a new metric that quantifies the maximum increase in time-averaged queue length caused by parameter uncertainty.
We characterize the CLQ of a single-queue multi-server system, and then extend these results to multi-queue multi-server systems and networks of queues. In establishing our results, we propose a unified analysis framework for CLQ that bridges Lyapunov and bandit analysis, provides guarantees for a wide range of algorithms, and could be of independent interest.
tl;dr: We revisit invariant representation learning for ranking, propose list-level alignment, and establish a domain adaptation generalization bound for ranking.
Domain adaptation aims to transfer the knowledge learned on (data-rich) source domains to (low-resource) target domains, and a popular method is invariant representation learning, which matches and aligns the data distributions on the feature space. Although this method is studied extensively and applied on classification and regression problems, its adoption on ranking problems is sporadic, and the few existing implementations lack theoretical justifications. This paper revisits invariant representation learning for ranking. Upon reviewing prior work, we found that they implement what we call item-level alignment, which aligns the distributions of the items being ranked from all lists in aggregate but ignores their list structure. However, the list structure should be leveraged, because it is intrinsic to ranking problems where the data and the metrics are defined and computed on lists, not the items by themselves. To close this discrepancy, we propose list-level alignment—learning domain-invariant representations at the higher level of lists. The benefits are twofold: it leads to the first domain adaptation generalization bound for ranking, in turn providing theoretical support for the proposed method, and it achieves better empirical transfer performance for unsupervised domain adaptation on ranking tasks, including passage reranking.
tl;dr: We propose a better-with-less framework for graph pre-training: fewer, but carefully chosen data are fed into a Graph Neural Network to enhance pre-training.
Pre-training on graph neural networks (GNNs) aims to learn transferable knowledge for downstream tasks with unlabeled data, and it has recently become an active research area. The success of graph pre-training models is often attributed to the massive amount of input data. In this paper, however, we identify the curse of big data phenomenon in graph pre-training: more training data do not necessarily lead to better downstream performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose a better-with-less framework for graph pre-training: fewer, but carefully chosen data are fed into a GNN model to enhance pre-training. The proposed pre-training pipeline is called the data-active graph pre-training (APT) framework, and is composed of a graph selector and a pre-training model. The graph selector chooses the most representative and instructive data points based on the inherent properties of graphs as well as predictive uncertainty. The proposed predictive uncertainty, as feedback from the pre-training model, measures the confidence level of the model in the data. When fed with the chosen data, on the other hand, the pre-training model grasps an initial understanding of the new, unseen data, and at the same time attempts to remember the knowledge learned from previous data. Therefore, the integration and interaction between these two components form a unified framework (APT), in which graph pre-training is performed in a progressive and iterative way. Experiment results show that the proposed APT is able to obtain an efficient pre-training model with fewer training data and better downstream performance.
tl;dr: This paper proves fast convergence of independent natural policy gradient algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning in Markov potential games.
This work studies an independent natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm for the multi-agent reinforcement learning problem in Markov potential games. It is shown that, under mild technical assumptions and the introduction of the \textit{suboptimality gap}, the independent NPG method with an oracle providing exact policy evaluation asymptotically reaches an $\epsilon$-Nash Equilibrium (NE) within $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon)$ iterations. This improves upon the previous best result of $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations and is of the same order, $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon)$, that is achievable for the single-agent case. Empirical results for a synthetic potential game and a congestion game are presented to verify the theoretical bounds.
tl;dr: We introduce a Multi-Modal Inverse Constrained Reinforcement Learning (MMICRL) algorithm to infer multiple constraints corresponding to various types of agents from a mixture of expert demonstrations.
Inverse Constraint Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) aims to recover the underlying constraints respected by expert agents in a data-driven manner. Existing ICRL algorithms typically assume that the demonstration data is generated by a single type of expert. However, in practice, demonstrations often comprise a mixture of trajectories collected from various expert agents respecting different constraints, making it challenging to explain expert behaviors with a unified constraint function. To tackle this issue, we propose a Multi-Modal Inverse Constrained Reinforcement Learning (MMICRL) algorithm for simultaneously estimating multiple constraints corresponding to different types of experts. MMICRL constructs a flow-based density estimator that enables unsupervised expert identification from demonstrations, so as to infer the agent-specific constraints. Following these constraints, MMICRL imitates expert policies with a novel multi-modal constrained policy optimization objective that minimizes the agent-conditioned policy entropy and maximizes the unconditioned one. To enhance robustness, we incorporate this objective into the contrastive learning framework. This approach enables imitation policies to capture the diversity of behaviors among expert agents. Extensive experiments in both discrete and continuous environments show that MMICRL outperforms other baselines in terms of constraint recovery and control performance.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently become more popular as a biologically plausible substitute for traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). SNNs are cost-efficient and deployment-friendly because they process input in both spatial and temporal manner using binary spikes. However, we observe that the information capacity in SNNs is affected by the number of timesteps, leading to an accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. In this work, we study a fine-grained adjustment of the number of timesteps in SNNs. Specifically, we treat the number of timesteps as a variable conditioned on different input samples to reduce redundant timesteps for certain data.
We call our method Spiking Early-Exit Neural Networks (**SEENNs**). To determine the appropriate number of timesteps, we propose SEENN-I which uses a confidence score thresholding to filter out the uncertain predictions, and SEENN-II which determines the number of timesteps by reinforcement learning.
Moreover, we demonstrate that SEENN is compatible with both the directly trained SNN and the ANN-SNN conversion.
By dynamically adjusting the number of timesteps, our SEENN achieves a remarkable reduction in the average number of timesteps during inference. For example, our SEENN-II ResNet-19 can achieve **96.1**\% accuracy with an average of **1.08** timesteps on the CIFAR-10 test dataset. Code is shared at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/SEENN.
tl;dr: We give polynomial-time and in some cases nearly optimal algorithms for robustly estimating the location parameter of symmetric distributions.
We study the problem of robustly estimating the mean or location parameter without moment assumptions.
Known computationally efficient algorithms rely on strong distributional assumptions, such as sub-Gaussianity, or (certifiably) bounded moments.
Moreover, the guarantees that they achieve in the heavy-tailed setting are weaker than those for sub-Gaussian distributions with known covariance.
In this work, we show that such a tradeoff, between error guarantees and heavy-tails, is not necessary for symmetric distributions.
We show that for a large class of symmetric distributions, the same error as in the Gaussian setting can be achieved efficiently.
The distributions we study include products of arbitrary symmetric one-dimensional distributions, such as product Cauchy distributions, as well as elliptical distributions,
a vast generalization of the Gaussian distribution.
For product distributions and elliptical distributions with known scatter (covariance) matrix, we show that given an $\varepsilon$-corrupted sample, we can with probability at least $1-\delta$ estimate its location up to error $O(\varepsilon \sqrt{\log(1/\varepsilon)})$ using $\tfrac{d\log(d) + \log(1/\delta)}{\varepsilon^2 \log(1/\varepsilon)}$ samples.
This result matches the best-known guarantees for the Gaussian distribution and known SQ lower bounds (up to the $\log(d)$ factor).
For elliptical distributions with unknown scatter (covariance) matrix, we propose a sequence of efficient algorithms that approaches this optimal error.
Specifically, for every $k \in \mathbb{N}$, we design an estimator using time and
samples $\tilde{O}({d^k})$ achieving error $O(\varepsilon^{1-\frac{1}{2k}})$.
This matches the error and running time guarantees when assuming certifiably bounded moments of order up to $k$.
For unknown covariance, such error bounds of $o(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ are not even known for (general) sub-Gaussian distributions.
Our algorithms are based on a generalization of the well-known filtering technique [DK22].
More specifically, we show how this machinery can be combined with Huber-loss-based
techniques to work with projections of the noise that behave more nicely than the initial noise.
Moreover, we show how sum-of-squares proofs can be used to obtain algorithmic guarantees even for distributions without a first moment.
We believe that this approach may find other applications in future works.
tl;dr: We develop a NeRF-based approach for view synthesis of transient, picosecond-scale measurements captured by a lidar.
Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have become a ubiquitous tool for modeling scene appearance and geometry from multiview imagery. Recent work has also begun to explore how to use additional supervision from lidar or depth sensor measurements in the NeRF framework. However, previous lidar-supervised NeRFs focus on rendering conventional camera imagery and use lidar-derived point cloud data as auxiliary supervision; thus, they fail to incorporate the underlying image formation model of the lidar. Here, we propose a novel method for rendering transient NeRFs that take as input the raw, time-resolved photon count histograms measured by a single-photon lidar system, and we seek to render such histograms from novel views. Different from conventional NeRFs, the approach relies on a time-resolved version of the volume rendering equation to render the lidar measurements and capture transient light transport phenomena at picosecond timescales. We evaluate our method on a first-of-its-kind dataset of simulated and captured transient multiview scans from a prototype single-photon lidar. Overall, our work brings NeRFs to a new dimension of imaging at transient timescales, newly enabling rendering of transient imagery from novel views. Additionally, we show that our approach recovers improved geometry and conventional appearance compared to point cloud-based supervision when training on few input viewpoints. Transient NeRFs may be especially useful for applications which seek to simulate raw lidar measurements for downstream tasks in autonomous driving, robotics, and remote sensing.
tl;dr: We provide generalization guarantees under adaptivity that scale with the variance, rather than the range
Repeated use of a data sample via adaptively chosen queries can rapidly lead to overfitting, wherein the empirical evaluation of queries on the sample significantly deviates from their mean with respect to the underlying data distribution. It turns out that simple noise addition algorithms suffice to prevent this issue, and differential privacy-based analysis of these algorithms shows that they can handle an asymptotically optimal number of queries. However, differential privacy's worst-case nature entails scaling such noise to the range of the queries even for highly-concentrated queries, or introducing more complex algorithms.
In this paper, we prove that straightforward noise-addition algorithms already provide variance-dependent guarantees that also extend to unbounded queries. This improvement stems from a novel characterization that illuminates the core problem of adaptive data analysis. We show that the harm of adaptivity results from the covariance between the new query and a Bayes factor-based measure of how much information about the data sample was encoded in the responses given to past queries. We then leverage this characterization to introduce a new data-dependent stability notion that can bound this covariance.
tl;dr: A lightweight Vision Transformer with bidirectional interaction achieved by context-aware manners between local and global contexts.
Recent advancements in vision backbones have significantly improved their performance by simultaneously modeling images’ local and global contexts. However, the bidirectional interaction between these two contexts has not been well explored and exploited, which is important in the human visual system. This paper proposes a **F**ully **A**daptive **S**elf-**A**ttention (FASA) mechanism for vision transformer to model the local and global information as well as the bidirectional interaction between them in context-aware ways. Specifically, FASA employs self-modulated convolutions to adaptively extract local representation while utilizing self-attention in down-sampled space to extract global representation. Subsequently, it conducts a bidirectional adaptation process between local and global representation to model their interaction. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained downsampling strategy to enhance the down-sampled self-attention mechanism for finer-grained global perception capability. Based on FASA, we develop a family of lightweight vision backbones, **F**ully **A**daptive **T**ransformer (FAT) family. Extensive experiments on multiple vision tasks demonstrate that FAT achieves impressive performance. Notably, FAT accomplishes a **77.6%** accuracy on ImageNet-1K using only **4.5M** parameters and **0.7G** FLOPs, which surpasses the most advanced ConvNets and Transformers with similar model size and computational costs. Moreover, our model exhibits faster speed on modern GPU compared to other models.
tl;dr: We present a framework for designing and analysing general U-Nets.
U-Nets are a go-to neural architecture across numerous tasks for continuous signals on a square such as images and Partial Differential Equations (PDE), however their design and architecture is understudied. In this paper, we provide a framework for designing and analysing general U-Net architectures. We present theoretical results which characterise the role of the encoder and decoder in a U-Net, their high-resolution scaling limits and their conjugacy to ResNets via preconditioning. We propose Multi-ResNets, U-Nets with a simplified, wavelet-based encoder without learnable parameters. Further, we show how to design novel U-Net architectures which encode function constraints, natural bases, or the geometry of the data. In diffusion models, our framework enables us to identify that high-frequency information is dominated by noise exponentially faster, and show how U-Nets with average pooling exploit this. In our experiments, we demonstrate how Multi-ResNets achieve competitive and often superior performance compared to classical U-Nets in image segmentation, PDE surrogate modelling, and generative modelling with diffusion models. Our U-Net framework paves the way to study the theoretical properties of U-Nets and design natural, scalable neural architectures for a multitude of problems beyond the square.
Recently, federated learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning abilities. However, under statistically heterogeneous scenarios, we observe that biased data domains on clients cause a representation bias phenomenon and further degenerate generic representations during local training, i.e., the representation degeneration phenomenon. To address these issues, we propose a general framework Domain Bias Eliminator (DBE) for FL. Our theoretical analysis reveals that DBE can promote bi-directional knowledge transfer between server and client, as it reduces the domain discrepancy between server and client in representation space. Besides, extensive experiments on four datasets show that DBE can greatly improve existing FL methods in both generalization and personalization abilities. The DBE-equipped FL method can outperform ten state-of-the-art personalized FL methods by a large margin. Our code is public at https://github.com/TsingZ0/DBE.
tl;dr: A method for differentiable clustering and techniques to learn from clustering data, end-to-end.
We introduce a differentiable clustering method based on stochastic perturbations of minimum-weight spanning forests. This allows us to include clustering in end-to-end trainable pipelines, with efficient gradients. We show that our method performs well even in difficult settings, such as data sets with high noise and challenging geometries. We also formulate an ad hoc loss to efficiently learn from partial clustering data using this operation. We demonstrate its performance on several data sets for supervised and semi-supervised tasks.
tl;dr: We propose deep RKHM and analyzed it through $C^*$-algebra and the Perron-Frobenius operators.
Reproducing kernel Hilbert $C^*$-module (RKHM) is a generalization of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) by means of $C^*$-algebra, and the Perron-Frobenius operator is a linear operator related to the composition of functions. Combining these two concepts, we present deep RKHM, a deep learning framework for kernel methods. We derive a new Rademacher generalization bound in this setting and provide a theoretical interpretation of benign overfitting by means of Perron-Frobenius operators. By virtue of $C^*$-algebra, the dependency of the bound on output dimension is milder than existing bounds. We show that $C^*$-algebra is a suitable tool for deep learning with kernels, enabling us to take advantage of the product structure of operators and to provide a clear connection with convolutional neural networks. Our theoretical analysis provides a new lens through which one can design and analyze deep kernel methods.
Reductive Lie Groups, such as the orthogonal groups, the Lorentz group, or the unitary groups, play essential roles across scientific fields as diverse as high energy physics, quantum mechanics, quantum chromodynamics, molecular dynamics, computer vision, and imaging. In this paper, we present a general Equivariant Neural Network architecture capable of respecting the symmetries of the finite-dimensional representations of any reductive Lie Group. Our approach generalizes the successful ACE and MACE architectures for atomistic point clouds to any data equivariant to a reductive Lie group action. We also introduce the lie-nn software library, which provides all the necessary tools to develop and implement such general G-equivariant neural networks. It implements routines for the reduction of generic tensor products of representations into irreducible representations, making it easy to apply our architecture to a wide range of problems and groups. The generality and performance of our approach are demonstrated by applying it to the tasks of top quark decay tagging (Lorentz group) and shape recognition (orthogonal group).
tl;dr: We analyze the convergence guarantee and provide non-convergence examples for Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) with constant perturbation size.
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an optimizer that takes a descent step based on the gradient at a perturbation $y_t = x_t + \rho \frac{\nabla f(x_t)}{\lVert \nabla f(x_t) \rVert}$ of the current point $x_t$.
Existing studies prove convergence of SAM for smooth functions, but they do so by assuming decaying perturbation size $\rho$ and/or no gradient normalization in $y_t$, which is detached from practice. To address this gap, we study deterministic/stochastic versions of SAM with practical configurations (i.e., constant $\rho$ and gradient normalization in $y_t$) and explore their convergence properties on smooth functions with (non)convexity assumptions.
Perhaps surprisingly, in many scenarios, we find out that SAM has limited capability to converge to global minima or stationary points.
For smooth strongly convex functions, we show that while deterministic SAM enjoys tight global convergence rates of $\tilde \Theta(\frac{1}{T^2})$, the convergence bound of stochastic SAM suffers an inevitable additive term $\mathcal O(\rho^2)$, indicating convergence only up to neighborhoods of optima.
In fact, such $\mathcal O(\rho^2)$ factors arise for stochastic SAM in all the settings we consider, and also for deterministic SAM in nonconvex cases; importantly, we prove by examples that such terms are unavoidable.
Our results highlight vastly different characteristics of SAM with vs. without decaying perturbation size or gradient normalization, and suggest that the intuitions gained from one version may not apply to the other.
tl;dr: We introduce an innovative approach to undirected probabilistic tensor decomposition, characterized by its exceptional flexibility in accommodating various structures and distributions.
Tensor decompositions (TDs) serve as a powerful tool for analyzing multiway data. Traditional TDs incorporate prior knowledge about the data into the model, such as a directed generative process from latent factors to observations. In practice, selecting proper structural or distributional assumptions beforehand is crucial for obtaining a promising TD representation. However, since such prior knowledge is typically unavailable in real-world applications, choosing an appropriate TD model can be challenging. This paper aims to address this issue by introducing a flexible TD framework that discards the structural and distributional assumptions, in order to learn as much information from the data. Specifically, we construct a TD model that captures the joint probability of the data and latent tensor factors through a deep energy-based model (EBM). Neural networks are then employed to parameterize the joint energy function of tensor factors and tensor entries. The flexibility of EBM and neural networks enables the learning of underlying structures and distributions. In addition, by designing the energy function, our model unifies the learning process of different types of tensors, such as static tensors and dynamic tensors with time stamps. The resulting model presents a doubly intractable nature due to the presence of latent tensor factors and the unnormalized probability function. To efficiently train the model, we derive a variational upper bound of the conditional noise-contrastive estimation objective that learns the unnormalized joint probability by distinguishing data from conditional noises. We show advantages of our model on both synthetic and several real-world datasets.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks
-- subtle, perceptually indistinguishable perturbations of inputs that change the response of the model. In the context of vision, we hypothesize that an important contributor to the robustness of human visual perception is constant exposure to low-fidelity visual stimuli in our peripheral vision. To investigate this hypothesis, we develop RBlur, an image transform that simulates the loss in fidelity of peripheral vision by blurring the image and reducing its color saturation based on the distance from a given fixation point. We show that compared to DNNs trained on the original images, DNNs trained on images transformed by RBlur are substantially more robust to adversarial attacks, as well as other, non-adversarial, corruptions, achieving up to 25% higher accuracy on perturbed data.
tl;dr: Our paper is the first to provide decentralized learning algorithms in a two-sided market where both sides have uncertain preference that need to be learned.
Double Auction enables decentralized transfer of goods between multiple buyers and sellers, thus underpinning functioning of many online marketplaces. Buyers and sellers compete in these markets through bidding, but do not often know their own valuation a-priori. As the allocation and pricing happens through bids, the profitability of participants, hence sustainability of such markets, depends crucially on learning respective valuations through repeated interactions. We initiate the study of Double Auction markets under bandit feedback on both buyers' and sellers' side. We show with confidence bound based bidding, and `Average Pricing' there is an efficient price discovery among the participants. In particular, the regret on combined valuation of the buyers and the sellers -- a.k.a. the social regret -- is $O(\log(T)/\Delta)$ in $T$ rounds, where $\Delta$ is the minimum price gap. Moreover, the buyers and sellers exchanging goods attain $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret, individually. The buyers and sellers who do not benefit from exchange in turn only experience $O(\log{T}/ \Delta)$ regret individually in $T$ rounds. We augment our upper bound by showing that $\omega(\sqrt{T})$ individual regret, and $\omega(\log{T})$ social regret is unattainable in certain Double Auction markets. Our paper is the first to provide decentralized learning algorithms in a two-sided market where \emph{both sides have uncertain preference} that need to be learned.
In this paper, we propose Barrier Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (BHMC), a version of the
HMC algorithm which aims at sampling from a Gibbs distribution $\pi$ on a manifold
$\mathsf{M}$, endowed with a Hessian metric $\mathfrak{g}$ derived from a self-concordant
barrier. Our method relies on Hamiltonian
dynamics which comprises $\mathfrak{g}$. Therefore, it incorporates the constraints defining
$\mathsf{M}$ and is able to exploit its underlying geometry. However,
the corresponding Hamiltonian dynamics is defined via non separable Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) in contrast to the Euclidean case. It implies unavoidable bias in existing generalization of HMC to Riemannian manifolds. In this paper, we propose a new filter step, called ``involution checking step'', to address this problem. This step is implemented in two versions of BHMC, coined continuous BHMC (c-bHMC) and numerical BHMC (n-BHMC) respectively.
Our main results establish that these two new algorithms generate reversible Markov
chains with respect to $\pi$ and do not suffer from any bias in comparison to previous implementations. Our conclusions are supported by numerical experiments where
we consider target distributions defined on polytopes.
tl;dr: This paper provides a new bilevel coreset selection formulation and optimization algorithm for continual learning.
Coreset is a small set that provides a data summary for a large dataset, such that training solely on the small set achieves competitive performance compared with a large dataset. In rehearsal-based continual learning, the coreset is typically used in the memory replay buffer to stand for representative samples in previous tasks, and the coreset selection procedure is typically formulated as a bilevel problem. However, the typical bilevel formulation for coreset selection explicitly performs optimization over discrete decision variables with greedy search, which is computationally expensive. Several works consider other formulations to address this issue, but they ignore the nested nature of bilevel optimization problems and may not solve the bilevel coreset selection problem accurately. To address these issues, we propose a new bilevel formulation, where the inner problem tries to find a model which minimizes the expected training error sampled from a given probability distribution, and the outer problem aims to learn the probability distribution with approximately $K$ (coreset size) nonzero entries such that learned model in the inner problem minimizes the training error over the whole data. To ensure the learned probability has approximately $K$ nonzero entries, we introduce a novel regularizer based on the smoothed top-$K$ loss in the upper problem. We design a new optimization algorithm that provably converges to the $\epsilon$-stationary point with $O(1/\epsilon^4)$ computational complexity. We conduct extensive experiments in various settings in continual learning, including balanced data, imbalanced data, and label noise, to show that our proposed formulation and new algorithm significantly outperform competitive baselines. From bilevel optimization point of view, our algorithm significantly improves the vanilla greedy coreset selection method in terms of running time on continual learning benchmark datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/MingruiLiu-ML-Lab/Bilevel-Coreset-Selection-via-Regularization.
In this work we consider an online learning problem, called Online $k$-Clustering with Moving Costs, at which a learner maintains a set of $k$ facilities over $T$ rounds so as to minimize the connection cost of an adversarially selected sequence of clients. The learner is informed on the positions of the clients at each round $t$ only after its facility-selection and can use this information to update its decision in the next round. However, updating the facility positions comes with an additional moving cost based on the moving distance of the facilities. We present the first $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-regret polynomial-time online learning algorithm guaranteeing that the overall cost (connection $+$ moving) is at most $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ times the time-averaged connection cost of the best fixed solution. Our work improves on the recent result of (Fotakis et al., 2021) establishing $\mathcal{O}(k)$-regret guarantees only on the connection cost.
Mislabeled, duplicated, or biased data in real-world scenarios can lead to prolonged training and even hinder model convergence. Traditional solutions prioritizing easy or hard samples lack the flexibility to handle such a variety simultaneously. Recent work has proposed a more reasonable data selection principle by examining the data's impact on the model's generalization loss. However, its practical adoption relies on less principled approximations and additional holdout data. This work solves these problems by leveraging a lightweight Bayesian treatment and incorporating off-the-shelf zero-shot predictors built on large-scale pre-trained models. The resulting algorithm is efficient and easy to implement. We perform extensive empirical studies on challenging benchmarks with considerable data noise and imbalance in the online batch selection scenario, and observe superior training efficiency over competitive baselines. Notably, on the challenging WebVision benchmark, our method can achieve similar predictive performance with significantly fewer training iterations than leading data selection methods.
tl;dr: The paper proposed parameterizing steerable kernels with group equivariant MLPs, providing a flexible approach that can generalize to different symmetry transformations and demonstrates its effectiveness in various tasks.
Steerable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide a general framework for building neural networks equivariant to translations and transformations of an origin-preserving group $G$, such as reflections and rotations. They rely on standard convolutions with $G$-steerable kernels obtained by analytically solving the group-specific equivariance constraint imposed onto the kernel space. As the solution is tailored to a particular group $G$, implementing a kernel basis does not generalize to other symmetry transformations, complicating the development of general group equivariant models. We propose using implicit neural representation via multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to parameterize $G$-steerable kernels. The resulting framework offers a simple and flexible way to implement Steerable CNNs and generalizes to any group $G$ for which a $G$-equivariant MLP can be built. We prove the effectiveness of our method on multiple tasks, including N-body simulations, point cloud classification and molecular property prediction.
tl;dr: In this work, we study the hypothesis selection problem in the presence of memory constraints, and we provide an algorithm that achieves a nearly optimal tradeoff between memory and the amount of data.
Hypothesis selection is a fundamental problem in learning theory and statistics.
Given a dataset and a finite set of candidate distributions, the goal is to select a distribution that matches the data as well as possible.
More specifically, suppose we have sample access to an unknown distribution $P$ over a domain $\mathcal{X}$ that we know is well-approximated by one of a
a class of $n$ distributions (a.k.a. hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} \coloneqq \{H_1, H_2, \ldots, H_n\}$. The goal is to design an algorithm that outputs a distribution $\hat{H} \in \mathcal{H}$ whose total variation distance from $P$ is nearly minimal.
In this work, we study the hypothesis selection problem under memory constraints. We consider a model where samples from $P$ are presented in a stream and we access each sample $x$ via ``PDF-comparison'' queries that allow us to compare the probability densities of any pair of hypotheses
at the domain point $x$ (i.e., is $H_i(x) < H_j(x)$?). This model allows us to study how much memory is needed at any point in time to store information about the portion of the stream seen so far.
Our main result is an algorithm that achieves a nearly optimal tradeoff between memory usage and the number of samples required. In particular, given $b$ bits of memory (for $b$ roughly between $\log n$ and $n$), our algorithm solves the hypothesis selection problem with $s$ samples, where $b \cdot s = O(n \log n)$. This result is optimal up to an $O(\log n)$ factor, for all $b$.
tl;dr: We introduce a framework inspired in adversarial learning to detect and correct features originating a distribution shift between datasets.
Data shift is a phenomenon present in many real-world applications, and while there are multiple methods attempting to detect shifts, the task of localizing and correcting the features originating such shifts has not been studied in depth. Feature shifts can occur in many datasets, including in multi-sensor data, where some sensors are malfunctioning, or in tabular and structured data, including biomedical, financial, and survey data, where faulty standardization and data processing pipelines can lead to erroneous features. In this work, we explore using the principles of adversarial learning, where the information from several discriminators trained to distinguish between two distributions is used to both detect the corrupted features and fix them in order to remove the distribution shift between datasets. We show that mainstream supervised classifiers, such as random forest or gradient boosting trees, combined with simple iterative heuristics, can localize and correct feature shifts, outperforming current statistical and neural network-based techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/AI-sandbox/DataFix.
1167. FedGCN: Convergence-Communication Tradeoffs in Federated Training of Graph Convolutional Networks
tl;dr: Federated training of graph convolutional networks with high accuracy and super low communication cost
Methods for training models on graphs distributed across multiple clients have recently grown in popularity, due to the size of these graphs as well as regulations on keeping data where it is generated. However, the cross-client edges naturally exist among clients. Thus, distributed methods for training a model on a single graph incur either significant communication overhead between clients or a loss of available information to the training. We introduce the Federated Graph Convolutional Network (FedGCN) algorithm, which uses federated learning to train GCN models for semi-supervised node classification with fast convergence and little communication. Compared to prior methods that require extra communication among clients at each training round, FedGCN clients only communicate with the central server in one pre-training step, greatly reducing communication costs and allowing the use of homomorphic encryption to further enhance privacy. We theoretically analyze the tradeoff between FedGCN's convergence rate and communication cost under different data distributions. Experimental results show that our FedGCN algorithm achieves better model accuracy with 51.7\% faster convergence on average and at least 100$\times$ less communication compared to prior work.
tl;dr: We propose the first online quantum algorithm for zero-sum games with logarithmic regret under the game setting.
We propose the first online quantum algorithm for zero-sum games with $\widetilde O(1)$ regret under the game setting. Moreover, our quantum algorithm computes an $\varepsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium of an $m \times n$ matrix zero-sum game in quantum time $\widetilde O(\sqrt{m+n}/\varepsilon^{2.5})$. Our algorithm uses standard quantum inputs and generates classical outputs with succinct descriptions, facilitating end-to-end applications. As an application, we obtain a fast quantum linear programming solver. Technically, our online quantum algorithm "quantizes" classical algorithms based on the optimistic multiplicative weight update method. At the heart of our algorithm is a fast quantum multi-sampling procedure for the Gibbs sampling problem, which may be of independent interest.
We systematically analyze optimization dynamics in deep neural networks (DNNs) trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study the effect of learning rate $\eta$, depth $d$, and width $w$ of the neural network. By analyzing the maximum eigenvalue $\lambda^H_t$ of the Hessian of the loss, which is a measure of sharpness of the loss landscape, we find that the dynamics can show four distinct regimes: (i) an early time transient regime, (ii) an intermediate saturation regime, (iii) a progressive sharpening regime, and (iv) a late time "edge of stability" regime. The early and intermediate regimes (i) and (ii) exhibit a rich phase diagram depending on $\eta \equiv c / \lambda_0^H $, $d$, and $w$. We identify several critical values of $c$, which separate qualitatively distinct phenomena in the early time dynamics of training loss and sharpness. Notably, we discover the opening up of a "sharpness reduction" phase, where sharpness decreases at early times, as $d$ and $ 1/w$ are increased.
1170. Towards robust and generalizable representations of extracellular data using contrastive learning
tl;dr: A contrastive learning spike featurization method for high-density extracellular recordings.
Contrastive learning is quickly becoming an essential tool in neuroscience for extracting robust and meaningful representations of neural activity. Despite numerous applications to neuronal population data, there has been little exploration of how these methods can be adapted to key primary data analysis tasks such as spike sorting or cell-type classification. In this work, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework, CEED (Contrastive Embeddings for Extracellular Data), for high-density extracellular recordings. We demonstrate that through careful design of the network architecture and data augmentations, it is possible to generically extract representations that far outperform current specialized approaches. We validate our method across multiple high-density extracellular recordings. All code used to run CEED can be found at https://github.com/ankitvishnu23/CEED.
tl;dr: We show that a single embedding space can support multiple vocabularies (multiplexing), driving significant practical improvements to recommendation systems.
Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a $d$-dimensional embedding, which introduces hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used for many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations give Pareto-optimal space-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.
tl;dr: This paper proposes methods for game solving with online fine-tuning; namely, while solving, we simultaneously use an online fine-tuning trainer to fine-tune heuristics to provide higher accurate evaluations.
Game solving is a similar, yet more difficult task than mastering a game. Solving a game typically means to find the game-theoretic value (outcome given optimal play), and optionally a full strategy to follow in order to achieve that outcome. The AlphaZero algorithm has demonstrated super-human level play, and its powerful policy and value predictions have also served as heuristics in game solving. However, to solve a game and obtain a full strategy, a winning response must be found for all possible moves by the losing player. This includes very poor lines of play from the losing side, for which the AlphaZero self-play process will not encounter. AlphaZero-based heuristics can be highly inaccurate when evaluating these out-of-distribution positions, which occur throughout the entire search. To address this issue, this paper investigates applying online fine-tuning while searching and proposes two methods to learn tailor-designed heuristics for game solving. Our experiments show that using online fine-tuning can solve a series of challenging 7x7 Killall-Go problems, using only 23.54\% of computation time compared to the baseline without online fine-tuning. Results suggest that the savings scale with problem size. Our method can further be extended to any tree search algorithm for problem solving. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/neurips2023-online-fine-tuning-solver.
High-dimensional mediation analysis is often associated with a multiple testing problem for detecting significant mediators. Assessing the uncertainty of this detecting process via false discovery rate (FDR) has garnered great interest. To control the FDR in multiple testing, two essential steps are involved: ranking and selection. Existing approaches either construct p-values without calibration or disregard the joint information across tests, leading to conservation in FDR control or non-optimal ranking rules for multiple hypotheses. In this paper, we develop an adaptive mediation detection procedure (referred to as "AMDP") to identify relevant mediators while asymptotically controlling the FDR in high-dimensional mediation analysis. AMDP produces the optimal rule for ranking hypotheses and proposes a data-driven strategy to determine the threshold for mediator selection. This novel method captures information from the proportions of composite null hypotheses and the distribution of p-values, which turns the high dimensionality into an advantage instead of a limitation. The numerical studies on synthetic and real data sets illustrate the performances of AMDP compared with existing approaches.
tl;dr: Approximation algorithms for the submodular cover problem
In this paper, we consider the optimization problem Submodular Cover (SCP), which is to find a minimum cardinality subset of a finite universe $U$ such that the value of a submodular function $f$ is above an input threshold $\tau$. In particular, we consider several variants of SCP including the general case, the case where $f$ is additionally assumed to be monotone, and finally the case where $f$ is a regularized monotone submodular function. Our most significant contributions are that: (i) We propose a scalable algorithm for monotone SCP that achieves nearly the same approximation guarantees as the standard greedy algorithm in significantly faster time; (ii) We are the first to develop an algorithm for general SCP that achieves a solution arbitrarily close to being feasible; and finally (iii) we are the first to develop algorithms for regularized SCP. Our algorithms are then demonstrated to be effective in an extensive experimental section on data summarization and graph cut, two applications of SCP.
tl;dr: grouping with emergent synchronization and the representation can generalize combinatorially
Dynamically grouping sensory information into structured entities is essential for understanding the world of combinatorial nature. However, the grouping ability and therefore combinatorial generalization are still challenging artificial neural networks. Inspired by the evidence that successful grouping is indicated by neuronal coherence in the human brain, we introduce GUST (Grouping Unsupervisely by Spike Timing network), an iterative network architecture with biological constraints to bias the network towards a dynamical state of neuronal coherence that softly reflects the grouping information in the temporal structure of its spiking activity. We evaluate and analyze the model on synthetic datasets. Interestingly, the segregation ability is directly learned from superimposed stimuli with a succinct unsupervised objective. Two learning stages are present, from coarsely perceiving global features to additionally capturing local features. Further, the learned symbol-like building blocks can be systematically composed to represent novel scenes in a bio-plausible manner.
tl;dr: We study the cross-architecture distillation and propose a OFA-KD method to get better performance on teacher-student belonging to different architectures, such as CNN, Transformer, and MLP.
Knowledge distillation (KD) has proven to be a highly effective approach for enhancing model performance through a teacher-student training scheme. However, most existing distillation methods are designed under the assumption that the teacher and student models belong to the same model family, particularly the hint-based approaches. By using centered kernel alignment (CKA) to compare the learned features between heterogeneous teacher and student models, we observe significant feature divergence. This divergence illustrates the ineffectiveness of previous hint-based methods in cross-architecture distillation. To tackle the challenge in distilling heterogeneous models, we propose a simple yet effective one-for-all KD framework called OFA-KD, which significantly improves the distillation performance between heterogeneous architectures. Specifically, we project intermediate features into an aligned latent space such as the logits space, where architecture-specific information is discarded. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive target enhancement scheme to prevent the student from being disturbed by irrelevant information. Extensive experiments with various architectures, including CNN, Transformer, and MLP, demonstrate the superiority of our OFA-KD framework in enabling distillation between heterogeneous architectures. Specifically, when equipped with our OFA-KD, the student models achieve notable performance improvements, with a maximum gain of 8.0% on the CIFAR-100 dataset and 0.7% on the ImageNet-1K dataset. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/Hao840/OFAKD.
1177. Closing the Computational-Statistical Gap in Best Arm Identification for Combinatorial Semi-bandits
We study the best arm identification problem in combinatorial semi-bandits in the fixed confidence setting. We present Perturbed Frank-Wolfe Sampling (P-FWS), an algorithm that (i) runs in polynomial time, (ii) achieves the instance-specific minimal sample complexity in the high confidence regime, and (iii) enjoys polynomial sample complexity guarantees in the moderate confidence regime. To our best knowledge, existing algorithms cannot achieve (ii) and (iii) simultaneously in vanilla bandits. With P-FWS, we close the computational-statistical gap in best arm identification in combinatorial semi-bandits. The design of P-FWS starts from the optimization problem that defines the information-theoretical and instance-specific sample complexity lower bound. P-FWS solves this problem in an online manner using, in each round, a single iteration of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Structural properties of the problem are leveraged to make the P-FWS successive updates computationally efficient. In turn, P-FWS only relies on a simple linear maximization oracle.
This paper examines learning the optimal filtering policy, known as the Kalman gain, for a linear system with unknown noise covariance matrices using noisy output data. The learning problem is formulated as a stochastic policy optimiza- tion problem, aiming to minimize the output prediction error. This formulation provides a direct bridge between data-driven optimal control and, its dual, op- timal filtering. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we conduct a thorough convergence analysis of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm, adopted for the filtering problem, accounting for biased gradients and stability constraints. Secondly, we carefully leverage a combination of tools from linear system theory and high-dimensional statistics to derive bias-variance error bounds that scale logarithmically with problem dimension, and, in contrast to subspace methods, the length of output trajectories only affects the bias term.
tl;dr: Introducing SeeTRUE, an image-text alignment benchmark; we showcase two methods using question generation, visual QA, and classification, excelling in alignment tasks and enabling text-to-image reordering.
Automatically determining whether a text and a corresponding image are semantically aligned is a significant challenge for vision-language models, with applications in generative text-to-image and image-to-text tasks. In this work, we study methods for automatic text-image alignment evaluation. We first introduce SeeTRUE: a comprehensive evaluation set, spanning multiple datasets from both text-to-image and image-to-text generation tasks, with human judgements for whether a given text-image pair is semantically aligned. We then describe two automatic methods to determine alignment: the first involving a pipeline based on question generation and visual question answering models, and the second employing an end-to-end classification approach by finetuning multimodal pretrained models. Both methods surpass prior approaches in various text-image alignment tasks, with significant improvements in challenging cases that involve complex composition or unnatural images. Finally, we demonstrate how our approaches can localize specific misalignments between an image and a given text, and how they can be used to automatically re-rank candidates in text-to-image generation.
tl;dr: A model that combines object-centric and relational inductive biases achieves systematic generalization in abstract visual reasoning tasks.
Human visual reasoning is characterized by an ability to identify abstract patterns from only a small number of examples, and to systematically generalize those patterns to novel inputs. This capacity depends in large part on our ability to represent complex visual inputs in terms of both objects and relations. Recent work in computer vision has introduced models with the capacity to extract object-centric representations, leading to the ability to process multi-object visual inputs, but falling short of the systematic generalization displayed by human reasoning. Other recent models have employed inductive biases for relational abstraction to achieve systematic generalization of learned abstract rules, but have generally assumed the presence of object-focused inputs. Here, we combine these two approaches, introducing Object-Centric Relational Abstraction (OCRA), a model that extracts explicit representations of both objects and abstract relations, and achieves strong systematic generalization in tasks (including a novel dataset, CLEVR-ART, with greater visual complexity) involving complex visual displays.
1181. Exploiting Connections between Lipschitz Structures for Certifiably Robust Deep Equilibrium Models
tl;dr: We delineate the connections between various Lipschitz parameterizations of DEQ and existing state-of-the-art explicit Lipschitz networks to improve our understanding of achieving better certified robustness for DEQ.
Recently, deep equilibrium models (DEQs) have drawn increasing attention from the machine learning community. However, DEQs are much less understood in terms of certified robustness than their explicit network counterparts. In this paper, we advance the understanding of certified robustness of DEQs via exploiting the connections between various Lipschitz network parameterizations for both explicit and implicit models. Importantly, we show that various popular Lipschitz network structures, including convex potential layers (CPL), SDP-based Lipschitz layers (SLL), almost orthogonal layers (AOL), Sandwich layers, and monotone DEQs (MonDEQ) can all be reparameterized as special cases of the Lipschitz-bounded equilibrium networks (LBEN) without changing the prescribed Lipschitz constant in the original network parameterization. A key feature of our reparameterization technique is that it preserves the Lipschitz prescription used in different structures. This opens the possibility of achieving improved certified robustness of DEQs via a combination of network reparameterization, structure-preserving regularization, and LBEN-based fine-tuning. We also support our theoretical understanding with new empirical results, which show that our proposed method improves the certified robust accuracy of DEQs on classification tasks. All codes and experiments are made available at \url{https://github.com/AaronHavens/ExploitingLipschitzDEQ}.
tl;dr: Sorting data using activations of an interpretable model enables efficient discovery, measurement, and mitigation of bias caused by spurious correlations.
We present a simple but effective method to measure and mitigate model biases caused by reliance on spurious cues. Instead of requiring costly changes to one's data or model training, our method better utilizes the data one already has by sorting them. Specifically, we rank images within their classes based on spuriosity (the degree to which common spurious cues are present), proxied via deep neural features of an interpretable network. With spuriosity rankings, it is easy to identify minority subpopulations (i.e. low spuriosity images) and assess model bias as the gap in accuracy between high and low spuriosity images. One can even efficiently remove a model's bias at little cost to accuracy by finetuning its classification head on low spuriosity images, resulting in fairer treatment of samples regardless of spuriosity. We demonstrate our method on ImageNet, annotating $5000$ class-feature dependencies ($630$ of which we find to be spurious) and generating a dataset of $325k$ soft segmentations for these features along the way. Having computed spuriosity rankings via the identified spurious neural features, we assess biases for $89$ diverse models and find that class-wise biases are highly correlated across models. Our results suggest that model bias due to spurious feature reliance is influenced far more by what the model is trained on than how it is trained.
Text-to-image generation has recently witnessed remarkable achievements. We introduce a text-conditional image diffusion model, termed RAPHAEL, to generate highly artistic images, which accurately portray the text prompts, encompassing multiple nouns, adjectives, and verbs. This is achieved by stacking tens of mixture-of-experts (MoEs) layers, i.e., space-MoE and time-MoE layers, enabling billions of diffusion paths (routes) from the network input to the output. Each path intuitively functions as a "painter" for depicting a particular textual concept onto a specified image region at a diffusion timestep. Comprehensive experiments reveal that RAPHAEL outperforms recent cutting-edge models, such as Stable Diffusion, ERNIE-ViLG 2.0, DeepFloyd, and DALL-E 2, in terms of both image quality and aesthetic appeal. Firstly, RAPHAEL exhibits superior performance in switching images across diverse styles, such as Japanese comics, realism, cyberpunk, and ink illustration. Secondly, a single model with three billion parameters, trained on 1,000 A100 GPUs for two months, achieves a state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 6.61 on the COCO dataset. Furthermore, RAPHAEL significantly surpasses its counterparts in human evaluation on the ViLG-300 benchmark. We believe that RAPHAEL holds the potential to propel the frontiers of image generation research in both academia and industry, paving the way for future breakthroughs in this rapidly evolving field. More details can be found on an anonymous webpage: https://raphaelpainting.github.io/.
Models that rely solely on pairwise relationships often fail to capture the complete statistical structure of the complex multivariate data found in diverse domains, such as socio-economic, ecological, or biomedical systems. Non-trivial dependencies between groups of more than two variables can play a significant role in the analysis and modelling of such systems, yet extracting such high-order interactions from data remains challenging. Here, we introduce a hierarchy of $d$-order ($d \geq 2$) interaction measures, increasingly inclusive of possible factorisations of the joint probability distribution, and define non-parametric, kernel-based tests to establish systematically the statistical significance of $d$-order interactions. We also establish mathematical links with lattice theory, which elucidate the derivation of the interaction measures and their composite permutation tests; clarify the connection of simplicial complexes with kernel matrix centring; and provide a means to enhance computational efficiency. We illustrate our results numerically with validations on synthetic data, and through an application to neuroimaging data.
tl;dr: We introduce Experiment Pretrained Transformer (ExPT), a novel method that can solve challenging experimental design problems with only a handful of labeled data points.
Experimental design is a fundamental problem in many science and engineering fields. In this problem, sample efficiency is crucial due to the time, money, and safety costs of real-world design evaluations. Existing approaches either rely on active data collection or access to large, labeled datasets of past experiments, making them impractical in many real-world scenarios. In this work, we address the more challenging yet realistic setting of few-shot experimental design, where only a few labeled data points of input designs and their corresponding values are available. We approach this problem as a conditional generation task, where a model conditions on a few labeled examples and the desired output to generate an optimal input design. To this end, we introduce Experiment Pretrained Transformers (ExPT), a foundation model for few-shot experimental design that employs a novel combination of synthetic pretraining with in-context learning. In ExPT, we only assume knowledge of a finite collection of unlabelled data points from the input domain and pretrain a transformer neural network to optimize diverse synthetic functions defined over this domain. Unsupervised pretraining allows ExPT to adapt to any design task at test time in an in-context fashion by conditioning on a few labeled data points from the target task and generating the candidate optima. We evaluate ExPT on few-shot experimental design in challenging domains and demonstrate its superior generality and performance compared to existing methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/tung-nd/ExPT.git.
How neuronal circuits achieve credit assignment remains a central unsolved question in systems neuroscience. Various studies have suggested plausible solutions for back-propagating error signals through multi-layer networks. These purely functionally motivated models assume distinct neuronal compartments to represent local error signals that determine the sign of synaptic plasticity. However, this explicit error modulation is inconsistent with phenomenological plasticity models in which the sign depends primarily on postsynaptic activity. Here we show how a plausible microcircuit model and Hebbian learning rule derived within an adaptive control theory framework can resolve this discrepancy. Assuming errors are encoded in top-down dis-inhibitory synaptic afferents, we show that error-modulated learning emerges naturally at the circuit level when recurrent inhibition explicitly influences Hebbian plasticity. The same learning rule accounts for experimentally observed plasticity in the absence of inhibition and performs comparably to back-propagation of error (BP) on several non-linearly separable benchmarks. Our findings bridge the gap between functional and experimentally observed plasticity rules and make concrete predictions on inhibitory modulation of excitatory plasticity.
tl;dr: MusicGen is simple, efficient, and controllable music generation, that can be conditioned on text and melody.
We tackle the task of conditional music generation. We introduce MusicGen, a single Language Model (LM) that operates over several streams of compressed discrete music representation, i.e., tokens. Unlike prior work, MusicGen is comprised of a single-stage transformer LM together with efficient token interleaving patterns, which eliminates the need for cascading several models, e.g., hierarchically or upsampling. Following this approach, we demonstrate how MusicGen can generate high-quality samples, both mono and stereo, while being conditioned on textual description or melodic features, allowing better controls over the generated output. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation, considering both automatic and human studies, showing the proposed approach is superior to the evaluated baselines on a standard text-to-music benchmark. Through ablation studies, we shed light over the importance of each of the components comprising MusicGen. Music samples, code, and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/audiocraft
tl;dr: We propose a theoretically-principled framework to bound the invertibility of instance encoding using Fisher information leakage. Our bound works for arbitrary (biased or unbiased) attackers and real-world datasets with an intractible prior.
Privacy-preserving instance encoding aims to encode raw data into feature vectors without revealing their privacy-sensitive information. When designed properly, these encodings can be used for downstream ML applications such as training and inference with limited privacy risk. However, the vast majority of existing schemes do not theoretically justify that their encoding is non-invertible, and their privacy-enhancing properties are only validated empirically against a limited set of attacks. In this paper, we propose a theoretically-principled measure for the invertibility of instance encoding based on Fisher information that is broadly applicable to a wide range of popular encoders. We show that dFIL can be used to bound the invertibility of encodings both theoretically and empirically, providing an intuitive interpretation of the privacy of instance encoding.
tl;dr: We give polylog(n) space single-pass streaming algorithms that approximate the optimal correlation clustering cost, and we provide memory-approximation trade-offs to justify our approximation.
Correlation clustering is a fundamental optimization problem at the intersection of machine learning and theoretical computer science.
Motivated by applications to big data processing, recent years have witnessed a flurry of results on this problem in the streaming model.
In this model, the algorithm needs to process the input $n$-vertex graph by making one or few passes over the stream of its edges and using a limited memory, much smaller than the input size.
All previous work on streaming correlation clustering have focused on semi-streaming algorithms with $\Omega(n)$ memory, whereas in this work, we study streaming algorithms with much smaller memory requirement of only $\text{polylog}{(n)}$ bits. This stringent memory requirement is in the same spirit of classical streaming algorithms that instead of recovering a full solution to the problem---which can be prohibitively large with such small memory as is the case in our problem---, aimed to learn certain statistical properties of their inputs. In our case, this translates to determining the ``(correlation) clusterability'' of input graphs, or more precisely, estimating the cost of the optimal correlation clustering solution.
As our main result, we present two novel algorithms that in only $\text{polylog}{(n)}$ space are able to estimate the optimal correlation clustering cost up to some constant multiplicative factor plus some extra additive error. One of the algorithms outputs a $3$-multiplicative approximation plus $o(n^2)$ additive approximation, and the other one improves the additive error further down at the cost of increasing the multiplicative factor to some large constant. We then present new lower bounds that justify this mix of both multiplicative and additive error approximation in our algorithms.
tl;dr: This work is dedicated to the algorithm design in a competitive framework, with the primary goal of learning a stable equilibrium.
This work is dedicated to the algorithm design in a competitive framework, with the primary goal of learning a stable equilibrium. We consider the dynamic price competition between two firms operating within an opaque marketplace, where each firm lacks information about its competitor. The demand follows the multinomial logit (MNL) choice model, which depends on the consumers' observed price and their reference price, and consecutive periods in the repeated games are connected by reference price updates. We use the notion of stationary Nash equilibrium (SNE), defined as the fixed point of the equilibrium pricing policy for the single-period game, to simultaneously capture the long-run market equilibrium and stability. We propose the online projected gradient ascent algorithm (OPGA), where the firms adjust prices using the first-order derivatives of their log-revenues that can be obtained from the market feedback mechanism. Despite the absence of typical properties required for the convergence of online games, such as strong monotonicity and variational stability, we demonstrate that under diminishing step-sizes, the price and reference price paths generated by OPGA converge to the unique SNE, thereby achieving the no-regret learning and a stable market. Moreover, with appropriate step-sizes, we prove that this convergence exhibits a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$.
tl;dr: We propose a two-stage VPGTrans framework that can build new MLLMs (e.g., BLIP-2, PALM-E) by transferring visual perception modules of exsiting MLLMs to reduce the training cost (e.g., using only 10% cost).
Since developing a new multimodal LLM (MLLM) by pre-training on tremendous image-text pairs from scratch can be exceedingly resource-consuming, connecting an existing LLM with a comparatively lightweight visual prompt generator (VPG) becomes a feasible paradigm. However, further tuning the VPG component of the MLLM still incurs significant computational costs, such as thousands of GPU hours and millions of training data points. An alternative solution is transferring an existing VPG from one MLLM to the target MLLM. In this work, we investigate VPG transferability across LLMs for the first time, aiming to reduce the cost of VPG training. Specifically, we explore VPG transfer across different LLM sizes (e.g., small-to-large) and types. We identify key factors to maximize transfer efficiency, based on which we develop a simple yet highly effective two-stage transfer framework, called VPGTrans. Notably, it enables VPG transfer from BLIP-2 OPT 2.7B to BLIP-2 OPT 6.7B with less than 10% of the GPU hours using only 10.7% of the training data compared to training a VPG for OPT 6.7B from scratch. Furthermore, we provide a series of intriguing findings and discuss potential explanations behind them. Finally, we showcase the practical value of our VPGTrans approach, by customizing two novel MLLMs, including VL-LLaMA and VL-Vicuna, with recently released LLaMA and Vicuna LLMs.
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is important for reliability assessment and enhancement of machine learning models. In deep learning, uncertainties arise not only from data, but also from the training procedure that often injects substantial noises and biases. These hinder the attainment of statistical guarantees and, moreover, impose computational challenges on UQ due to the need for repeated network retraining. Building upon the recent neural tangent kernel theory, we create statistically guaranteed schemes to principally \emph{characterize}, and \emph{remove}, the uncertainty of over-parameterized neural networks with very low computation effort. In particular, our approach, based on what we call a procedural-noise-correcting (PNC) predictor, removes the procedural uncertainty by using only \emph{one} auxiliary network that is trained on a suitably labeled dataset, instead of many retrained networks employed in deep ensembles. Moreover, by combining our PNC predictor with suitable light-computation resampling methods, we build several approaches to construct asymptotically exact-coverage confidence intervals using as low as four trained networks without additional overheads.
tl;dr: Bayesian optimization where the learner chooses a subset of query variables and specifies their values while the rest are randomly sampled, and each subset comes with a cost.
We introduce the problem of Bayesian optimization with cost-varying variable subsets (BOCVS) where in each iteration, the learner chooses a subset of query variables and specifies their values while the rest are randomly sampled. Each chosen subset has an associated cost. This presents the learner with the novel challenge of balancing between choosing more informative subsets for more directed learning versus leaving some variables to be randomly sampled to reduce incurred costs. This paper presents a novel Gaussian process upper confidence bound-based algorithm for solving the BOCVS problem that is provably no-regret. We analyze how the availability of cheaper control sets helps in exploration and reduces overall regret. We empirically show that our proposed algorithm can find significantly better solutions than comparable baselines with the same budget.
tl;dr: We propose the first spatial NDCG optimization method for urban event location ranking on spatiotemporal data
The problem of urban event ranking aims at predicting the top-$k$ most risky locations of future events such as traffic accidents and crimes. This problem is of fundamental importance to public safety and urban administration especially when limited resources are available. The problem is, however, challenging due to complex and dynamic spatio-temporal correlations between locations, uneven distribution of urban events in space, and the difficulty to correctly rank nearby locations with similar features. Prior works on event forecasting mostly aim at accurately predicting the actual risk score or counts of events for all the locations. Rankings obtained as such usually have low quality due to prediction errors. Learning-to-rank methods directly optimize measures such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), but cannot handle the spatiotemporal autocorrelation existing among locations. Due to the common assumption that items are independent. In this paper, we bridge the gap by proposing a novel spatial event ranking approach named SpatialRank. SpatialRank features adaptive graph convolution layers that dynamically learn the spatiotemporal dependencies across locations from data. In addition, the model optimizes through surrogates a hybrid NDCG loss with a spatial component to better rank neighboring spatial locations. We design an importance-sampling with a spatial filtering algorithm to effectively evaluate the loss during training. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that SpatialRank can effectively identify the top riskiest locations of crimes and traffic accidents and outperform state-of-art methods in terms of NDCG by up to 12.7%.
Targeted protein degradation techniques, such as PROteolysis TArgeting Chimeras (PROTACs), have emerged as powerful tools for selectively removing disease-causing proteins. One challenging problem in this field is designing a linker to connect different molecular fragments to form a stable drug-candidate molecule. Existing models for linker design assume that the relative positions of the fragments are known, which may not be the case in real scenarios. In this work, we address a more general problem where the poses of the fragments are *unknown* in 3D space. We develop a 3D equivariant diffusion model that jointly learns the generative process of both fragment poses and the 3D structure of the linker. By viewing fragments as rigid bodies, we design a fragment pose prediction module inspired by the Newton-Euler equations in rigid body mechanics. Empirical studies on ZINC and PROTAC-DB datasets demonstrate that our model can generate chemically valid, synthetically-accessible, and low-energy molecules under both unconstrained and constrained generation settings.
Heterogeneous federated learning without assuming any structure is challenging due to the conflicts among non-identical data distributions of clients. In practice, clients often comprise near-homogeneous clusters so training a server-side model per cluster mitigates the conflicts. However, FL with client clustering often suffers from “clustering collapse'', i.e., one cluster's model excels on increasing clients, and reduces to single-model FL. Moreover, cluster-wise models hinder knowledge sharing between clusters and each model depends on fewer clients. Furthermore, the static clustering assumption on data may not hold for dynamically changing models, which are sensitive to cluster imbalance/initialization or outliers. To address these challenges, we propose ''Clustered Additive Modeling (CAM)'', which applies a globally shared model $\Theta_g$ on top of the cluster-wise models $\Theta_{1:K}$, i.e., $y=h(x;\Theta_g)+f(x;\Theta_k)$ for clients of cluster-$k$. The global model captures the features shared by all clusters so $\Theta_{1:K}$ are enforced to focus on the difference among clusters. To train CAM, we develop a novel Fed-CAM algorithm that alternates between client clustering and training global/cluster models to predict the residual of each other. We can easily modify any existing clustered FL methods by CAM and significantly improve their performance without ‘’clustering collapse'' in different non-IID settings. We also provide a convergence analysis of Fed-CAM algorithm.
tl;dr: This study investigates the performance disparity of GNNs on homophilic and heterophilic nodes in the same graph.
Recent studies on Graph Neural Networks(GNNs) provide both empirical and theoretical evidence supporting their effectiveness in capturing structural patterns on both homophilic and certain heterophilic graphs. Notably, most real-world homophilic and heterophilic graphs are comprised of a mixture of nodes in both homophilic and heterophilic structural patterns, exhibiting a structural disparity. However, the analysis of GNN performance with respect to nodes exhibiting different structural patterns, e.g., homophilic nodes in heterophilic graphs, remains rather limited. In the present study, we provide evidence that Graph Neural Networks(GNNs) on node classification typically perform admirably on homophilic nodes within homophilic graphs and heterophilic nodes within heterophilic graphs while struggling on the opposite node set, exhibiting a performance disparity. We theoretically and empirically identify effects of GNNs on testing nodes exhibiting distinct structural patterns. We then propose a rigorous, non-i.i.d PAC-Bayesian generalization bound for GNNs, revealing reasons for the performance disparity, namely the aggregated feature distance and homophily ratio difference between training and testing nodes. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical implications of our new findings via (1) elucidating the effectiveness of deeper GNNs; and (2) revealing an over-looked distribution shift factor on graph out-of-distribution problem and proposing a new scenario accordingly.
tl;dr: We present a new masked modeling method for time series as SimMTM. Unlike the previous, it reconstructs the original time series with multiple series. SimMTM achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance in both forecasting and classification.
Time series analysis is widely used in extensive areas. Recently, to reduce labeling expenses and benefit various tasks, self-supervised pre-training has attracted immense interest. One mainstream paradigm is masked modeling, which successfully pre-trains deep models by learning to reconstruct the masked content based on the unmasked part. However, since the semantic information of time series is mainly contained in temporal variations, the standard way of randomly masking a portion of time points will seriously ruin vital temporal variations of time series, making the reconstruction task too difficult to guide representation learning. We thus present SimMTM, a Simple pre-training framework for Masked Time-series Modeling. By relating masked modeling to manifold learning, SimMTM proposes to recover masked time points by the weighted aggregation of multiple neighbors outside the manifold, which eases the reconstruction task by assembling ruined but complementary temporal variations from multiple masked series. SimMTM further learns to uncover the local structure of the manifold, which is helpful for masked modeling. Experimentally, SimMTM achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance compared to the most advanced time series pre-training methods in two canonical time series analysis tasks: forecasting and classification, covering both in- and cross-domain settings.
tl;dr: We present MagicBrush, a large-scale and manually annotated dataset for instruction-guided real image editing.
Text-guided image editing is widely needed in daily life, ranging from personal use to professional applications such as Photoshop.
However, existing methods are either zero-shot or trained on an automatically synthesized dataset, which contains a high volume of noise.
Thus, they still require lots of manual tuning to produce desirable outcomes in practice.
To address this issue, we introduce MagicBrush, the first large-scale, manually annotated dataset for instruction-guided real image editing that covers diverse scenarios: single-turn, multi-turn, mask-provided, and mask-free editing.
MagicBrush comprises over 10K manually annotated triplets (source image, instruction, target image), which supports trainining large-scale text-guided image editing models.
We fine-tune InstructPix2Pix on MagicBrush and show that the new model can produce much better images according to human evaluation.
We further conduct extensive experiments to evaluate current image editing baselines from multiple dimensions including quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations.
The results reveal the challenging nature of our dataset and the gap between current baselines and real-world editing needs.
tl;dr: We present a novel dataset and tasks for evaluating creative problem solving in LLMs that mimic analogical cognitive neuroscience (RAT) tests. We report baseline evaluation results on a suite of PLMs, LLMs and human performance.
The quest for human imitative AI has been an enduring topic in AI research since inception. The technical evolution and emerging capabilities of the latest cohort of large language models (LLMs) have reinvigorated the subject beyond academia to cultural zeitgeist.
While recent NLP evaluation benchmark tasks test some aspects of human-imitative behaviour (e.g., BIG-bench's `human-like behavior' tasks), few, if not none, examine *creative problem solving* abilities. Creative problem solving in humans is a well-studied topic in cognitive neuroscience with standardized tests that predominantly use ability to associate (heterogeneous) connections among clue words as a metric for creativity. Exposure to misleading stimuli --- distractors dubbed *red herrings* --- impede human performance in such tasks via the *fixation effect* and Einstellung paradigm. In cognitive neuroscience studies, such fixations are experimentally induced by pre-exposing participants to orthographically similar incorrect words to subsequent word-fragments or clues. The popular British quiz show Only Connect's *Connecting Wall* segment essentially mimics Mednick's Remote Associates Test (RAT) formulation with built-in, deliberate red herrings, that makes it an ideal proxy dataset to explore and study fixation effect and Einstellung paradigm from cognitive neuroscience in LLMs. In addition to presenting the novel Only Connect Wall (OCW) dataset, we also report results from our evaluation of selected pre-trained language models and LLMs (including OpenAI's GPT series) on creative problem solving tasks like grouping clue words by heterogeneous connections, and identifying correct open knowledge domain connections in respective groups. We synthetically generate two additional datasets: OCW-Randomized, OCW-WordNet to further analyze our red-herrings hypothesis in language models.
The code and link to the dataset is available at [url](https://github.com/TaatiTeam/OCW).
1201. MVDiffusion: Enabling Holistic Multi-view Image Generation with Correspondence-Aware Diffusion
tl;dr: This paper introduces MVDiffusion, a simple yet effective multi-view image generation method, tailored for scenarios where pixel-to-pixel correspondences are available, such as perspective crops from panorama or multi-view images given depth/pose.
This paper introduces MVDiffusion, a simple yet effective multi-view image generation method for scenarios where pixel-to-pixel correspondences are available, such as perspective crops from panorama or multi-view images given geometry (depth maps and poses). Unlike prior methods that rely on iterative image warping and inpainting, MVDiffusion concurrently generates all images with a global awareness, encompassing high resolution and rich content, effectively addressing the error accumulation prevalent in preceding models. MVDiffusion specifically incorporates a correspondence-aware attention mechanism, enabling effective cross-view interaction. This mechanism underpins three pivotal modules: 1) a generation module that produces low-resolution images while maintaining global correspondence, 2) an interpolation module that densifies spatial coverage between images, and 3) a super-resolution module that upscales into high-resolution images. In terms of panoramic imagery, MVDiffusion generates high-resolution photorealistic images up to 1024*1024 pixels. For geometry-conditioned multi-view image generation, MVDiffusion demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on texture-map generation for a given scene mesh. We recommend referring to our Arxiv version at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.01097.pdf for the latest update. The project page is at https://mvdiffusion.github.io/.
1202. VisIT-Bench: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following Vision-and-Language Models
tl;dr: Introducing VisIT-Bench, a dynamic benchmark and evaluation metric for vision-language models. It provides rankings, diverse tasks, and enhances model evaluations. VisIT-Bench highlights performance gaps and supports future research.
We introduce VisIT-Bench (Visual InsTruction Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluating instruction-following vision-language models for real-world use. Our starting point is curating 70 "instruction families" that we envision instruction tuned vision-language models should be able to address. Extending beyond evaluations like VQAv2 and COCO, tasks range from basic recognition to game playing and creative generation. Following curation, our dataset comprises 592 test queries, each with a human-authored instruction-conditioned caption. These descriptions surface instruction-specific factors, e.g., for an instruction asking about the accessibility of a storefront for wheelchair users, the instruction-conditioned caption describes ramps/potential obstacles. These descriptions enable 1) collecting human-verified reference outputs for each instance; and 2) automatic evaluation of candidate multimodal generations using a text-only LLM, aligning with human judgment. We quantify quality gaps between models and references using both human and automatic evaluations; e.g., the top-performing instruction-following model wins against the GPT-4 reference in just 27% of the comparison. VisIT-Bench is dynamic to participate, practitioners simply submit their model's response on the project website; Data, code and leaderboard is available at https://visit-bench.github.io/.
tl;dr: We modify TD3+BC with [layer norm, deeper critic, higher discount factor, decoupled penalization] and find it can outperform SOTA ensemble-free offline RL algorithms
Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in offline reinforcement learning (RL), resulting in the development of numerous algorithms with varying degrees of complexity. While these algorithms have led to noteworthy improvements, many incorporate seemingly minor design choices that impact their effectiveness beyond core algorithmic advances. However, the effect of these design choices on established baselines remains understudied. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by conducting a retrospective analysis of recent works in offline RL and propose ReBRAC, a minimalistic algorithm that integrates such design elements built on top of the TD3+BC method. We evaluate ReBRAC on 51 datasets with both proprioceptive and visual state spaces using D4RL and V-D4RL benchmarks, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance among ensemble-free methods in both offline and offline-to-online settings. To further illustrate the efficacy of these design choices, we perform a large-scale ablation study and hyperparameter sensitivity analysis on the scale of thousands of experiments.
tl;dr: We present the first diffusion-based framework to learn an unknown distribution when the training set only contains highly-corrupted examples drawn from it.
We present the first diffusion-based framework that can learn an unknown distribution using only highly-corrupted samples. This problem arises in scientific applications where access to uncorrupted samples is impossible or expensive to acquire. Another benefit of our approach is the ability to train generative models that are less likely to memorize any individual training sample, since they never observe clean training data.
Our main idea is to introduce additional measurement distortion during the diffusion process and require the model to predict the original corrupted image from the further corrupted image. We prove that our method leads to models that learn the conditional expectation of the full uncorrupted image given this additional measurement corruption. This holds for any corruption process that satisfies some technical conditions (and in particular includes inpainting and compressed sensing). We train models on standard benchmarks (CelebA, CIFAR-10 and AFHQ) and show that we can learn the distribution even when all the training samples have 90\% of their pixels missing. We also show that we can finetune foundation models on small corrupted datasets (e.g. MRI scans with block corruptions) and learn the clean distribution without memorizing the training set.
In real-world online web systems, multiple users usually arrive sequentially into the system. For applications like click fraud and fake reviews, some users can maliciously perform corrupted (disrupted) behaviors to trick the system. Therefore, it is crucial to design efficient online learning algorithms to robustly learn from potentially corrupted user behaviors and accurately identify the corrupted users in an online manner. Existing works propose bandit algorithms robust to adversarial corruption. However, these algorithms are designed for a single user, and cannot leverage the implicit social relations among multiple users for more efficient learning. Moreover, none of them consider how to detect corrupted users online in the multiple-user scenario. In this paper, we present an important online learning problem named LOCUD to learn and utilize unknown user relations from disrupted behaviors to speed up learning, and identify the corrupted users in an online setting. To robustly learn and utilize the unknown relations among potentially corrupted users, we propose a novel bandit algorithm RCLUB-WCU. To detect the corrupted users, we devise a novel online detection algorithm OCCUD based on RCLUB-WCU's inferred user relations. We prove a regret upper bound for RCLUB-WCU, which asymptotically matches the lower bound with respect to $T$ up to logarithmic factors, and matches the state-of-the-art results in degenerate cases. We also give a theoretical guarantee for the detection accuracy of OCCUD. With extensive experiments, our methods achieve superior performance over previous bandit algorithms and high corrupted user detection accuracy.
1206. An Efficient and Robust Framework for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Attribute Constraint
tl;dr: An Efficient and Robust Framework for ANNS with Attribute Constraint
This paper introduces an efficient and robust framework for hybrid query (HQ) processing, which combines approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) with attribute constraint. HQ aims to find objects that are similar to a feature vector and match some structured attributes. Existing methods handle ANNS and attribute filtering separately, leading to inefficiency and inaccuracy. Our framework, called native hybrid query (NHQ), builds a composite index based on proximity graph (PG) and applies joint pruning for HQ. We can easily adapt existing PGs to this framework for efficient HQ processing. We also propose two new navigable PGs (NPGs) with optimized edge selection and routing, which improve the overall ANNS performance. We implement five HQ methods based on the proposed NPGs and existing PGs in NHQ, and show that they outperform the state-of-the-art methods on 10 real-world datasets (up to 315$\times$ faster with the same accuracy).
tl;dr: We uncover the the surprising finding that decreasing the batch size improves the performance of many standard deep RL agents.
In value-based deep reinforcement learning with replay memories, the batch size parameter specifies how many transitions to sample for each gradient update. Although critical to the learning process, this value is typically not adjusted when proposing new algorithms. In this work we present a broad empirical study that suggests reducing the batch size can result in a number of significant performance gains; this is surprising, as the general tendency when training neural networks is towards larger batch sizes for improved performance. We complement our experimental findings with a set of empirical analyses towards better understanding this phenomenon.
tl;dr: We build an open, massive and curated collection of interleaved image-text web documents.
Large multimodal models trained on natural documents, which interleave images and text, outperform models trained on image-text pairs on various multimodal benchmarks. However, the datasets used to train these models have not been released, and the collection process has not been fully specified. We introduce the OBELICS dataset, an open web-scale filtered dataset of interleaved image-text documents comprising 141 million web pages extracted from Common Crawl, 353 million associated images, and 115 billion text tokens. We describe the dataset creation process, present comprehensive filtering rules, and provide an analysis of the dataset's content. To show the viability of OBELICS, we train on the dataset vision and language models of 9 and 80 billion parameters, IDEFICS-9B and IDEFICS, and obtain competitive performance on different multimodal benchmarks. We release our dataset, models and code.
We study the problem of designing adaptive multi-armed bandit algorithms that perform optimally in both the stochastic setting and the adversarial setting simultaneously (often known as a best-of-both-world guarantee).
A line of recent works shows that when configured and analyzed properly, the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) algorithm, originally designed for the adversarial setting, can in fact optimally adapt to the stochastic setting as well.
Such results, however, critically rely on an assumption that there exists one unique optimal arm.
Recently, Ito [2021] took the first step to remove such an undesirable uniqueness assumption for one particular FTRL algorithm with
the 1/2-Tsallis entropy regularizer.
In this work, we significantly improve and generalize this result, showing that uniqueness is unnecessary for FTRL with a broad family of regularizers and a new learning rate schedule.
For some regularizers, our regret bounds also improve upon prior results even when uniqueness holds. We further provide an application of our results to the decoupled exploration and exploitation problem, demonstrating that our techniques are broadly applicable.
Understanding different human attributes and how they affect model behavior may become a standard need for all model creation and usage, from traditional computer vision tasks to the newest multimodal generative AI systems. In computer vision specifically, we have relied on datasets augmented with perceived attribute signals (eg, gender presentation, skin tone, and age) and benchmarks enabled by these datasets. Typically labels for these tasks come from human annotators. However, annotating attribute signals, especially skin tone, is a difficult and subjective task. Perceived skin tone is affected by technical factors, like lighting conditions, and social factors that shape an annotator's lived experience.
This paper examines the subjectivity of skin tone annotation through a series of annotation experiments using the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale~\cite{Monk2022Monk}, a small pool of professional photographers, and a much larger pool of trained crowdsourced annotators. Along with this study we release the Monk Skin Tone Examples (MST-E) dataset, containing 1515 images and 31 videos spread across the full MST scale. MST-E is designed to help train human annotators to annotate MST effectively.Our study shows that annotators can reliably annotate skin tone in a way that aligns with an expert in the MST scale, even under challenging environmental conditions. We also find evidence that annotators from different geographic regions rely on different mental models of MST categories resulting in annotations that systematically vary across regions. Given this, we advise practitioners to use a diverse set of annotators and a higher replication count for each image when annotating skin tone for fairness research.
tl;dr: The Drunkard's Dataset provides synthetic data for camera motion estimation in deformable scenes, allowing for quantitative evaluation of baselines and the development of the Drunkard's Odometry, a novel odometry method.
Estimating camera motion in deformable scenes poses a complex and open research challenge. Most existing non-rigid structure from motion techniques assume to observe also static scene parts besides deforming scene parts in order to establish an anchoring reference. However, this assumption does not hold true in certain relevant application cases such as endoscopies. Deformable odometry and SLAM pipelines, which tackle the most challenging scenario of exploratory trajectories, suffer from a lack of robustness and proper quantitative evaluation methodologies. To tackle this issue with a common benchmark, we introduce the Drunkard's Dataset, a challenging collection of synthetic data targeting visual navigation and reconstruction in deformable environments. This dataset is the first large set of exploratory camera trajectories with ground truth inside 3D scenes where every surface exhibits non-rigid deformations over time. Simulations in realistic 3D buildings lets us obtain a vast amount of data and ground truth labels, including camera poses, RGB images and depth, optical flow and normal maps at high resolution and quality. We further present a novel deformable odometry method, dubbed the Drunkard’s Odometry, which decomposes optical flow estimates into rigid-body camera motion and non-rigid scene deformations. In order to validate our data, our work contains an evaluation of several baselines as well as a novel tracking error metric which does not require ground truth data. Dataset and code: https://davidrecasens.github.io/TheDrunkard'sOdometry/
The past decade has witnessed the flourishing of a new profession as media content creators, who rely on revenue streams from online content recommendation platforms. The reward mechanism employed by these platforms creates a competitive environment among creators which affects their production choices and, consequently, content distribution and system welfare. It is thus crucial to design the platform's reward mechanism in order to steer the creators' competition towards a desirable welfare outcome in the long run. This work makes two major contributions in this regard: first, we uncover a fundamental limit about a class of widely adopted mechanisms, coined \emph{Merit-based Monotone Mechanisms}, by showing that they inevitably lead to a constant fraction loss of the optimal welfare. To circumvent this limitation, we introduce \emph{Backward Rewarding Mechanisms} (BRMs) and show that the competition game resultant from BRMs possesses a potential game structure. BRMs thus naturally induce strategic creators' collective behaviors towards optimizing the potential function, which can be designed to match any given welfare metric. In addition, the class of BRM can be parameterized so that it allows the platform to directly optimize welfare within the feasible mechanism space even when the welfare metric is not explicitly defined.
tl;dr: We show that Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs) are a dramatically cheaper and higher-quality alternative to MCMC for right-censored learning curve inference, enabling practical applications, e.g., early stopping, at almost no overhead.
Learning curve extrapolation aims to predict model performance in later epochs of training, based on the performance in earlier epochs.
In this work, we argue that, while the inherent uncertainty in the extrapolation of learning curves warrants a Bayesian approach, existing methods are (i) overly restrictive, and/or (ii) computationally expensive. We describe the first application of prior-data fitted neural networks (PFNs) in this context. A PFN is a transformer, pre-trained on data generated from a prior, to perform approximate Bayesian inference in a single forward pass. We propose LC-PFN, a PFN trained to extrapolate 10 million artificial right-censored learning curves generated from a parametric prior proposed in prior art using MCMC. We demonstrate that LC-PFN can approximate the posterior predictive distribution more accurately than MCMC, while being over 10 000 times faster. We also show that the same LC-PFN achieves competitive performance extrapolating a total of 20 000 real learning curves from four learning curve benchmarks (LCBench, NAS-Bench-201, Taskset, and PD1) that stem from training a wide range of model architectures (MLPs, CNNs, RNNs, and Transformers) on 53 different datasets with varying input modalities (tabular, image, text, and protein data). Finally, we investigate its potential in the context of model selection and find that a simple LC-PFN based predictive early stopping criterion obtains 2 - 6x speed-ups on 45 of these datasets, at virtually no overhead.
tl;dr: We perform a detailed analysis of dynamics, convergence, and implicit bias of gradient flow from a small initialisation, for learning a neuron by a one-hidden layer ReLU network, when the training points are correlated with the teacher.
We prove that, for the fundamental regression task of learning a single neuron, training a one-hidden layer ReLU network of any width by gradient flow from a small initialisation converges to zero loss and is implicitly biased to minimise the rank of network parameters. By assuming that the training points are correlated with the teacher neuron, we complement previous work that considered orthogonal datasets. Our results are based on a detailed non-asymptotic analysis of the dynamics of each hidden neuron throughout the training. We also show and characterise a surprising distinction in this setting between interpolator networks of minimal rank and those of minimal Euclidean norm. Finally we perform a range of numerical experiments, which corroborate our theoretical findings.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, including those that affect both node features and graph topology. This paper investigates GNNs derived from diverse neural flows, concentrating on their connection to various stability notions such as BIBO stability, Lyapunov stability, structural stability, and conservative stability. We argue that Lyapunov stability, despite its common use, does not necessarily ensure adversarial robustness. Inspired by physics principles, we advocate for the use of conservative Hamiltonian neural flows to construct GNNs that are robust to adversarial attacks. The adversarial robustness of different neural flow GNNs is empirically compared on several benchmark datasets under a variety of adversarial attacks. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that GNNs leveraging conservative Hamiltonian flows with Lyapunov stability substantially improve robustness against adversarial perturbations. The implementation code of experiments is available at \url{https://github.com/zknus/NeurIPS-2023-HANG-Robustness}.
tl;dr: We propose a novel WITRAN model, with the best performance and the lowest complexity for long-range time series forecasting.
Capturing semantic information is crucial for accurate long-range time series forecasting, which involves modeling global and local correlations, as well as discovering long- and short-term repetitive patterns. Previous works have partially addressed these issues separately, but have not been able to address all of them simultaneously. Meanwhile, their time and memory complexities are still not sufficiently low for long-range forecasting. To address the challenge of capturing different types of semantic information, we propose a novel Water-wave Information Transmission (WIT) framework. This framework captures both long- and short-term repetitive patterns through bi-granular information transmission. It also models global and local correlations by recursively fusing and selecting information using Horizontal Vertical Gated Selective Unit (HVGSU). In addition, to improve the computing efficiency, we propose a generic Recurrent Acceleration Network (RAN) which reduces the time complexity to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{L})$ while maintaining the memory complexity at $\mathcal{O}(L)$. Our proposed method, called Water-wave Information Transmission and Recurrent Acceleration Network (WITRAN), outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 5.80% and 14.28% on long-range and ultra-long-range time series forecasting tasks respectively, as demonstrated by experiments on four benchmark datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/Water2sea/WITRAN.
tl;dr: We consider the principle of Independent Change of causal mechanisms from an information-theoretic perspective, and propose an approach for discovering causal mechanisms beyond Markov Equivalence from non-i.i.d. data using Gaussian Processes.
In many scientific applications, we observe a system in different conditions in which its components may change, rather than in isolation. In our work, we are interested in explaining the generating process of such a multi-context system using a finite mixture of causal mechanisms. Recent work shows that this causal model is identifiable from data, but is limited to settings where the sparse mechanism shift hypothesis holds and only a subset of the causal conditionals change. As this assumption is not easily verifiable in practice, we study the more general principle that mechanism shifts are independent, which we formalize using the algorithmic notion of independence. We introduce an approach for causal discovery beyond partially directed graphs using Gaussian Process models, and give conditions under which we provably identify the correct causal model. In our experiments, we show that our method performs well in a range of synthetic settings, on realistic gene expression simulations, as well as on real-world cell signaling data.
1218. Credal Marginal MAP
tl;dr: The paper presents new exact and approximate algorithms for Marginal MAP inference in credal networks.
Credal networks extend Bayesian networks to allow for imprecision in probability values. Marginal MAP is a widely applicable mixed inference task that identifies the most likely assignment for a subset of variables (called MAP variables). However, the task is extremely difficult to solve in credal networks particularly because the evaluation of each complete MAP assignment involves exact likelihood computations (combinatorial sums) over the vertices of a complex joint credal set representing the space of all possible marginal distributions of the MAP variables. In this paper, we explore Credal Marginal MAP inference and develop new exact methods based on variable elimination and depth-first search as well as several approximation schemes based on the mini-bucket partitioning and stochastic local search. An extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our new methods on random as well as real-world benchmark problems.
Covariate shift occurs prevalently in practice, where the input distributions of the source and target data are substantially different. Despite its practical importance in various learning problems, most of the existing methods only focus on some specific learning tasks and are not well validated theoretically and numerically. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified analysis of general nonparametric methods in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) under covariate shift. Our theoretical results are established for a general loss belonging to a rich loss function family, which includes many commonly used methods as special cases, such as mean regression, quantile regression, likelihood-based classification, and margin-based classification. Two types of covariate shift problems are the focus of this paper and the sharp convergence rates are established for a general loss function to provide a unified theoretical analysis, which concurs with the optimal results in literature where the squared loss is used. Extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real examples confirm our theoretical findings and further illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Visual navigation has been widely studied under the assumption that there may be several clear routes to reach the goal. However, in more practical scenarios such as a house with several messy rooms, there may not. Interactive Navigation (InterNav) considers agents navigating to their goals more effectively with object interactions, posing new challenges of learning interaction dynamics and extra action space. Previous works learn single vision-to-action policy with the guidance of designed representations. However, the causality between actions and outcomes is prone to be confounded when the attributes of obstacles are diverse and hard to measure. Learning policy for long-term action planning in complex scenes also leads to extensive inefficient exploration. In this paper, we introduce a causal diagram of InterNav clarifying the confounding bias caused by obstacles. To address the problem, we propose a multi-policy model that enables the exploration of counterfactual interactions as well as reduces unnecessary exploration. We develop a large-scale dataset containing 600k task episodes in 12k multi-room scenes based on the ProcTHOR simulator and showcase the effectiveness of our method with the evaluations on our dataset.
The past two years have witnessed a significant increase in interest concerning NeRF-based human body rendering. While this surge has propelled considerable advancements, it has also led to an influx of methods and datasets. This explosion complicates experimental settings and makes fair comparisons challenging. In this work, we design and execute thorough studies into unified evaluation settings and metrics to establish a fair and reasonable benchmark for human NeRF models. To reveal the effects of extant models, we benchmark them against diverse and hard scenes. Additionally, we construct a cross-subject benchmark pre-trained on large-scale datasets to assess generalizable methods. Finally, we analyze the essential components for animatability and generalizability, and make HumanNeRF from monocular videos generalizable, as the inaugural baseline. We hope these benchmarks and analyses could serve the community.
tl;dr: We study the scaling and transfer learning performance of neural operators on different PDE systems to build a pathway towards foundation models for scientific machine learning.
Pre-trained machine learning (ML) models have shown great performance for a
wide range of applications, in particular in natural language processing (NLP)
and computer vision (CV). Here, we study how pre-training could be used for
scientific machine learning (SciML) applications, specifically in the context of
transfer learning. We study the transfer behavior of these models as (i) the pretrained
model size is scaled, (ii) the downstream training dataset size is scaled,
(iii) the physics parameters are systematically pushed out of distribution, and (iv)
how a single model pre-trained on a mixture of different physics problems can
be adapted to various downstream applications. We find that—when fine-tuned
appropriately—transfer learning can help reach desired accuracy levels with orders
of magnitude fewer downstream examples (across different tasks that can even be
out-of-distribution) than training from scratch, with consistent behaviour across a
wide range of downstream examples. We also find that fine-tuning these models
yields more performance gains as model size increases, compared to training from
scratch on new downstream tasks. These results hold for a broad range of PDE
learning tasks. All in all, our results demonstrate the potential of the “pre-train and
fine-tune” paradigm for SciML problems, demonstrating a path towards building
SciML foundation models. Our code is available as open-source.
There is a growing interest in applying pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to planning problems. However, methods that use LLMs directly as planners are currently impractical due to several factors, including limited correctness of plans, strong reliance on feedback from interactions with simulators or even the actual environment, and the inefficiency in utilizing human feedback. In this work, we introduce a novel alternative paradigm that constructs an explicit world (domain) model in planning domain definition language (PDDL) and then uses it to plan with sound domain-independent planners. To address the fact that LLMs may not generate a fully functional PDDL model initially, we employ LLMs as an interface between PDDL and sources of corrective feedback, such as PDDL validators and humans. For users who lack a background in PDDL, we show that LLMs can translate PDDL into natural language and effectively encode corrective feedback back to the underlying domain model. Our framework not only enjoys the correctness guarantee offered by the external planners but also reduces human involvement by allowing users to correct domain models at the beginning, rather than inspecting and correcting (through interactive prompting) every generated plan as in previous work. On two IPC domains and a Household domain that is more complicated than commonly used benchmarks such as ALFWorld, we demonstrate that GPT-4 can be leveraged to produce high-quality PDDL models for over 40 actions, and the corrected PDDL models are then used to successfully solve 48 challenging planning tasks. Resources, including the source code, are released at: https://guansuns.github.io/pages/llm-dm.
1224. Multi-Swap k-Means++
The $k$-means++ algorithm of Arthur and Vassilvitskii (SODA 2007) is often the practitioners' choice algorithm for optimizing the popular $k$-means clustering objective and is known to give an $O(\log k)$-approximation in expectation. To obtain higher quality solutions, Lattanzi and Sohler (ICML 2019) proposed augmenting $k$-means++ with $O(k \log \log k)$ local-search steps obtained through the $k$-means++ sampling distribution to yield a $c$-approximation to the $k$-means clustering problem, where $c$ is a large absolute constant. Here we generalize and extend their local-search algorithm by considering larger and more sophisticated local-search neighborhoods hence allowing to swap multiple centers at the same time. Our algorithm achieves a $9 + \varepsilon$ approximation ratio, which is the best possible for local search. Importantly we show that our algorithm is practical, namely easy to implement and fast enough to run on a variety of classic datasets, and outputs solutions of better cost.
1225. Beta Diffusion
tl;dr: We introduce beta diffusion for generative modeling of range-bounded data and propose KL-divergence upper bounds for optimizing diffusion models
We introduce beta diffusion, a novel generative modeling method that integrates demasking and denoising to generate data within bounded ranges. Using scaled and shifted beta distributions, beta diffusion utilizes multiplicative transitions over time to create both forward and reverse diffusion processes, maintaining beta distributions in both the forward marginals and the reverse conditionals, given the data at any point in time. Unlike traditional diffusion-based generative models relying on additive Gaussian noise and reweighted evidence lower bounds (ELBOs), beta diffusion is multiplicative and optimized with KL-divergence upper bounds (KLUBs) derived from the convexity of the KL divergence. We demonstrate that the proposed KLUBs are more effective for optimizing beta diffusion compared to negative ELBOs, which can also be derived as the KLUBs of the same KL divergence with its two arguments swapped. The loss function of beta diffusion, expressed in terms of Bregman divergence, further supports the efficacy of KLUBs for optimization. Experimental results on both synthetic data and natural images demonstrate the unique capabilities of beta diffusion in generative modeling of range-bounded data and validate the effectiveness of KLUBs in optimizing diffusion models, thereby making them valuable additions to the family of diffusion-based generative models and the optimization techniques used to train them.
In this work, we study the effect of occlusion on video action recognition. To
facilitate this study, we propose three benchmark datasets and experiment with
seven different video action recognition models. These datasets include two synthetic benchmarks, UCF-101-O and K-400-O, which enabled understanding the
effects of fundamental properties of occlusion via controlled experiments. We also
propose a real-world occlusion dataset, UCF-101-Y-OCC, which helps in further
validating the findings of this study. We find several interesting insights such as 1)
transformers are more robust than CNN counterparts, 2) pretraining make models
robust against occlusions, and 3) augmentation helps, but does not generalize
well to real-world occlusions. In addition, we propose a simple transformer based
compositional model, termed as CTx-Net, which generalizes well under this distribution shift. We observe that CTx-Net outperforms models which are trained
using occlusions as augmentation, performing significantly better under natural
occlusions. We believe this benchmark will open up interesting future research in
robust video action recognition
tl;dr: We present VidChapters-7M, a large-scale dataset of user-chaptered videos. We study three tasks on top of this dataset and show that video chapter generation models trained on VidChapters-7M transfer well to dense video captioning.
Segmenting untrimmed videos into chapters enables users to quickly navigate to the information of their interest. This important topic has been understudied due to the lack of publicly released datasets. To address this issue, we present VidChapters-7M, a dataset of 817K user-chaptered videos including 7M chapters in total. VidChapters-7M is automatically created from videos online in a scalable manner by scraping user-annotated chapters and hence without any additional manual annotation. We introduce the following three tasks based on this data. First, the video chapter generation task consists of temporally segmenting the video and generating a chapter title for each segment. To further dissect the problem, we also define two variants of this task: video chapter generation given ground-truth boundaries, which requires generating a chapter title given an annotated video segment, and video chapter grounding, which requires temporally localizing a chapter given its annotated title. We benchmark both simple baselines as well as state-of-the-art video-language models on these three tasks. We also show that pretraining on VidChapters-7M transfers well to dense video captioning tasks, largely improving the state of the art on the YouCook2 and ViTT benchmarks. Finally, our experiments reveal that downstream performance scales well with the size of the pretraining dataset.
tl;dr: Solving long-horizon robotic tasks with crowdsourced human feedback
Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision making tasks with a non-trivial element of exploration requires either specifying carefully designed reward functions or relying on indiscriminate, novelty seeking exploration bonuses. Human supervisors can provide effective guidance in the loop to direct the exploration process, but prior methods to leverage this guidance require constant synchronous high-quality human feedback, which is expensive and impractical to obtain. In this work, we propose a technique - Human Guided Exploration (HUGE), that is able to leverage low-quality feedback from non-expert users, which is infrequent, asynchronous and noisy, to guide exploration for reinforcement learning, without requiring careful reward specification. The key idea is to separate the challenges of directed exploration and policy learning - human feedback is used to direct exploration, while self-supervised policy learning is used to independently learn unbiased behaviors from the collected data. We show that this procedure can leverage noisy, asynchronous human feedback to learn tasks with no hand-crafted reward design or exploration bonuses. We show that HUGE is able to learn a variety of challenging multi-stage robotic navigation and manipulation tasks in simulation using crowdsourced feedback from non-expert users. Moreover, this paradigm can be scaled to learning directly on real-world robots.
tl;dr: CoLLAT is a framework that enhances audio understanding by fine-grained audio-text grounding in a locked language embedding space, achieving superior performance in various tasks while unlocking audio guidance for text-guided downstream applications.
Humans can easily understand various audio concepts, but conventional audio classification models fail due to their inability to predict unseen classes during training. To address this challenge, recent literature has explored contrastive language-audio pretraining to learn an audio understanding model using natural language supervision from a pretrained language model. However, despite their reasonable zero-shot performance in audio understanding, these models typically fail to achieve optimal performance while preserving the text understanding capabilities of the pretrained language model. They also perform poorly when comprehending audio clips with multiple audio concepts. To bridge these gaps, we propose $CoLLAT$: $Co$ntrastive $L$ocked $L$anguage and $A$udio $T$uning. This is a framework to effectively learn an audio understanding model with a locked language model, which is learned using a novel pretraining objective for audio-to-text grounding to yield fine-grained audio understanding. Our extensive experiments, which include several downstream applications such as audio classification, cross-modal retrieval, and audio-guided image generation, demonstrate that $CoLLAT$ yields state-of-the-art performance for audio understanding. Additionally, it unlocks audio guidance to applications built on top of pretrained language models.
tl;dr: The largest database of multiple sequence alignment data, for use as training data in applications in bioinformatics.
Multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) of proteins encode rich biological information and have been workhorses in bioinformatic methods for tasks like protein design and protein structure prediction for decades. Recent breakthroughs like AlphaFold2 that use transformers to attend directly over large quantities of raw MSAs have reaffirmed their importance. Generation of MSAs is highly computationally intensive, however, and no datasets comparable to those used to train AlphaFold2 have been made available to the research community, hindering progress in machine learning for proteins. To remedy this problem, we introduce OpenProteinSet, an open-source corpus of more than 16 million MSAs, associated structural homologs from the Protein Data Bank, and AlphaFold2 protein structure predictions. We have previously demonstrated the utility of OpenProteinSet by successfully retraining AlphaFold2 on it. We expect OpenProteinSet to be broadly useful as training and validation data for 1) diverse tasks focused on protein structure, function, and design and 2) large-scale multimodal machine learning research.
The local search methods have been widely used to solve the clustering problems. In practice, local search algorithms for clustering problems mainly adapt the single-swap strategy, which enables them to handle large-scale datasets and achieve linear running time in the data size. However, compared with multi-swap local search algorithms, there is a considerable gap on the approximation ratios of the single-swap local search algorithms. Although the current multi-swap local search algorithms provide small constant approximation, the proposed algorithms tend to have large polynomial running time, which cannot be used to handle large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a multi-swap local search algorithm for the $k$-means problem with linear running time in the data size. Given a swap size $t$, our proposed algorithm can achieve a $(50(1+\frac{1}{t})+\epsilon)$-approximation, which improves the current best result 509 (ICML 2019) with linear running time in the data size. Our proposed method, compared with previous multi-swap local search algorithms, is the first one to achieve linear running time in the data size. To obtain a more practical algorithm for the problem with better clustering quality and running time, we propose a sampling-based method which accelerates the process of clustering cost update during swaps. Besides, a recombination mechanism is proposed to find potentially better solutions. Empirical experiments show that our proposed algorithms achieve better performances compared with branch and bound solver (NeurIPS 2022) and other existing state-of-the-art local search algorithms on both small and large datasets.
tl;dr: A semantic correspondence between latent spaces is enough to unlock translation between them, reaching zero-shot stitching of arbitrarly pre-trained neural components across various tasks, modalities and architectures.
While different neural models often exhibit latent spaces that are alike when exposed to semantically related data, this intrinsic similarity is not always immediately discernible. Towards a better understanding of this phenomenon, our work shows how representations learned from these neural modules can be translated between different pre-trained networks via simpler transformations than previously thought. An advantage of this approach is the ability to estimate these transformations using standard, well-understood algebraic procedures that have closed-form solutions. Our method directly estimates a transformation between two given latent spaces, thereby enabling effective stitching of encoders and decoders without additional training. We extensively validate the adaptability of this translation procedure in different experimental settings: across various trainings, domains, architectures (e.g., ResNet, CNN, ViT), and in multiple downstream tasks (classification, reconstruction). Notably, we show how it is possible to zero-shot stitch text encoders and vision decoders, or vice-versa, yielding surprisingly good classification performance in this multimodal setting.
Many policy optimization approaches in reinforcement learning incorporate a Kullback-Leilbler (KL) divergence to the previous policy, to prevent the policy from changing too quickly. This idea was initially proposed in a seminal paper on Conservative Policy Iteration, with approximations given by algorithms like TRPO and Munchausen Value Iteration (MVI). We continue this line of work by investigating a generalized KL divergence---called the Tsallis KL divergence. Tsallis KL defined by the $q$-logarithm is a strict generalization, as $q = 1$ corresponds to the standard KL divergence; $q > 1$ provides a range of new options. We characterize the types of policies learned under the Tsallis KL, and motivate when $q >1$ could be beneficial. To obtain a practical algorithm that incorporates Tsallis KL regularization, we extend MVI, which is one of the simplest approaches to incorporate KL regularization. We show that this generalized MVI($q$) obtains significant improvements over the standard MVI($q = 1$) across 35 Atari games.
Visual reasoning requires multimodal perception and commonsense cognition of the world. Recently, multiple vision-language models (VLMs) have been proposed with excellent commonsense reasoning ability in various domains. However, how to harness the collective power of these complementary VLMs is rarely explored. Existing methods like ensemble still struggle to aggregate these models with the desired higher-order communications. In this work, we propose Cola, a novel paradigm that coordinates multiple VLMs for visual reasoning. Our key insight is that a large language model (LLM) can efficiently coordinate multiple VLMs by facilitating natural language communication that leverages their distinct and complementary capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our instruction tuning variant, Cola-FT, achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual question answering (VQA), outside knowledge VQA, visual entailment, and visual spatial reasoning tasks. Moreover, we show that our in-context learning variant, Cola-Zero, exhibits competitive performance in zero and few-shot settings, without finetuning. Through systematic ablation studies and visualizations, we validate that a coordinator LLM indeed comprehends the instruction prompts as well as the separate functionalities of VLMs; it then coordinates them to enable impressive visual reasoning capabilities.
tl;dr: a versatile pipeline for generating and editing 3D head avatars with textual prompts
Recently, text-guided 3D generative methods have made remarkable advancements in producing high-quality textures and geometry, capitalizing on the proliferation of large vision-language and image diffusion models.
However, existing methods still struggle to create high-fidelity 3D head avatars in two aspects:
(1) They rely mostly on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model whilst missing the necessary 3D awareness and head priors.
This makes them prone to inconsistency and geometric distortions in the generated avatars.
(2) They fall short in fine-grained editing. This is primarily due to the inherited limitations from the pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, which become more pronounced when it comes to 3D head avatars.
In this work, we address these challenges by introducing a versatile coarse-to-fine pipeline dubbed HeadSculpt for crafting (i.e., generating and editing) 3D head avatars from textual prompts.
Specifically, we first equip the diffusion model with 3D awareness by leveraging landmark-based control and a learned textual embedding representing the back view appearance of heads, enabling 3D-consistent head avatar generations.
We further propose a novel identity-aware editing score distillation strategy to optimize a textured mesh with a high-resolution differentiable rendering technique.
This enables identity preservation while following the editing instruction.
We showcase HeadSculpt's superior fidelity and editing capabilities through comprehensive experiments and comparisons with existing methods.
tl;dr: Diff-Foley is a synchronized Video-to-Audio synthesis method with a latent diffusion model that generates high quality, highly synchronized audio with improved audio-visual relevance. It outperforms previous methods by a large margin.
The Video-to-Audio (V2A) model has recently gained attention for its practical application in generating audio directly from silent videos, particularly in video/film production. However, previous methods in V2A have limited generation quality in terms of temporal synchronization and audio-visual relevance. We present Diff-Foley, a synchronized Video-to-Audio synthesis method with a latent diffusion model (LDM) that generates high-quality audio with improved synchronization and audio-visual relevance. We adopt contrastive audio-visual pretraining (CAVP) to learn more temporally and semantically aligned features, then train an LDM with CAVP-aligned visual features on spectrogram latent space. The CAVP-aligned features enable LDM to capture the subtler audio-visual correlation via a cross-attention module. We further significantly improve sample quality with `double guidance'. Diff-Foley achieves state-of-the-art V2A performance on current large scale V2A dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate Diff-Foley practical applicability and adaptability via customized downstream finetuning. Project Page: https://diff-foley.github.io/
tl;dr: We propose a novel approach that enables simple goal-conditioned RL agents to follow arbitrary LTL specifications without any additional training over the LTL task space.
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for learning general-purpose skills by reaching diverse goals. However, it has limitations when it comes to task-conditioned policies, where goals are specified by temporally extended instructions written in the Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formal language. Existing approaches for finding LTL-satisfying policies rely on sampling a large set of LTL instructions during training to adapt to unseen tasks at inference time. However, these approaches do not guarantee generalization to out-of-distribution LTL objectives, which may have increased complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this challenge. We show that simple goal-conditioned RL agents can be instructed to follow arbitrary LTL specifications without additional training over the LTL task space. Unlike existing approaches that focus on LTL specifications expressible as regular expressions, our technique is unrestricted and generalizes to $\omega$-regular expressions. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in adapting goal-conditioned RL agents to satisfy complex temporal logic task specifications zero-shot.
Consider the setting of constrained optimization, with some parameters unknown at solving time and requiring prediction from relevant features. Predict+Optimize is a recent framework for end-to-end training supervised learning models for such predictions, incorporating information about the optimization problem in the training process in order to yield better predictions in terms of the quality of the predicted solution under the true parameters. Almost all prior works have focused on the special case where the unknowns appear only in the optimization objective and not the constraints. Hu et al. proposed the first adaptation of Predict+Optimize to handle unknowns appearing in constraints, but the framework has somewhat ad-hoc elements, and they provided a training algorithm only for covering and packing linear programs. In this work, we give a new simpler and more powerful framework called Two-Stage Predict+Optimize, which we believe should be the canonical framework for the Predict+Optimize setting. We also give a training algorithm usable for all mixed integer linear programs, vastly generalizing the applicability of the framework. Experimental results demonstrate the superior prediction performance of our training framework over all classical and state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees of a previously proposed empirically successful offline goal-conditioned RL algorithm under mild assumptions.
Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) refers to learning general-purpose skills that aim to reach diverse goals. In particular, offline GCRL only requires purely pre-collected datasets to perform training tasks without additional interactions with the environment. Although offline GCRL has become increasingly prevalent and many previous works have demonstrated its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of efficient offline GCRL algorithms is not well established, especially when the state space is huge and the offline dataset only covers the policy we aim to learn. In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of an existing empirically successful offline GCRL algorithm. We prove that under slight modification, this algorithm enjoys an $\tilde{O}(\text{poly}(1/\epsilon))$ sample complexity (where $\epsilon$ is the desired suboptimality of the learned policy) with general function approximation thanks to the property of (semi-)strong convexity of the objective functions. We only require nearly minimal assumptions on the dataset (single-policy concentrability) and the function class (realizability). Moreover, this algorithm consists of two uninterleaved optimization steps, which we refer to as $V$-learning and policy learning, and is computationally stable since it does not involve minimax optimization. We also empirically validate our theory by showing that the modified algorithm outperforms the previous algorithm in various real-world environments.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that is both provably efficient with general function approximation and single-policy concentrability, and empirically successful without requiring solving minimax optimization problems.
Although existing fMRI-to-image reconstruction methods could predict high-quality images, they do not explicitly consider the semantic gap between training and testing data, resulting in reconstruction with unstable and uncertain semantics. This paper addresses the problem of generalized fMRI-to-image reconstruction by explicitly alleviates the semantic gap. Specifically, we leverage the pre-trained CLIP model to map the training data to a compact feature representation, which essentially extends the sparse semantics of training data to dense ones, thus alleviating the semantic gap of the instances nearby known concepts (i.e., inside the training super-classes). Inspired by the robust low-level representation in fMRI data, which could help alleviate the semantic gap for instances that far from the known concepts (i.e., outside the training super-classes), we leverage structural information as a general cue to guide image reconstruction. Further, we quantify the semantic uncertainty based on probability density estimation and achieve Generalized fMRI-to-image reconstruction by adaptively integrating Expanded Semantics and Structural information (GESS) within a diffusion process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GESS model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and we propose a generalized scenario split strategy to evaluate the advantage of GESS in closing the semantic gap.
tl;dr: Optimising risk-averse policies in an ensemble of models to avoid distributional shift and risky actions.
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is suitable for safety-critical domains where online exploration is not feasible. In such domains, decision-making should take into consideration the risk of catastrophic outcomes. In other words, decision-making should be *risk-averse*. An additional challenge of offline RL is avoiding *distributional shift*, i.e. ensuring that state-action pairs visited by the policy remain near those in the dataset. Previous offline RL algorithms that consider risk combine offline RL techniques (to avoid distributional shift), with risk-sensitive RL algorithms (to achieve risk-aversion). In this work, we propose risk-aversion as a mechanism to jointly address *both* of these issues. We propose a model-based approach, and use an ensemble of models to estimate epistemic uncertainty, in addition to aleatoric uncertainty. We train a policy that is risk-averse, and avoids high uncertainty actions. Risk-aversion to epistemic uncertainty prevents distributional shift, as areas not covered by the dataset have high epistemic uncertainty. Risk-aversion to aleatoric uncertainty discourages actions that are risky due to environment stochasticity. Thus, by considering epistemic uncertainty via a model ensemble and introducing risk-aversion, our algorithm (1R2R) avoids distributional shift in addition to achieving risk-aversion to aleatoric risk. Our experiments show that 1R2R achieves strong performance on deterministic benchmarks, and outperforms existing approaches for risk-sensitive objectives in stochastic domains.
We study lower bounds on adaptive sensing algorithms for recovering low rank matrices using linear measurements. Given an $n \times n$ matrix $A$, a general linear measurement $S(A)$, for an $n \times n$ matrix $S$, is just the inner product of $S$ and $A$, each treated as $n^2$-dimensional vectors. By performing as few linear measurements as possible on a rank-$r$ matrix $A$, we hope to construct a matrix $\hat{A}$ that satisfies $|A - \hat{A}|\_F^2 \le c |A|\_F^2$, for a small constant $c$. Here $|A|\_F$ denotes the Frobenius norm $(\sum_{i,j} A_{i,j}^2)^{1/2}$. It is commonly assumed that when measuring $A$ with $S$, the response is corrupted with an independent Gaussian random variable of mean $0$ and variance $\sigma^2$. Candès and Plan (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 2011) study non-adaptive algorithms for low rank matrix recovery using random linear measurements. They use the restricted isometry property (RIP) of Random Gaussian Matrices to give tractable algorithms to estimate $A$ from the measurements.
At the edge of the noise level where recovery is information-theoretically feasible, it is known that their non-adaptive algorithms need to perform $\Omega(n^2)$ measurements, which amounts to reading the entire matrix. An important question is whether adaptivity helps in decreasing the overall number of measurements. While for the related problem of sparse recovery, adaptive algorithms have been extensively studied, as far as we are aware adaptive algorithms and lower bounds on them seem largely unexplored for matrix recovery. We show that any adaptive algorithm that uses $k$ linear measurements in each round and outputs an approximation as in (1) with probability $\ge 9/10$ must run for $t = \Omega(\log(n^2/k)/\log\log n)$ rounds. Our lower bound shows that any adaptive algorithm which uses $n^{2-\beta}$ ($\beta > 0$ is arbitrary constant) linear measurements in each round must run for $\Omega(\log n/\log\log n)$ rounds. Our techniques also readily extend to obtain lower bounds on adaptive algorithms for tensor recovery.
Our hard distribution also allows us to give a measurement-vs-rounds trade-off for many sensing problems in numerical linear algebra, such as spectral norm low rank approximation, Frobenius norm low rank approximation, singular vector approximation, and more.
We study robust adversarial training of two-layer neural networks as a bi-level optimization problem. In particular, for the inner loop that implements the adversarial attack during training using projected gradient descent (PGD), we propose maximizing a \emph{lower bound} on the $0/1$-loss by reflecting a surrogate loss about the origin. This allows us to give a convergence guarantee for the inner-loop PGD attack. Furthermore, assuming the data is linearly separable, we provide precise iteration complexity results for end-to-end adversarial training, which holds for any width and initialization. We provide empirical evidence to support our theoretical results.
tl;dr: Establish a standard OOD robustness benchmark for NLP, analyze the ID-OOD performance correlation of fine-tuned PLMs, and evaluate existing robustness-enhanced methods and LLMs.
This paper reexamines the research on out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness in the field of NLP. We find that the distribution shift settings in previous studies commonly lack adequate challenges, hindering the accurate evaluation of OOD robustness. To address these issues, we propose a benchmark construction protocol that ensures clear differentiation and challenging distribution shifts. Then we introduce
BOSS, a Benchmark suite for Out-of-distribution robustneSS evaluation covering 5 tasks and 20 datasets. Based on BOSS, we conduct a series of experiments on pretrained language models for analysis and evaluation of OOD robustness. First, for vanilla fine-tuning, we examine the relationship between in-distribution (ID) and OOD performance. We identify three typical types that unveil the inner learning
mechanism, which could potentially facilitate the forecasting of OOD robustness, correlating with the advancements on ID datasets. Then, we evaluate 5 classic methods on BOSS and find that, despite exhibiting some effectiveness in specific cases, they do not offer significant improvement compared to vanilla fine-tuning. Further, we evaluate 5 LLMs with various adaptation paradigms and find that when sufficient ID data is available, fine-tuning domain-specific models outperform LLMs on ID examples significantly. However, in the case of OOD instances, prioritizing LLMs with in-context learning yields better results. We identify that both fine-tuned small models and LLMs face challenges in effectively addressing downstream tasks. The code is public at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/OOD_NLP.
In federated frequency estimation (FFE), multiple clients work together to estimate the frequency of their local data by communicating with a server, while maintaining the security constraint of $\mathtt{secsum}$ where the server can only access the sum of client-held vectors. For FFE with a single communication round, it is known that count sketch is nearly information-theoretically optimal [Chen et al., 2022]. However, when multiple communication rounds are allowed, we propose a new sketch algorithm that is provably more accurate than a naive adaptation of count sketch. Furthermore, we show that both our sketch algorithm and count sketch can achieve better accuracy when the problem instance is simpler. Therefore, we propose a two-phase approach to enable the use of a smaller sketch size for simpler problems. Finally, we provide mechanisms to make our proposed algorithm differentially private. We verify the performance of our methods through experiments conducted on real datasets.
tl;dr: We introduce HT-Step, a large-scale dataset of step annotations on instructional videos.
We introduce HT-Step, a large-scale dataset containing temporal annotations of instructional article steps in cooking videos. It includes 122k segment-level annotations over 20k narrated videos (approximately 2.3k hours) of the HowTo100M dataset.
Each annotation provides a temporal interval, and a categorical step label from a taxonomy of 4,958 unique steps automatically mined from wikiHow articles which include rich descriptions of each step.
Our dataset significantly surpasses existing labeled step datasets in terms of scale, number of tasks, and richness of natural language step descriptions. Based on these annotations, we introduce a strongly supervised benchmark for aligning instructional articles with how-to videos and present a comprehensive evaluation of baseline methods for this task.
By publicly releasing these annotations and defining rigorous evaluation protocols and metrics,
we hope to significantly accelerate research in the field of procedural activity understanding.
Although large language models (LLMs) have shown great performance in natural language processing (NLP) in the financial domain, there are no publicly available financially tailored LLMs, instruction tuning datasets, and evaluation benchmarks, which is critical for continually pushing forward the open-source development of financial artificial intelligence (AI). This paper introduces PIXIU, a comprehensive framework including the first financial LLM based on fine-tuning LLaMA with instruction data, the first instruction data with 128K data samples to support the fine-tuning, and an evaluation benchmark with 8 tasks and 15 datasets. We first construct the large-scale multi-task instruction data considering a variety of financial tasks, financial document types, and financial data modalities. We then propose a financial LLM called FinMA by fine-tuning LLaMA with the constructed dataset to be able to follow instructions for various financial tasks. To support the evaluation of financial LLMs, we propose a standardized benchmark that covers a set of critical financial tasks, including six financial NLP tasks and two financial prediction tasks. With this benchmark, we conduct a detailed analysis of FinMA and several existing LLMs, uncovering their strengths and weaknesses in handling critical financial tasks. The model, datasets, benchmark, and experimental results are open-sourced to facilitate future research in financial AI.
This paper presents new projection-free algorithms for Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex domain $\mathcal{K} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$. Classical OCO algorithms (such as Online Gradient Descent) typically need to perform Euclidean projections onto the convex set $\mathcal{K}$ to ensure feasibility of their iterates. Alternative algorithms, such as those based on the Frank-Wolfe method, swap potentially-expensive Euclidean projections onto $\mathcal{K}$ for linear optimization over $\mathcal{K}$. However, such algorithms have a sub-optimal regret in OCO compared to projection-based algorithms. In this paper, we look at a third type of algorithms that output approximate Newton iterates using a self-concordant barrier for the set of interest. The use of a self-concordant barrier automatically ensures feasibility without the need of projections. However, the computation of the Newton iterates requires a matrix inverse, which can still be expensive. As our main contribution, we show how the stability of the Newton iterates can be leveraged to only compute the inverse Hessian a vanishing fractions of the rounds, leading to a new efficient projection-free OCO algorithm with a state-of-the-art regret bound.
tl;dr: Engaging with communities in India to build a more comprehensive stereotype resource for evaluating generative language models.
With rapid development and deployment of generative language models in global settings, there is an urgent need to also scale our measurements of harm, not just in the number and types of harms covered, but also how well they account for local cultural contexts, including marginalized identities and the social biases experienced by them.
Current evaluation paradigms are limited in their abilities to address this, as they are not representative of diverse, locally situated but global, socio-cultural perspectives. It is imperative that our evaluation resources are enhanced and calibrated by including people and experiences from different cultures and societies worldwide, in order to prevent gross underestimations or skews in measurements of harm. In this work, we demonstrate a socio-culturally aware expansion of evaluation resources in the Indian societal context, specifically for the harm of stereotyping. We devise a community engaged effort to build a resource which contains stereotypes for axes of disparity that are uniquely present in India. The resultant resource increases the number of stereotypes known for and in the Indian context by over 1000 stereotypes across many unique identities. We also demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of such expanded resources for evaluations of language models.
CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains examples of stereotypes that may be offensive.
tl;dr: We show why modern transformers learn outliers in activations & propose methods that solve this problem and significantly improve the quantized performance.
Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased tremendously, but this has come at the cost of a significant increase in necessary compute. Quantization is one of the most effective ways for reducing the computational time and memory consumption of neural networks. Many studies have shown, however, that modern transformer models tend to learn strong outliers in their activations, making them difficult to quantize. To retain acceptable performance, the existence of these outliers requires activations to be in higher-bitwidth or the use of different numeric formats, extra fine-tuning, or other workarounds. We show that strong outliers are related to very specific behavior of attention heads that try to learn a "no-op", or just a partial update of the residual. To achieve the exact zeros needed in the attention matrix for a no-update, the input to the softmax is pushed to be larger and larger during training, causing outliers in other parts of the network. Based on these observations, we propose two simple (independent) modifications to the attention mechanism - _clipped softmax_ and _gated attention_. We empirically show that models pre-trained using our methods learn significantly smaller outliers while maintaining and sometimes even improving the floating-point task performance. This enables us to quantize transformers to full INT8 quantization of the activations without any additional effort. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both language models (BERT, OPT) and vision transformers.
tl;dr: A dataset of similar objects under different extrinsic conditions used to benchmark object intrinsic — based image similarity.
The human visual system can effortlessly recognize an object under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, object poses, and background, yet current computer vision systems often struggle with these variations. An important step to understanding and improving artificial vision systems is to measure image similarity purely based on intrinsic object properties that define object identity. This problem has been studied in the computer vision literature as re-identification, though mostly restricted to specific object categories such as people and cars. We propose to extend it to general object categories, exploring an image similarity metric based on object intrinsics. To benchmark such measurements, we collect the Common paired objects Under differenT Extrinsics (CUTE) dataset of 18, 000 images of 180 objects under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, poses, and imaging conditions. While existing methods such as LPIPS and CLIP scores do not measure object intrinsics well, we find that combining deep features learned from contrastive self-supervised learning with foreground filtering is a simple yet effective approach to approximating the similarity. We conduct an extensive survey of pre-trained features and foreground extraction methods to arrive at a strong baseline that best measures intrinsic object-centric image similarity among current methods. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach can aid in downstream applications such as acting as an analog for human subjects and improving generalizable re-identification. Please see our project website at https://s-tian.github.io/projects/cute/ for visualizations of the data and demos of our metric.
tl;dr: We present a unified framework for deriving information-theoretic generalization bounds.
This paper presents a general methodology for deriving information-theoretic generalization bounds for learning algorithms. The main technical tool is a probabilistic decorrelation lemma based on a change of measure and a relaxation of Young's inequality in $L_{\psi_p}$ Orlicz spaces. Using the decorrelation lemma in combination with other techniques, such as symmetrization, couplings, and chaining in the space of probability measures, we obtain new upper bounds on the generalization error, both in expectation and in high probability, and recover as special cases many of the existing generalization bounds, including the ones based on mutual information, conditional mutual information, stochastic chaining, and PAC-Bayes inequalities. In addition, the Fernique--Talagrand upper bound on the expected supremum of a subgaussian process emerges as a special case.
tl;dr: We propose $\eta\psi$-Learning algorithm to learn a non-Markovian maximum state entropy exploration policy by combining predecessor and successor representation to estimate the state visitation distribution of trajectory of finite length.
Animals have a developed ability to explore that aids them in important tasks such as locating food, exploring for shelter, and finding misplaced items. These exploration skills necessarily track where they have been so that they can plan for finding items with relative efficiency. Contemporary exploration algorithms often learn a less efficient exploration strategy because they either condition only on the current state or simply rely on making random open-loop exploratory moves. In this work, we propose $\eta\psi$-Learning, a method to learn efficient exploratory policies by conditioning on past episodic experience to make the next exploratory move. Specifically, $\eta\psi$-Learning learns an exploration policy that maximizes the entropy of the state visitation distribution of a single trajectory. Furthermore, we demonstrate how variants of the predecessor representation and successor representations can be combined to predict the state visitation entropy. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of $\eta\psi$-Learning to strategically explore the environment and maximize the state coverage with limited samples.
tl;dr: We connect diffusion models with TPPs by introducing a novel model that naturally models point processes.
Autoregressive neural networks within the temporal point process (TPP) framework have become the standard for modeling continuous-time event data. Even though these models can expressively capture event sequences in a one-step-ahead fashion, they are inherently limited for long-term forecasting applications due to the accumulation of errors caused by their sequential nature. To overcome these limitations, we derive ADD-THIN, a principled probabilistic denoising diffusion model for TPPs that operates on entire event sequences. Unlike existing diffusion approaches, ADD-THIN naturally handles data with discrete and continuous components. In experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, our model matches the state-of-the-art TPP models in density estimation and strongly outperforms them in forecasting.
tl;dr: Powerful derandomization framework for conformalized novelty detection under rigorous false discovery rate control.
Conformal inference provides a general distribution-free method to rigorously calibrate the output of any machine learning algorithm for novelty detection. While this approach has many strengths, it has the limitation of being randomized, in the sense that it may lead to different results when analyzing twice the same data and this can hinder the interpretation of any findings. We propose to make conformal inferences more stable by leveraging suitable conformal e-values instead of p-values to quantify statistical significance. This solution allows the evidence gathered from multiple analyses of the same data to be aggregated effectively while provably controlling the false discovery rate. Further, we show that the proposed method can reduce randomness without much loss of power compared to standard conformal inference, partly thanks to an innovative way of weighting conformal e-values based on additional side information carefully extracted from the same data. Simulations with synthetic and real data confirm this solution can be effective at eliminating random noise in the inferences obtained with state-of-the-art alternative techniques, sometimes also leading to higher power.
tl;dr: In this benchmark, we introduce two novel semiconductor datasets and conduct a thorough performance evaluation of various MLFF models, considering energy and force errors as well as simulation-derived metrics
As semiconductor devices become miniaturized and their structures become more complex, there is a growing need for large-scale atomic-level simulations as a less costly alternative to the trial-and-error approach during development.
Although machine learning force fields (MLFFs) can meet the accuracy and scale requirements for such simulations, there are no open-access benchmarks for semiconductor materials.
Hence, this study presents a comprehensive benchmark suite that consists of two semiconductor material datasets and ten MLFF models with six evaluation metrics.
We select two important semiconductor thin-film materials silicon nitride and hafnium oxide, and generate their datasets using computationally expensive density functional theory simulations under various scenarios at a cost of 2.6k GPU days.
Additionally, we provide a variety of architectures as baselines: descriptor-based fully connected neural networks and graph neural networks with rotational invariant or equivariant features.
We assess not only the accuracy of energy and force predictions but also five additional simulation indicators to determine the practical applicability of MLFF models in molecular dynamics simulations.
To facilitate further research, our benchmark suite is available at https://github.com/SAITPublic/MLFF-Framework.
tl;dr: Realistic benchmarking of generative molecular design models
The efficient exploration of chemical space to design molecules with intended properties enables the accelerated discovery of drugs, materials, and catalysts, and is one of the most important outstanding challenges in chemistry. Encouraged by the recent surge in computer power and artificial intelligence development, many algorithms have been developed to tackle this problem. However, despite the emergence of many new approaches in recent years, comparatively little progress has been made in developing realistic benchmarks that reflect the complexity of molecular design for real-world applications. In this work, we develop a set of practical benchmark tasks relying on physical simulation of molecular systems mimicking real-life molecular design problems for materials, drugs, and chemical reactions. Additionally, we demonstrate the utility and ease of use of our new benchmark set by demonstrating how to compare the performance of several well-established families of algorithms. Overall, we believe that our benchmark suite will help move the field towards more realistic molecular design benchmarks, and move the development of inverse molecular design algorithms closer to the practice of designing molecules that solve existing problems in both academia and industry alike.
tl;dr: We propose a novel class of diffusion models that learn to sample from distributions of signals that are never directly observed, e.g., our model learns to sample 3D scenes by only training on 2D image observations.
Denoising diffusion models are a powerful type of generative models used to capture complex distributions of real-world signals. However, their applicability is limited to scenarios where training samples are readily available, which is not always the case in real-world applications. For example, in inverse graphics, the goal is to generate samples from a distribution of 3D scenes that align with a given image, but ground-truth 3D scenes are unavailable and only 2D images are accessible. To address this limitation, we propose a novel class of denoising diffusion probabilistic models that learn to sample from distributions of signals that are never directly observed. Instead, these signals are measured indirectly through a known differentiable forward model, which produces partial observations of the unknown signal. Our approach involves integrating the forward model directly into the denoising process. A key contribution of our work is the integration of a differentiable forward model into the denoising process. This integration effectively connects the generative modeling of observations with the generative modeling of the underlying signals, allowing for end-to-end training of a conditional generative model over signals. During inference, our approach enables sampling from the distribution of underlying signals that are consistent with a given partial observation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three challenging computer vision tasks. For instance, in the context of inverse graphics, our model enables direct sampling from the distribution of 3D scenes that align with a single 2D input image.
tl;dr: This work proposes a unified analysis framework for two-layer networks trained by gradient descent, which is centered around the principle of feature learning from gradients.
Neural networks have achieved remarkable empirical performance, while the current theoretical analysis is not adequate for understanding their success, e.g., the Neural Tangent Kernel approach fails to capture their key feature learning ability, while recent analyses on feature learning are typically problem-specific. This work proposes a unified analysis framework for two-layer networks trained by gradient descent. The framework is centered around the principle of feature learning from gradients, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by applications in several prototypical problems, such as mixtures of Gaussians and parity functions.
The framework also sheds light on interesting network learning phenomena such as feature learning beyond kernels and the lottery ticket hypothesis.
1260. RS-Del: Edit Distance Robustness Certificates for Sequence Classifiers via Randomized Deletion
tl;dr: We develop a new randomized deletion mechanism for smoothing and certifying black-box models on sequence data under edit distance threat models.
Randomized smoothing is a leading approach for constructing classifiers that are certifiably robust against adversarial examples. Existing work on randomized smoothing has focused on classifiers with continuous inputs, such as images, where $\ell_p$-norm bounded adversaries are commonly studied. However, there has been limited work for classifiers with discrete or variable-size inputs, such as for source code, which require different threat models and smoothing mechanisms. In this work, we adapt randomized smoothing for discrete sequence classifiers to provide certified robustness against edit distance-bounded adversaries. Our proposed smoothing mechanism randomized deletion (RS-Del) applies random deletion edits, which are (perhaps surprisingly) sufficient to confer robustness against adversarial deletion, insertion and substitution edits. Our proof of certification deviates from the established Neyman-Pearson approach, which is intractable in our setting, and is instead organized around longest common subsequences. We present a case study on malware detection—a binary classification problem on byte sequences where classifier evasion is a well-established threat model. When applied to the popular MalConv malware detection model, our smoothing mechanism RS-Del achieves a certified accuracy of 91% at an edit distance radius of 128 bytes.
tl;dr: We propose a reduced policy optimization algorithm that combines RL with generalized reduced gradient for continuos control tasks with hard constraints, and develop three new benchmarks for RL with hard constraints.
Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints remains challenging, particularly in those situations with non-convex hard constraints. Inspired by the generalized reduced gradient (GRG) algorithm, a classical constrained optimization technique, we propose a reduced policy optimization (RPO) algorithm that combines RL with GRG to address general hard constraints. RPO partitions actions into basic actions and nonbasic actions following the GRG method and outputs the basic actions via a policy network. Subsequently, RPO calculates the nonbasic actions by solving equations based on equality constraints using the obtained basic actions. The policy network is then updated by implicitly differentiating nonbasic actions with respect to basic actions. Additionally, we introduce an action projection procedure based on the reduced gradient and apply a modified Lagrangian relaxation technique to ensure inequality constraints are satisfied. To the best of our knowledge, RPO is the first attempt that introduces GRG to RL as a way of efficiently handling both equality and inequality hard constraints. It is worth noting that there is currently a lack of RL environments with complex hard constraints, which motivates us to develop three new benchmarks: two robotics manipulation tasks and a smart grid operation control task. With these benchmarks, RPO achieves better performance than previous constrained RL algorithms in terms of both cumulative reward and constraint violation. We believe RPO, along with the new benchmarks, will open up new opportunities for applying RL to real-world problems with complex constraints.
1262. $\texttt{TACO}$: Temporal Latent Action-Driven Contrastive Loss for Visual Reinforcement Learning
tl;dr: We propose a temporal action-driven contrastive loss that concurrently learn state and action representations for continuous control tasks.
Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) from raw pixel data, sample inefficiency continues to present a substantial obstacle.
Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by creating self-supervised auxiliary tasks, aiming to enrich the agent's learned representations with control-relevant information for future state prediction.
However, these objectives are often insufficient to learn representations that can represent the optimal policy or value function, and they often consider tasks with small, abstract discrete action spaces and thus overlook the importance of action representation learning in continuous control.
In this paper, we introduce $\texttt{TACO}$: $\textbf{T}$emporal $\textbf{A}$ction-driven $\textbf{CO}$ntrastive Learning, a simple yet powerful temporal contrastive learning approach that facilitates the concurrent acquisition of latent state and action representations for agents.
$\texttt{TACO}$ simultaneously learns a state and an action representation by optimizing the mutual information between representations of current states paired with action sequences and representations of the corresponding future states.
Theoretically, $\texttt{TACO}$ can be shown to learn state and action representations that encompass sufficient information for control, thereby improving sample efficiency.
For online RL, $\texttt{TACO}$ achieves 40% performance boost after one million environment interaction steps on average across nine challenging visual continuous control tasks from Deepmind Control Suite.
In addition, we show that $\texttt{TACO}$ can also serve as a plug-and-play module adding to existing offline visual RL methods to establish the new state-of-the-art performance for offline visual RL across offline datasets with varying quality.
1263. Sharpness Minimization Algorithms Do Not Only Minimize Sharpness To Achieve Better Generalization
tl;dr: For 2 layer ReLU networks, sharpness may not always imply generalization but sharpness minimization algorithms may still generalize even when non-generalizing flattest models exist.
Despite extensive studies, the underlying reason as to why overparameterized
neural networks can generalize remains elusive. Existing theory shows that common stochastic optimizers prefer flatter minimizers of the training loss, and thus
a natural potential explanation is that flatness implies generalization. This work
critically examines this explanation. Through theoretical and empirical investigation, we identify the following three scenarios for two-layer ReLU networks: (1)
flatness provably implies generalization; (2) there exist non-generalizing flattest
models and sharpness minimization algorithms fail to generalize poorly, and (3)
perhaps most strikingly, there exist non-generalizing flattest models, but sharpness
minimization algorithms still generalize. Our results suggest that the relationship
between sharpness and generalization subtly depends on the data distributions
and the model architectures and sharpness minimization algorithms do not only
minimize sharpness to achieve better generalization. This calls for the search for
other explanations for the generalization of over-parameterized neural networks
tl;dr: We predict mutational effects on protein-protein binding using a side-chain diffusion probabilistic model.
Many crucial biological processes rely on networks of protein-protein interactions. Predicting the effect of amino acid mutations on protein-protein binding is important in protein engineering, including therapeutic discovery. However, the scarcity of annotated experimental data on binding energy poses a significant challenge for developing computational approaches, particularly deep learning-based methods. In this work, we propose SidechainDiff, a novel representation learning-based approach that leverages unlabelled experimental protein structures. SidechainDiff utilizes a Riemannian diffusion model to learn the generative process of side-chain conformations and can also give the structural context representations of mutations on the protein-protein interface. Leveraging the learned representations, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in predicting the mutational effects on protein-protein binding. Furthermore, SidechainDiff is the first diffusion-based generative model for side-chains, distinguishing it from prior efforts that have predominantly focused on the generation of protein backbone structures.
Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep networks. Prior works have shown that conditional prediction objectives such as masked autoencoding can be seen as stochastic estimation of pseudo-likelihood. We show how this perspective naturally leads to a unified view on existing intrinsic reward approaches: they are special cases of conditional prediction, where the estimation of novelty can be seen as pseudo-likelihood estimation with different mask distributions. From this view, we propose a general framework for deriving intrinsic rewards -- Masked Input Modeling for Exploration (MIMEx) -- where the mask distribution can be flexibly tuned to control the difficulty of the underlying conditional prediction task. We demonstrate that MIMEx can achieve superior results when compared against competitive baselines on a suite of challenging sparse-reward visuomotor tasks.
tl;dr: We model how humans infer an agent's goal from a snapshot of its current state. We frame the problem as Monte Carlo path tracing, which allows us to apply ideas from computer graphics to design a cognitively-plausible sample-efficient algorithm.
A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex sequences of past and future events from a *static snapshot* of a *dynamic scene*, even in situations they have never seen before.
In this paper, we model how humans make such rapid and flexible inferences. Building on a long line of work in cognitive science, we offer a Monte Carlo algorithm whose inferences correlate well with human intuitions in a wide variety of domains, while only using a small, cognitively-plausible number of samples. Our key technical insight is a surprising connection between our inference problem and Monte Carlo path tracing, which allows us to apply decades of ideas from the computer graphics community to this seemingly-unrelated theory of mind task.
Differentially private mechanisms restrict the membership inference capabilities of powerful (optimal) adversaries against machine learning models. Such adversaries are rarely encountered in practice. In this work, we examine a more realistic threat model relaxation, where (sub-optimal) adversaries lack access to the exact model training database, but may possess related or partial data. We then formally characterise and experimentally validate adversarial membership inference capabilities in this setting in terms of hypothesis testing errors. Our work helps users to interpret the privacy properties of sensitive data processing systems under realistic threat model relaxations and choose appropriate noise levels for their use-case.
Goal-conditioned policies are generally understood to be "feed-forward" circuits, in the form of neural networks that map from the current state and the goal specification to the next action to take. However, under what circumstances such a policy can be learned and how efficient the policy will be are not well understood. In this paper, we present a circuit complexity analysis for relational neural networks (such as graph neural networks and transformers) representing policies for planning problems, by drawing connections with serialized goal regression search (S-GRS). We show that there are three general classes of planning problems, in terms of the growth of circuit width and depth as a function of the number of objects and planning horizon, providing constructive proofs. We also illustrate the utility of this analysis for designing neural networks for policy learning.
tl;dr: We devise a method inspired by continual learning for selective forgetting of concepts in deep generative models.
The recent proliferation of large-scale text-to-image models has led to growing concerns that such models may be misused to generate harmful, misleading, and inappropriate content. Motivated by this issue, we derive a technique inspired by continual learning to selectively forget concepts in pretrained deep generative models. Our method, dubbed Selective Amnesia, enables controllable forgetting where a user can specify how a concept should be forgotten. Selective Amnesia can be applied to conditional variational likelihood models, which encompass a variety of popular deep generative frameworks, including variational autoencoders and large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Experiments across different models demonstrate that our approach induces forgetting on a variety of concepts, from entire classes in standard datasets to celebrity and nudity prompts in text-to-image models.
tl;dr: We propose switching autoregressive low-rank tensor models, which retain the advantages of both ARHMMs and SLDSs, while ameliorating both of their weaknesses.
An important problem in time-series analysis is modeling systems with time-varying dynamics. Probabilistic models with joint continuous and discrete latent states offer interpretable, efficient, and experimentally useful descriptions of such data. Commonly used models include autoregressive hidden Markov models (ARHMMs) and switching linear dynamical systems (SLDSs), each with its own advantages and disadvantages. ARHMMs permit exact inference and easy parameter estimation, but are parameter intensive when modeling long dependencies, and hence are prone to overfitting. In contrast, SLDSs can capture long-range dependencies in a parameter efficient way through Markovian latent dynamics, but present an intractable likelihood and a challenging parameter estimation task. In this paper, we propose _switching autoregressive low-rank tensor_ SALT models, which retain the advantages of both approaches while ameliorating the weaknesses. SALT parameterizes the tensor of an ARHMM with a low-rank factorization to control the number of parameters and allow longer range dependencies without overfitting. We prove theoretical and discuss practical connections between SALT, linear dynamical systems, and SLDSs. We empirically demonstrate quantitative advantages of SALT models on a range of simulated and real prediction tasks, including behavioral and neural datasets. Furthermore, the learned low-rank tensor provides novel insights into temporal dependencies within each discrete state.
tl;dr: Improving dynamics modeling with reusable mechanisms and an efficient communication among object-centric representations
Agents with the ability to comprehend and reason about the dynamics of objects would be expected to exhibit improved robustness and generalization in novel scenarios. However, achieving this capability necessitates not only an effective scene representation but also an understanding of the mechanisms governing interactions among object subsets. Recent studies have made significant progress in representing scenes using object slots. In this work, we introduce Reusable Slotwise Mechanisms, or RSM, a framework that models object dynamics by leveraging communication among slots along with a modular architecture capable of dynamically selecting reusable mechanisms for predicting the future states of each object slot. Crucially, RSM leverages the Central Contextual Information (CCI), enabling selected mechanisms to access the remaining slots through a bottleneck, effectively allowing for modeling of higher order and complex interactions that might require a sparse subset of objects. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of RSM compared to state-of-the-art methods across various future prediction and related downstream tasks, including Visual Question Answering and action planning. Furthermore, we showcase RSM’s Out-of-Distribution generalization ability to handle scenes in intricate scenarios.
Parallelization is a popular strategy for improving the performance of methods. Optimization methods are no exception: design of efficient parallel optimization methods and tight analysis of their theoretical properties are important research endeavors. While the minimax complexities are well known for sequential optimization methods, the theory of parallel optimization methods is less explored. In this paper, we propose a new protocol that generalizes the classical oracle framework approach. Using this protocol, we establish minimax complexities for parallel optimization methods that have access to an unbiased stochastic gradient oracle with bounded variance. We consider a fixed computation model characterized by each worker requiring a fixed but worker-dependent time to calculate stochastic gradient. We prove lower bounds and develop optimal algorithms that attain them. Our results have surprising consequences for the literature of asynchronous optimization methods.
tl;dr: We design an offline preference-based RL algorithm that does not require learning a reward function.
Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of preference-based RL methods na\"ively combine supervised reward models with off-the-shelf RL algorithms. Contemporary approaches have sought to improve performance and query complexity by using larger and more complex reward architectures such as transformers. Instead of using highly complex architectures, we develop a new and parameter-efficient algorithm, Inverse Preference Learning (IPL), specifically designed for learning from offline preference data. Our key insight is that for a fixed policy, the $Q$-function encodes all information about the reward function, effectively making them interchangeable. Using this insight, we completely eliminate the need for a learned reward function. Our resulting algorithm is simpler and more parameter-efficient. Across a suite of continuous control and robotics benchmarks, IPL attains competitive performance compared to more complex approaches that leverage transformer-based and non-Markovian reward functions while having fewer algorithmic hyperparameters and learned network parameters. Our code is publicly released.
tl;dr: we propose an innovative test-time poisoned sample detection framework that hinges on the interpretability of model predictions, grounded in the semantic meaning of inputs.
Backdoor attacks have emerged as a prominent threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, where the presence of specific triggers in the input can lead poisoned models to misclassify these inputs to predetermined target classes. Current detection mechanisms are limited by their inability to address more covert backdoor strategies, such as style-based attacks. In this work, we propose an innovative test-time poisoned sample detection framework that hinges on the interpretability of model predictions, grounded in the semantic meaning of inputs.
We contend that triggers (e.g., infrequent words) are
not supposed to fundamentally alter the underlying semantic meanings of poisoned samples as they want to stay stealthy. Based on this observation, we hypothesize that while the model's predictions for paraphrased clean samples should remain stable, predictions for poisoned samples should revert to their true labels upon the mutations applied to triggers during the paraphrasing process.
We employ ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art large language model, as our paraphraser and formulate the trigger-removal task as a prompt engineering problem. We adopt fuzzing, a technique commonly used for unearthing software vulnerabilities, to discover optimal paraphrase prompts that can effectively eliminate triggers while concurrently maintaining input semantics.
Experiments on 4 types of backdoor attacks, including the subtle style backdoors, and 4 distinct datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses baseline methods, including STRIP, RAP, and ONION, in precision and recall.
tl;dr: We propose grammar prompting, a simple approach for improving the few-shot DSL generation with large language models.
Large language models (LLMs) can learn to perform a wide range of natural language tasks from just a handful of in-context examples. However, for generating strings from highly structured languages (e.g., semantic parsing to complex domain-specific languages), it is challenging for the LLM to generalize from just a few exemplars. We propose \emph{grammar prompting}, a simple approach to enable LLMs to use external knowledge and domain-specific constraints, expressed through a grammar in Backus--Naur Form (BNF), during in-context learning. Grammar prompting augments each demonstration example with a specialized grammar that is minimally sufficient for generating the particular output example, where the specialized grammar is a subset of the full DSL grammar. For inference, the LLM first predicts a BNF grammar given a test input, and then generates the output according to the rules of the grammar. Experiments demonstrate that grammar prompting can enable LLMs to perform competitively on a diverse set of DSL generation tasks, including semantic parsing (SMCalFlow, Overnight, GeoQuery), PDDL planning, and SMILES-based molecule generation.
We characterise the learning of a mixture of two clouds of data points with generic centroids via empirical risk minimisation in the high dimensional regime, under the assumptions of generic convex loss and convex regularisation. Each cloud of data points is obtained via a double-stochastic process, where the sample is obtained from a Gaussian distribution whose variance is itself a random parameter sampled from a scalar distribution $\varrho$. As a result, our analysis covers a large family of data distributions, including the case of power-law-tailed distributions with no covariance, and allows us to test recent ''Gaussian universality'' claims. We study the generalisation performance of the obtained estimator, we analyse the role of regularisation, and we analytically characterise the separability transition.
Image generation techniques have been gaining increasing attention recently, but concerns have been raised about the potential misuse and intellectual property (IP) infringement associated with image generation models. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze the origin of images by inferring if a specific image was generated by a particular model, i.e., origin attribution. Existing methods only focus on specific types of generative models and require additional procedures during the training phase or generation phase. This makes them unsuitable for pre-trained models that lack these specific operations and may impair generation quality. To address this problem, we first develop an alteration-free and model-agnostic origin attribution method via reverse-engineering on image generation models, i.e., inverting the input of a particular model for a specific image. Given a particular model, we first analyze the differences in the hardness of reverse-engineering tasks for generated samples of the given model and other images. Based on our analysis, we then propose a method that utilizes the reconstruction loss of reverse-engineering to infer the origin. Our proposed method effectively distinguishes between generated images of a specific generative model and other images, i.e., images generated by other models and real images.
tl;dr: A GFlowNet approach for Bayesian dynamic structure learning of gene regulatory networks.
One of the grand challenges of cell biology is inferring the gene regulatory network (GRN) which describes interactions between genes and their products that control gene expression and cellular function. We can treat this as a causal discovery problem but with two non-standard challenges: (1) regulatory networks are inherently cyclic so we should not model a GRN as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and (2) observations have significant measurement noise so for typical sample sizes, there will always be a large equivalence class of graphs that are likely given the data, and we want methods that capture this uncertainty. Existing methods either focus on challenge (1), identifying cyclic structure from dynamics, or on challenge (2) learning complex Bayesian posteriors over directed acyclic graphs, but not both. In this paper we leverage the fact that it is possible to estimate the ``velocity'' of the expression of a gene with RNA velocity techniques to develop an approach that addresses both challenges. Because we have access to velocity information, we can treat the Bayesian structure learning problem as a problem of sparse identification of a dynamical system, capturing cyclic feedback loops through time. We leverage Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to estimate the posterior distribution over the combinatorial space of possible sparse dependencies. Our results indicate that our method learns posteriors that better encapsulate the distributions of cyclic structures compared to counterpart state-of-the-art Bayesian structure learning approaches.
1279. Bootstrapped Training of Score-Conditioned Generator for Offline Design of Biological Sequences
tl;dr: This paper proposes a novel variations of classical ensemble and bootstrapping into conditional generation for offline biological sequence design.
We study the problem of optimizing biological sequences, e.g., proteins, DNA, and RNA, to maximize a black-box score function that is only evaluated in an offline dataset. We propose a novel solution, bootstrapped training of score-conditioned generator (BootGen) algorithm. Our algorithm repeats a two-stage process. In the first stage, our algorithm trains the biological sequence generator with rank-based weights to enhance the accuracy of sequence generation based on high scores. The subsequent stage involves bootstrapping, which augments the training dataset with self-generated data labeled by a proxy score function. Our key idea is to align the score-based generation with a proxy score function, which distills the knowledge of the proxy score function to the generator. After training, we aggregate samples from multiple bootstrapped generators and proxies to produce a diverse design. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms competitive baselines on biological sequential design tasks. We provide reproducible source code: https://github.com/kaist-silab/bootgen.
1280. Algorithmic Regularization in Tensor Optimization: Towards a Lifted Approach in Matrix Sensing
tl;dr: Our work proves that optimizing over the tensor space with gradient descent can also induce implicit bias, making over-parameterized models tractable to use.
Gradient descent (GD) is crucial for generalization in machine learning models, as it induces implicit regularization, promoting compact representations. In this work, we examine the role of GD in inducing implicit regularization for tensor optimization, particularly within the context of the lifted matrix sensing framework. This framework has been recently proposed to address the non-convex matrix sensing problem by transforming spurious solutions into strict saddles when optimizing over symmetric, rank-1 tensors. We show that, with sufficiently small initialization scale, GD applied to this lifted problem results in approximate rank-1 tensors and critical points with escape directions. Our findings underscore the significance of the tensor parametrization of matrix sensing, in combination with first-order methods, in achieving global optimality in such problems.
Neural posterior estimation methods based on discrete normalizing flows have become established tools for simulation-based inference (SBI), but scaling them to high-dimensional problems can be challenging. Building on recent advances in generative modeling, we here present flow matching posterior estimation (FMPE), a technique for SBI using continuous normalizing flows. Like diffusion models, and in contrast to discrete flows, flow matching allows for unconstrained architectures, providing enhanced flexibility for complex data modalities. Flow matching, therefore, enables exact density evaluation, fast training, and seamless scalability to large architectures---making it ideal for SBI. We show that FMPE achieves competitive performance on an established SBI benchmark, and then demonstrate its improved scalability on a challenging scientific problem: for gravitational-wave inference, FMPE outperforms methods based on comparable discrete flows, reducing training time by 30\% with substantially improved accuracy. Our work underscores the potential of FMPE to enhance performance in challenging inference scenarios, thereby paving the way for more advanced applications to scientific problems.
tl;dr: We propose DiffCSP, a diffusion framework to jointly generate the lattice and the fractional coordinates for the Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) task.
Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) is crucial in various scientific disciplines. While CSP can be addressed by employing currently-prevailing generative models (**e.g.** diffusion models), this task encounters unique challenges owing to the symmetric geometry of crystal structures---the invariance of translation, rotation, and periodicity. To incorporate the above symmetries, this paper proposes DiffCSP, a novel diffusion model to learn the structure distribution from stable crystals. To be specific, DiffCSP jointly generates the lattice and atom coordinates for each crystal by employing a periodic-E(3)-equivariant denoising model, to better model the crystal geometry. Notably, different from related equivariant generative approaches, DiffCSP leverages fractional coordinates other than Cartesian coordinates to represent crystals, remarkably promoting the diffusion and the generation process of atom positions. Extensive experiments verify that our DiffCSP remarkably outperforms existing CSP methods, with a much lower computation cost in contrast to DFT-based methods. Moreover, the superiority of DiffCSP is still observed when it is extended for ab initio crystal generation.
tl;dr: We propose a prioritization scheme based on the loss reduction potential instead of just the magnitude of the loss
Most reinforcement learning algorithms take advantage of an experience replay buffer to repeatedly train on samples the agent has observed in the past. Not all samples carry the same amount of significance and simply assigning equal importance to each of the samples is a naïve strategy. In this paper, we propose a method to prioritize samples based on how much we can learn from a sample. We define the learn-ability of a sample as the steady decrease of the training loss associated with this sample over time. We develop an algorithm to prioritize samples with high learn-ability, while assigning lower priority to those that are hard-to-learn, typically caused by noise or stochasticity. We empirically show that across multiple domains our method is more robust than random sampling and also better than just prioritizing with respect to the training loss, i.e. the temporal difference loss, which is used in prioritized experience replay.
tl;dr: We propose to automatically optimize prompts for text-to-image models so that the user input and model-preferred prompts can be well aligned.
Well-designed prompts can guide text-to-image models to generate amazing images. However, the performant prompts are often model-specific and misaligned with user input. Instead of laborious human engineering, we propose prompt adaptation, a general framework that automatically adapts original user input to model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we first perform supervised fine-tuning with a pretrained language model on a small collection of manually engineered prompts. Then we use reinforcement learning to explore better prompts. We define a reward function that encourages the policy to generate more aesthetically pleasing images while preserving the original user intentions. Experimental results on Stable Diffusion show that our method outperforms manual prompt engineering in terms of both automatic metrics and human preference ratings. Moreover, reinforcement learning further boosts performance, especially on out-of-domain prompts.
Prior research on policy adaptation in multi-agent games has often relied on online interaction with the target agent in training, which can be expensive and impractical in real-world scenarios. Inspired by recent progress in offline reinforcement learn- ing, this paper studies offline policy adaptation, which aims to utilize the target agent’s behavior data to exploit its weakness or enable effective cooperation. We investigate its distinct challenges of distributional shift and risk-free deviation, and propose a novel learning objective, conservative offline adaptation, that optimizes the worst-case performance against any dataset consistent proxy models. We pro- pose an efficient algorithm called Constrained Self-Play (CSP) that incorporates dataset information into regularized policy learning. We prove that CSP learns a near-optimal risk-free offline adaptation policy upon convergence. Empirical results demonstrate that CSP outperforms non-conservative baselines in various environments, including Maze, predator-prey, MuJoCo, and Google Football.
The excellent generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models suggest they learn informative representations of image-text data.
However, what knowledge their representations capture is not fully understood, and they have not been thoroughly explored on downstream tasks.
We investigate diffusion models by proposing a method for evaluating them as zero-shot classifiers.
The key idea is using a diffusion model's ability to denoise a noised image given a text description of a label as a proxy for that label's likelihood.
We apply our method to Stable Diffusion and Imagen, using it to probe fine-grained aspects of the models' knowledge and comparing them with CLIP's zero-shot abilities.
They perform competitively with CLIP on a wide range of zero-shot image classification datasets.
Additionally, they achieve state-of-the-art results on shape/texture bias tests and can successfully perform attribute binding while CLIP cannot.
Although generative pre-training is prevalent in NLP, visual foundation models often use other methods such as contrastive learning.
Based on our findings, we argue that generative pre-training should be explored as a compelling alternative for vision and vision-language problems.
tl;dr: We show excess bounds for multi-task representation learning that are fast under near-realizability.
We study the problem of transfer learning via Multi-Task Representation Learning (MTRL), wherein multiple source tasks are used to learn a good common representation, and a predictor is trained on top of it for the target task. Under standard regularity assumptions on the loss function and task diversity, we provide new statistical rates on the excess risk of the target task, which demonstrate the benefit of representation learning. Importantly, our rates are optimistic, i.e., they interpolate between the standard $O(m^{-1/2})$ rate and the fast $O(m^{-1})$ rate, depending on the difficulty of the learning task, where $m$ is the number of samples for the target task. Besides the main result, we make several new contributions, including giving optimistic rates for excess risk of source tasks (multi-task learning (MTL)), a local Rademacher complexity theorem for MTRL and MTL, as well as a chain rule for local Rademacher complexity for composite predictor classes.
Attention networks such as transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many domains.
These networks rely heavily on the dot product attention operator, which computes the similarity between two points by taking their inner product.
However, the inner product does not explicitly model the complex structural properties of real world datasets, such as hierarchies between data points.
To remedy this, we introduce cone attention, a drop-in replacement for dot product attention based on hyperbolic entailment cones.
Cone attention associates two points by the depth of their lowest common ancestor in a hierarchy defined by hyperbolic cones, which intuitively measures the divergence of two points and gives a $\textit{hierarchy aware}$ similarity score.
We test cone attention on a wide variety of models and tasks and show that it improves task-level performance over dot product attention and other baselines, and is able to match dot-product attention with significantly fewer parameters.
Our results suggest that cone attention is an effective way to capture hierarchical relationships when calculating attention.
tl;dr: We propose a practical, general-purpose method for randomizing paper assignments in peer review, and show its effect both theoretically and empirically.
The assignment of papers to reviewers is a crucial part of the peer review processes of large publication venues, where organizers (e.g., conference program chairs) rely on algorithms to perform automated paper assignment. As such, a major challenge for the organizers of these processes is to specify paper assignment algorithms that find appropriate assignments with respect to various desiderata. Although the main objective when choosing a good paper assignment is to maximize the expertise of each reviewer for their assigned papers, several other considerations make introducing randomization into the paper assignment desirable: robustness to malicious behavior, the ability to evaluate alternative paper assignments, reviewer diversity, and reviewer anonymity. However, it is unclear in what way one should randomize the paper assignment in order to best satisfy all of these considerations simultaneously. In this work, we present a practical, one-size-fits-all method for randomized paper assignment intended to perform well across different motivations for randomness. We show theoretically and experimentally that our method outperforms currently-deployed methods for randomized paper assignment on several intuitive randomness metrics, demonstrating that the randomized assignments produced by our method are general-purpose.
tl;dr: A new diffusion model achieves zero-shot subject-driven generation/editing and efficient, high-fidelity few-step finetuning for generic subjects.
Subject-driven text-to-image generation models create novel renditions of an input subject based on text prompts. Existing models suffer from lengthy fine-tuning and difficulties preserving the subject fidelity. To overcome these limitations, we introduce BLIP-Diffusion, a new subject-driven image generation model that supports multimodal control which consumes inputs of subject images and text prompts.
Unlike other subject-driven generation models, BLIP-Diffusion introduces a new multimodal encoder which is pre-trained to provide subject representation. We first pre-train the multimodal encoder following BLIP-2 to produce visual representation aligned with the text.
Then we design a subject representation learning task which enables a diffusion model to leverage such visual representation and generates new subject renditions. Compared with previous methods such as DreamBooth, our model enables zero-shot subject-driven generation, and efficient fine-tuning for customized subject with up to 20x speedup. We also demonstrate that BLIP-Diffusion can be flexibly combined with existing techniques such as ControlNet and prompt-to-prompt to enable novel subject-driven generation and editing applications. Implementations are available at: https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS/tree/main/projects/blip-diffusion.
Spiking neural networks are becoming increasingly popular for their low energy requirement in real-world tasks with accuracy comparable to traditional ANNs. SNN training algorithms face the loss of gradient information and non-differentiability due to the Heaviside function in minimizing the model loss over model parameters. To circumvent this problem, the surrogate method employs a differentiable approximation of the Heaviside function in the backward pass, while the forward pass continues to use the Heaviside as the spiking function. We propose to use the zeroth-order technique at the local or neuron level in training SNNs, motivated by its regularizing and potential energy-efficient effects and establish a theoretical connection between it and the existing surrogate methods. We perform experimental validation of the technique on standard static datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100) and neuromorphic datasets (DVS-CIFAR-10, DVS-Gesture, N-Caltech-101, NCARS) and obtain results that offer improvement over the state-of-the-art results. The proposed method also lends itself to efficient implementations of the back-propagation method, which could provide 3-4 times overall speedup in training time. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/BhaskarMukhoty/LocalZO}.
Cognitive diagnosis is an important task in intelligence education, which aims at measuring students’ proficiency in specific knowledge concepts. Given a fully labeled exercise-concept matrix, most existing models focused on mining students' response records for cognitive diagnosis. Despite their success, due to the huge cost of labeling exercises, a more practical scenario is that limited exercises are labeled with concepts. Performing cognitive diagnosis with limited exercise labels is under-explored and remains pretty much open.
In this paper, we propose Disentanglement based Cognitive Diagnosis (DCD) to address the challenges of limited exercise labels. Specifically, we utilize students' response records to model student proficiency, exercise difficulty and exercise label distribution.
Then, we introduce two novel modules - group-based disentanglement and limited-labeled alignment modules - to disentangle the factors relevant to concepts and align them with real limited labels.
Particularly, we introduce the tree-like structure of concepts with negligible cost for group-based disentangling, as concepts of different levels exhibit different independence relationships.
Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.
The efficient coding hypothesis proposes that the response properties of sensory systems are adapted to the statistics of their inputs such that they capture maximal information about the environment, subject to biological constraints. While elegant, information theoretic properties are notoriously difficult to measure in practical settings or to employ as objective functions in optimization. This difficulty has necessitated that computational models designed to test the hypothesis employ several different information metrics ranging from approximations and lower bounds to proxy measures like reconstruction error. Recent theoretical advances have characterized a novel and ecologically relevant efficiency metric, the ``manifold capacity,” which is the number of object categories that may be represented in a linearly separable fashion. However, calculating manifold capacity is a computationally intensive iterative procedure that until now has precluded its use as an objective. Here we outline the simplifying assumptions that allow manifold capacity to be optimized directly, yielding Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations (MMCR). The resulting method is closely related to and inspired by advances in the field of self supervised learning (SSL), and we demonstrate that MMCRs are competitive with state of the art results on standard SSL benchmarks. Empirical analyses reveal differences between MMCRs and representations learned by other SSL frameworks, and suggest a mechanism by which manifold compression gives rise to class separability. Finally we evaluate a set of SSL methods on a suite of neural predicitivity benchmarks, and find MMCRs are higly competitive as models of the ventral stream.
tl;dr: We propose a novel embedding-based framework for complex logical reasoning over temporal knowledge graph.
Multi-hop logical reasoning over knowledge graph plays a fundamental role in many artificial intelligence tasks. Recent complex query embedding methods for reasoning focus on static KGs, while temporal knowledge graphs have not been fully explored. Reasoning over TKGs has two challenges: 1. The query should answer entities or timestamps; 2. The operators should consider both set logic on entity set and temporal logic on timestamp set.
To bridge this gap, we introduce the multi-hop logical reasoning problem on TKGs and then propose the first temporal complex query embedding named Temporal Feature-Logic Embedding framework (TFLEX) to answer the temporal complex queries. Specifically, we utilize fuzzy logic to compute the logic part of the Temporal Feature-Logic embedding, thus naturally modeling all first-order logic operations on the entity set. In addition, we further extend fuzzy logic on timestamp set to cope with three extra temporal operators (**After**, **Before** and **Between**).
Experiments on numerous query patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
tl;dr: The paper introduces PaintSeg, a new unsupervised method for segmenting objects without any training.
The paper introduces PaintSeg, a new unsupervised method for segmenting objects without any training. We propose an adversarial masked contrastive painting (AMCP) process, which creates a contrast between the original image and a painted image in which a masked area is painted using off-the-shelf generative models. During the painting process, inpainting and outpainting are alternated, with the former masking the foreground and filling in the background, and the latter masking the background while recovering the missing part of the foreground object. Inpainting and outpainting, also referred to as I-step and O-step, allow our method to gradually advance the target segmentation mask toward the ground truth without supervision or training. PaintSeg can be configured to work with a variety of prompts, e.g. coarse masks, boxes, scribbles, and points. Our experimental results demonstrate that PaintSeg outperforms existing approaches in coarse mask-prompt, box-prompt, and point-prompt segmentation tasks, providing a training-free solution suitable for unsupervised segmentation. Code: https://github.com/lxa9867/PaintSeg.
Learning to represent and simulate the dynamics of physical systems is a crucial yet challenging task. Existing equivariant Graph Neural Network (GNN) based methods have encapsulated the symmetry of physics, \emph{e.g.}, translations, rotations, etc, leading to better generalization ability. Nevertheless, their frame-to-frame formulation of the task overlooks the non-Markov property mainly incurred by unobserved dynamics in the environment. In this paper, we reformulate dynamics simulation as a spatio-temporal prediction task, by employing the trajectory in the past period to recover the Non-Markovian interactions. We propose Equivariant Spatio-Temporal Attentive Graph Networks (ESTAG), an equivariant version of spatio-temporal GNNs, to fulfil our purpose. At its core, we design a novel Equivariant Discrete Fourier Transform (EDFT) to extract periodic patterns from the history frames, and then construct an Equivariant Spatial Module (ESM) to accomplish spatial message passing, and an Equivariant Temporal Module (ETM) with the forward attention and equivariant pooling mechanisms to aggregate temporal message. We evaluate our model on three real datasets corresponding to the molecular-, protein- and macro-level. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of ESTAG compared to typical spatio-temporal GNNs and equivariant GNNs.
In this paper, we prove state-of-the-art Bayesian regret bounds for Thompson Sampling in reinforcement learning in a multitude of settings. We present a refined analysis of the information ratio, and show an upper bound of order $\widetilde{O}(H\sqrt{d_{l_1}T})$ in the time inhomogeneous reinforcement learning problem where $H$ is the episode length and $d_{l_1}$ is the Kolmogorov $l_1-$dimension of the space of environments. We then find concrete bounds of $d_{l_1}$ in a variety of settings, such as tabular, linear and finite mixtures, and discuss how our results improve the state-of-the-art.
tl;dr: We propose Model Spider to learn how to tokenize both Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) and tasks. Model Spider accelerates selecting a helpful PTM from visual models or Large Language Models (LLMs) for a downstream task and improves the PTM ranking quality.
Figuring out which Pre-Trained Model (PTM) from a model zoo fits the target task is essential to take advantage of plentiful model resources. With the availability of numerous heterogeneous PTMs from diverse fields, efficiently selecting the most suitable one is challenging due to the time-consuming costs of carrying out forward or backward passes over all PTMs. In this paper, we propose Model Spider, which tokenizes both PTMs and tasks by summarizing their characteristics into vectors to enable efficient PTM selection. By leveraging the approximated performance of PTMs on a separate set of training tasks, Model Spider learns to construct representation and measure the fitness score between a model-task pair via their representation. The ability to rank relevant PTMs higher than others generalizes to new tasks. With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task repr. with their PTM-specific semantics to re-rank the PTMs for better selection. Model Spider balances efficiency and selection ability, making PTM selection like a spider preying on a web. Model Spider exhibits promising performance across diverse model zoos, including visual models and Large Language Models (LLMs). Code is available at https://github.com/zhangyikaii/Model-Spider.
tl;dr: We map an algorithm performing Poisson compressed sensing onto the circuits of the olfactory bulb.
Within a single sniff, the mammalian olfactory system can decode the identity and concentration of odorants wafted on turbulent plumes of air. Yet, it must do so given access only to the noisy, dimensionally-reduced representation of the odor world provided by olfactory receptor neurons. As a result, the olfactory system must solve a compressed sensing problem, relying on the fact that only a handful of the millions of possible odorants are present in a given scene. Inspired by this principle, past works have proposed normative compressed sensing models for olfactory decoding. However, these models have not captured the unique anatomy and physiology of the olfactory bulb, nor have they shown that sensing can be achieved within the 100-millisecond timescale of a single sniff. Here, we propose a rate-based Poisson compressed sensing circuit model for the olfactory bulb. This model maps onto the neuron classes of the olfactory bulb, and recapitulates salient features of their connectivity and physiology. For circuit sizes comparable to the human olfactory bulb, we show that this model can accurately detect tens of odors within the timescale of a single sniff. We also show that this model can perform Bayesian posterior sampling for accurate uncertainty estimation. Fast inference is possible only if the geometry of the neural code is chosen to match receptor properties, yielding a distributed neural code that is not axis-aligned to individual odor identities. Our results illustrate how normative modeling can help us map function onto specific neural circuits to generate new hypotheses.
tl;dr: A precise characterization of the effect of look-alike clustering on the generalization property of the model
While personalized recommendations systems have become increasingly popular, ensuring user data protection remains a top concern in the development of these learning systems. A common approach to enhancing privacy involves training models using anonymous data rather than individual data. In this paper, we explore a natural technique called "look-alike clustering", which involves replacing sensitive features of individuals with the cluster's average values. We provide a precise analysis of how training models using anonymous cluster centers affects their generalization capabilities. We focus on an asymptotic regime where the size of the training set grows in proportion to the features dimension. Our analysis is based on the Convex Gaussian Minimax Theorem (CGMT) and allows us to theoretically understand the role of different model components on the generalization error. In addition, we demonstrate that in certain high-dimensional regimes, training over anonymous cluster centers acts as a regularization and improves generalization error of the trained models. Finally, we corroborate our asymptotic theory with finite-sample numerical experiments where we observe a perfect match when the sample size is only of order of a few hundreds.
1301. Mitigating the Popularity Bias of Graph Collaborative Filtering: A Dimensional Collapse Perspective
Graph-based Collaborative Filtering (GCF) is widely used in personalized recommendation systems. However, GCF suffers from a fundamental problem where features tend to occupy the embedding space inefficiently (by spanning only a low-dimensional subspace). Such an effect is characterized in GCF by the embedding space being dominated by a few of popular items with the user embeddings highly concentrated around them. This enhances the so-called Matthew effect of the popularity bias where popular items are highly recommend whereas remaining items are ignored. In this paper, we analyze the above effect in GCF and reveal that the simplified graph convolution operation (typically used in GCF) shrinks the singular space of the feature matrix. As typical approaches (i.e., optimizing the uniformity term) fail to prevent the embedding space degradation, we propose a decorrelation-enhanced GCF objective that promotes feature diversity by leveraging the so-called principle of redundancy reduction in embeddings. However, unlike conventional methods that use the Euclidean geometry to relax hard constraints for decorrelation, we exploit non-Euclidean geometry. Such a choice helps maintain the range space of the matrix and obtain small condition number, which prevents the embedding space degradation. Our method outperforms contrastive-based GCF models on several benchmark datasets and improves the performance for unpopular items.
Deriving from image matching and understanding, semantic keypoint matching aims at establishing correspondence between keypoint sets in images. As graphs are powerful tools to represent points and their complex relationships, graph matching provides an effective way to find desired semantic keypoint correspondences. Recent deep graph matching methods have shown excellent performance, but there is still a lack of exploration and utilization of spatial information of keypoints as nodes in graphs. More specifically, existing methods are insufficient to capture the relative spatial relations through current graph construction approaches from the locations of semantic keypoints. To address these issues, we introduce a positional reconstruction encoder-decoder (PR-EnDec) to model intrinsic graph spatial structure, and present an end-to-end graph matching network PREGM based on PR-EnDec. Our PR-EnDec consists of a positional encoder that learns effective node spatial embedding with the affine transformation invariance, and a spatial relation decoder that further utilizes the high-order spatial information by reconstructing the locational structure of graphs contained in the node coordinates. Extensive experimental results on three public keypoint matching datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PREGM.
tl;dr: Independent recurrent units enable tractable online learning of long-range dependencies
Online learning holds the promise of enabling efficient long-term credit assignment in recurrent neural networks. However, current algorithms fall short of offline backpropagation by either not being scalable or failing to learn long-range dependencies. Here we present a high-performance online learning algorithm that merely doubles the memory and computational requirements of a single inference pass. We achieve this by leveraging independent recurrent modules in multi-layer networks, an architectural motif that has recently been shown to be particularly powerful. Experiments on synthetic memory problems and on the challenging long-range arena benchmark suite reveal that our algorithm performs competitively, establishing a new standard for what can be achieved through online learning. This ability to learn long-range dependencies offers a new perspective on learning in the brain and opens a promising avenue in neuromorphic computing.
We consider a fundamental problem where there are multiple groups whose data distributions are unknown, and an analyst would like to learn the mean of each group. We consider an active learning framework to sequentially collect $T$ samples with bandit, each period observing a sample from a chosen group. After observing a sample, the analyst may update their estimate of the mean and variance of that group and choose the next group accordingly. The objective is to dynamically collect samples to minimize the $p$-norm of the vector of variances of our mean estimators after $T$ rounds. We propose an algorithm, Variance-UCB, that selects groups according to a an upper bound on the variance estimate adjusted to the $p$-norm chosen. We show that the regret of Variance-UCB is $O(T^{-2})$ for finite $p$, and prove that no algorithm can do better. When $p$ is infinite, we recover the $O(T^{-1.5})$ obtained in \cite{activelearning, carpentier2011upper} and provide a new lower bound showing that no algorithm can do better.
Spectral embedding is a powerful graph embedding technique that has received a lot of attention recently due to its effectiveness on Graph Transformers. However, from a theoretical perspective, the universal expressive power of spectral embedding comes at the price of losing two important invariance properties of graphs, sign and basis invariance, which also limits its effectiveness on graph data. To remedy this issue, many previous methods developed costly approaches to learn new invariants and suffer from high computation complexity. In this work, we explore a minimal approach that resolves the ambiguity issues by directly finding canonical directions for the eigenvectors, named Laplacian Canonization (LC). As a pure pre-processing method, LC is light-weighted and can be applied to any existing GNNs. We provide a thorough investigation, from theory to algorithm, on this approach, and discover an efficient algorithm named Maximal Axis Projection (MAP) that works for both sign and basis invariance and successfully canonizes more than 90\% of all eigenvectors. Experiments on real-world benchmark datasets like ZINC, MOLTOX21, and MOLPCBA show that MAP consistently outperforms existing methods while bringing minimal computation overhead. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/LaplacianCanonization}.
tl;dr: We observe that low-rank layers may negatively affect network stability and we propose an algorithm that mitigates this phenomenon in a computationally affordable way, while maintaining the low-rank structure.
With the growth of model and data sizes, a broad effort has been made to design pruning techniques that reduce the resource demand of deep learning pipelines, while retaining model performance. In order to reduce both inference and training costs, a prominent line of work uses low-rank matrix factorizations to represent the network weights. Although able to retain accuracy, we observe that low-rank methods tend to compromise model robustness against adversarial perturbations. By modeling robustness in terms of the condition number of the neural network, we argue that this loss of robustness is due to the exploding singular values of the low-rank weight matrices. Thus, we introduce a robust low-rank training algorithm that maintains the network's weights on the low-rank matrix manifold while simultaneously enforcing approximate orthonormal constraints. The resulting model
reduces both training and inference costs while ensuring well-conditioning and thus better adversarial robustness, without compromising model accuracy. This is shown by extensive numerical evidence and by our main approximation theorem that shows the computed robust low-rank network well-approximates the ideal full model, provided a highly performing low-rank sub-network exists.
tl;dr: We introduce a single-stage Visual Query Localization method that achieves state-of-the-art results and is ten times faster during inference.
Visual Query Localization on long-form egocentric videos requires spatio-temporal search and localization of visually specified objects and is vital to build episodic memory systems. Prior work develops complex multi-stage pipelines that leverage well-established object detection and tracking methods to perform VQL. However, each stage is independently trained and the complexity of the pipeline results in slow inference speeds. We propose VQLoC, a novel single-stage VQL framework that is end-to-end trainable. Our key idea is to first build a holistic understanding of the query-video relationship and then perform spatio-temporal localization in a single shot manner. Specifically, we establish the query-video relationship by jointly considering query-to-frame correspondences between the query and each video frame and frame-to-frame correspondences between nearby video frames. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior VQL methods by $20$% accuracy while obtaining a $10\times$ improvement in inference speed. VQLoC is also the top entry on the Ego4D VQ2D challenge leaderboard.
tl;dr: In a specific task, the computational core of a feed-forward neural network can be identified using L2-regularized weight parameterization, based on the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the network's adjacency matrix.
In theoretical Machine Learning, the teacher-student paradigm is often employed as an effective metaphor for real-life tuition. A student network is trained on data generated by a fixed teacher network until it matches the instructor’s ability to cope with the assigned task. The above scheme proves particularly relevant when the student network is overparameterized (namely, when larger layer sizes are employed) as compared to the underlying teacher network. Under these operating conditions, it is tempting to speculate that the student ability to handle the given task could be eventually stored in a sub-portion of the whole network. This latter should be to some extent reminiscent of the frozen teacher structure, according to suitable metrics, while being approximately invariant across different architectures of the student candidate network. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art conventional learning techniques could not help in identifying the existence of such an invariant subnetwork, due to the inherent degree of non-convexity that characterizes the examined problem. In this work, we take a decisive leap forward by proposing a radically different optimization scheme which builds on a spectral representation of the linear transfer of information between layers. The gradient is hence calculated with respect to both eigenvalues and eigenvectors with negligible increase in terms of computational and complexity load, as compared to standard training algorithms. Working in this framework, we could isolate a stable student substructure, that mirrors the true complexity of the teacher in terms of computing neurons, path distribution and topological attributes. When pruning unimportant nodes of the trained student, as follows a ranking that reflects the optimized eigenvalues, no degradation in the recorded performance is seen above a threshold that corresponds to the effective teacher size. The observed behavior can be pictured as a genuine second-order phase transition that bears universality traits.
Imitation learning from human feedback studies how to train well-performed imitation agents with an annotator's relative comparison of two demonstrations (one demonstration is better/worse than the other), which is usually easier to collect than the perfect expert data required by traditional imitation learning. However, in many real-world applications, it is still expensive or even impossible to provide a clear pairwise comparison between two demonstrations with similar quality. This motivates us to study the problem of imitation learning with vague feedback, where the data annotator can only distinguish the paired demonstrations correctly when their quality differs significantly, i.e., one from the expert and another from the non-expert. By modeling the underlying demonstration pool as a mixture of expert and non-expert data, we show that the expert policy distribution can be recovered when the proportion $\alpha$ of expert data is known. We also propose a mixture proportion estimation method for the unknown $\alpha$ case. Then, we integrate the recovered expert policy distribution with generative adversarial imitation learning to form an end-to-end algorithm. Experiments show that our methods outperform standard and preference-based imitation learning methods on various tasks.
tl;dr: We define group fairness in a peer review assignment problem using the concept of core stability and show that a review assignment in the core can be efficiently found when each submission is single-authored.
Large conferences such as NeurIPS and AAAI serve as crossroads of various AI fields, since they attract submissions from a vast number of communities. However, in some cases, this has resulted in a poor reviewing experience for some communities, whose submissions get assigned to less qualified reviewers outside of their communities. An often-advocated solution is to break up any such large conference into smaller conferences, but this can lead to isolation of communities and harm interdisciplinary research. We tackle this challenge by introducing a notion of group fairness, called the core, which requires that every possible community (subset of researchers) to be treated in a way that prevents them from unilaterally benefiting by withdrawing from a large conference.
We study a simple peer review model, prove that it always admits a reviewing assignment in the core, and design an efficient algorithm to find one such assignment.
We use real data from CVPR and ICLR conferences to compare our algorithm to existing reviewing assignment algorithms on a number of metrics.
tl;dr: We solve imbalanced mixed linear regression using tools from robust regression
We consider the problem of mixed linear regression (MLR), where each observed sample belongs to one of $K$ unknown linear models.
In practical applications, the mixture of the $K$ models may be imbalanced with a significantly different number of samples from each model. Unfortunately, most MLR methods do not perform well in such settings. Motivated by this practical challenge, in this work we propose Mix-IRLS, a novel, simple and fast algorithm for MLR with excellent performance on both balanced and imbalanced mixtures.
In contrast to popular approaches that recover the $K$ models simultaneously, Mix-IRLS does it sequentially using tools from robust regression. Empirically, beyond imbalanced mixtures, Mix-IRLS succeeds in a broad range of additional settings where other methods fail, including small sample sizes, presence of outliers, and an unknown number of models $K$. Furthermore, Mix-IRLS outperforms competing methods on several real-world datasets, in some cases by a large margin. We complement our empirical results by deriving a recovery guarantee for Mix-IRLS, which highlights its advantage on imbalanced mixtures.
We introduce Back-Modality, a novel data augmentation schema predicated on modal transformation. Data from an initial modality undergoes transformation to an intermediate modality, followed by a reverse transformation. This framework serves dual roles. On one hand, it operates as a general data augmentation strategy. On the other hand, it allows for other augmentation techniques, suitable for the intermediate modality, to enhance the initial modality. For instance, data augmentation methods applicable to pure text can be employed to augment images, thereby facilitating the cross-modality of data augmentation techniques. To validate the viability and efficacy of our framework, we proffer three instantiations of Back-Modality: back-captioning, back-imagination, and back-speech. Comprehensive evaluations across tasks such as image classification, sentiment classification, and textual entailment demonstrate that our methods consistently enhance performance under data-scarce circumstances.
tl;dr: We propose to augment Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory for memorizing long-form previous contexts and meanwhile propose a residual SideNet as the memory retriever and reader.
Existing large language models (LLMs) can only afford fix-sized inputs due to the input length limit, preventing them from utilizing rich long-context information from past inputs. To address this, we propose a framework, Language Models Augmented with Long-Term Memory (LongMem), which enables LLMs to memorize long history. We design a novel decoupled network architecture with the original backbone LLM frozen as a memory encoder and an adaptive residual side-network as a memory retriever and reader. Such a decoupled memory design can easily cache and update long-term past contexts for memory retrieval without suffering from memory staleness. Enhanced with memory-augmented adaptation training, LongMem can thus memorize long past context and use long-term memory for language modeling. The proposed memory retrieval module can handle unlimited-length context in its memory bank to benefit various downstream tasks. Typically, LongMem can enlarge the long-form memory to 65k tokens and thus cache many-shot extra demonstration examples as long-form memory for in-context learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong long-context models on ChapterBreak, a challenging long-context modeling benchmark, and achieves remarkable improvements on memory-augmented in-context learning over LLMs. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in helping language models to memorize and utilize long-form contents.
1314. MeCo: Zero-Shot NAS with One Data and Single Forward Pass via Minimum Eigenvalue of Correlation
tl;dr: A new zero-cost proxy for NAS that requires a single forward pass using one data and achieves SOTA results.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a promising paradigm in automatic architecture engineering. Zero-shot NAS can evaluate the network without training via some specific metrics called zero-cost proxies. Though effective, the existing zero-cost proxies either invoke at least one backpropagation or depend highly on the data and labels. To alleviate the above issues, in this paper, we first reveal how the Pearson correlation matrix of the feature maps impacts the convergence rate and the generalization capacity of an over-parameterized neural network. Enlightened by the theoretical analysis, we propose a novel zero-cost proxy called $\mathsf{MeCo}$, which requires only one random data for a single forward pass. We further propose an optimization approach $\mathsf{MeCo_{opt}}$ to improve the performance of our method. We design comprehensive experiments and extensively evaluate $\mathsf{MeCo}$ on multiple popular benchmarks. $\mathsf{MeCo}$ achieves the highest correlation with the ground truth (e.g., 0.89 on NATS-Bench-TSS with CIFAR-10) among all the state-of-the-art proxies, which is also fully independent of the data and labels. Moreover, we integrate $\mathsf{MeCo}$ with the existing generation method to comprise a complete NAS. The experimental results illustrate that $\mathsf{MeCo}$-based NAS can select the architecture with the highest accuracy and a low search cost. For instance, the best network searched by $\mathsf{MeCo}$-based NAS achieves 97.31% on CIFAR-10, which is 0.04% higher than the baselines under the same settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/HamsterMimi/MeCo
tl;dr: We propose SE(3) equivariant augmented coupling flows for modeling physical systems.
Coupling normalizing flows allow for fast sampling and density evaluation, making them the tool of choice for probabilistic modeling of physical systems. However, the standard coupling architecture precludes endowing flows that operate on the Cartesian coordinates of atoms with the SE(3) and permutation invariances of physical systems. This work proposes a coupling flow that preserves SE(3) and permutation equivariance by performing coordinate splits along additional augmented dimensions. At each layer, the flow maps atoms' positions into learned SE(3) invariant bases, where we apply standard flow transformations, such as monotonic rational-quadratic splines, before returning to the original basis. Crucially, our flow preserves fast sampling and density evaluation, and may be used to produce unbiased estimates of expectations with respect to the target distribution via importance sampling. When trained on the DW4, LJ13, and QM9-positional datasets, our flow is competitive with equivariant continuous normalizing flows, while allowing sampling more than an order of magnitude faster. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn the full Boltzmann distribution of alanine dipeptide by only modeling the Cartesian positions of its atoms. Lastly, we demonstrate that our flow can be trained to approximately sample from the Boltzmann distribution of the DW4 and LJ13 particle systems using only their energy functions.
tl;dr: This paper presents the first provably efficient algorithms for offline RL with DP guarantee.
The offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem is often motivated by the need to learn data-driven decision policies in financial, legal and healthcare applications. However, the learned policy could retain sensitive information of individuals in the training data (e.g., treatment and outcome of patients), thus susceptible to various privacy risks. We design offline RL algorithms with differential privacy guarantees which provably prevent such risks. These algorithms also enjoy strong instance-dependent learning bounds under both tabular and linear Markov Decision Process (MDP) settings. Our theory and simulation suggest that the privacy guarantee comes at (almost) no drop in utility comparing to the non-private counterpart for a medium-size dataset.
In this paper, we design a regularization-free algorithm for high-dimensional support vector machines (SVMs) by integrating over-parameterization with Nesterov's smoothing method, and provide theoretical guarantees for the induced implicit regularization phenomenon. In particular, we construct an over-parameterized hinge loss function and estimate the true parameters by leveraging regularization-free gradient descent on this loss function. The utilization of Nesterov's method enhances the computational efficiency of our algorithm, especially in terms of determining the stopping criterion and reducing computational complexity. With appropriate choices of initialization, step size, and smoothness parameter, we demonstrate that unregularized gradient descent achieves a near-oracle statistical convergence rate. Additionally, we verify our theoretical findings through a variety of numerical experiments and compare the proposed method with explicit regularization. Our results illustrate the advantages of employing implicit regularization via gradient descent in conjunction with over-parameterization in sparse SVMs.
We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be collected to identify a nearly-optimal policy. Deriving this lower bound along with the optimal exploration strategy entails solving an intricate optimization problem and requires a model of the system. In turn, most existing sample optimal exploration algorithms rely on estimating the model. We derive an approximation of the instance-specific lower bound that only involves quantities that can be inferred using model-free approaches. Leveraging this approximation, we devise an ensemble-based model-free exploration strategy applicable to both tabular and continuous Markov decision processes. Numerical results demonstrate that our strategy is able to identify efficient policies faster than state-of-the-art exploration approaches.
tl;dr: We propose a method to compute an action sequence that, in retrospect, would have led a particular observed episode of a continuous-state MDP to a better outcome.
Whenever a clinician reflects on the efficacy of a sequence of treatment decisions for a patient, they may try to identify critical time steps where, had they made different decisions, the patient's health would have improved. While recent methods at the intersection of causal inference and reinforcement learning promise to aid human experts, as the clinician above, to *retrospectively* analyze sequential decision making processes, they have focused on environments with finitely many discrete states. However, in many practical applications, the state of the environment is inherently continuous in nature. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. We start by formally characterizing a sequence of discrete actions and continuous states using finite horizon Markov decision processes and a broad class of bijective structural causal models. Building upon this characterization, we formalize the problem of finding counterfactually optimal action sequences and show that, in general, we cannot expect to solve it in polynomial time. Then, we develop a search method based on the A* algorithm that, under a natural form of Lipschitz continuity of the environment’s dynamics, is guaranteed to return the optimal solution to the problem. Experiments on real clinical data show that our method is very efficient in practice, and it has the potential to offer interesting insights for sequential decision making tasks.
We introduce a new diffusion-based approach for shape completion on 3D range scans. Compared with prior deterministic and probabilistic methods, we strike a balance between realism, multi-modality, and high fidelity. We propose DiffComplete by casting shape completion as a generative task conditioned on the incomplete shape. Our key designs are two-fold. First, we devise a hierarchical feature aggregation mechanism to inject conditional features in a spatially-consistent manner. So, we can capture both local details and broader contexts of the conditional inputs to control the shape completion. Second, we propose an occupancy-aware fusion strategy in our model to enable the completion of multiple partial shapes and introduce higher flexibility on the input conditions. DiffComplete sets a new SOTA performance (e.g., 40% decrease on $l_1$ error) on two large-scale 3D shape completion benchmarks. Our completed shapes not only have a realistic outlook compared with the deterministic methods but also exhibit high similarity to the ground truths compared with the probabilistic alternatives. Further, DiffComplete has strong generalizability on objects of entirely unseen classes for both synthetic and real data, eliminating the need for model re-training in various applications.
Attention mechanisms play a crucial role in cognitive systems by allowing them to flexibly allocate cognitive resources. Transformers, in particular, have become a dominant architecture in machine learning, with attention as their central innovation. However, the underlying intuition and formalism of attention in Transformers is based on ideas of keys and queries in database management systems. In this work, we pursue a structural inference perspective, building upon, and bringing together, previous theoretical descriptions of attention such as; Gaussian Mixture Models, alignment mechanisms and Hopfield Networks. Specifically, we demonstrate that attention can be viewed as inference over an implicitly defined set of possible adjacency structures in a graphical model, revealing the generality of such a mechanism. This perspective unifies different attentional architectures in machine learning and suggests potential modifications and generalizations of attention. Here we investigate two and demonstrate their behaviour on explanatory toy problems: (a) extending the value function to incorporate more nodes of a graphical model yielding a mechanism with a bias toward attending multiple tokens; (b) introducing a geometric prior (with conjugate hyper-prior) over the adjacency structures producing a mechanism which dynamically scales the context window depending on input. Moreover, by describing a link between structural inference and precision-regulation in Predictive Coding Networks, we discuss how this framework can bridge the gap between attentional mechanisms in machine learning and Bayesian conceptions of attention in Neuroscience. We hope by providing a new lens on attention architectures our work can guide the development of new and improved attentional mechanisms.
We propose an end-to-end trainable, cross-category method for reconstructing multiple man-made articulated objects from a single RGBD image, focusing on part-level shape reconstruction and pose and kinematics estimation. We depart from previous works that rely on learning instance-level latent space, focusing on man-made articulated objects with predefined part counts. Instead, we propose a novel alternative approach that employs part-level representation, representing instances as combinations of detected parts. While our detect-then-group approach effectively handles instances with diverse part structures and various part counts, it faces issues of false positives, varying part sizes and scales, and an increasing model size due to end-to-end training. To address these challenges, we propose 1) test-time kinematics-aware part fusion to improve detection performance while suppressing false positives, 2) anisotropic scale normalization for part shape learning to accommodate various part sizes and scales, and 3) a balancing strategy for cross-refinement between feature space and output space to improve part detection while maintaining model size. Evaluation on both synthetic and real data demonstrates that our method successfully reconstructs variously structured multiple instances that previous works cannot handle, and outperforms prior works in shape reconstruction and kinematics estimation.
tl;dr: We propose a novel interactive planning approach using LLMs that brings a planning-based agent to the apex of Minecraft (an open-world environment) for the first time.
In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requires precise and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of the tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider the achievability of the current agent when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient. To this end, we propose ``$\underline{D}$escribe, $\underline{E}$xplain, $\underline{P}$lan and $\underline{S}$elect'' ($\textbf{DEPS}$), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach helps with better error correction from the feedback during the long-haul planning, while also bringing the sense of proximity via goal $\textbf{Selector}$, a learnable module that ranks parallel sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion and improves the original plan accordingly. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first zero-shot multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly double the overall performances. Further testing reveals our method's general effectiveness in popularly adopted non-open-ended domains as well (i.e., ALFWorld and tabletop manipulation). The ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the $\texttt{ObtainDiamond}$ grand challenge with our approach.
1324. Theoretically Guaranteed Bidirectional Data Rectification for Robust Sequential Recommendation
tl;dr: We propose a theoretically guaranteed model-agnostic framework to rectify unreliable targets and input for more robust sequential recommendation, with strategies to reduce time and space complexity.
Sequential recommender systems (SRSs) are typically trained to predict the next item as the target given its preceding (and succeeding) items as the input. Such a paradigm assumes that every input-target pair is reliable for training. However, users can be induced to click on items that are inconsistent with their true preferences, resulting in unreliable instances, i.e., mismatched input-target pairs. Current studies on mitigating this issue suffer from two limitations: (i) they discriminate instance reliability according to models trained with unreliable data, yet without theoretical guarantees that such a seemingly contradictory solution can be effective; and (ii) most methods can only tackle either unreliable input or targets but fail to handle both simultaneously. To fill the gap, we theoretically unveil the relationship between SRS predictions and instance reliability, whereby two error-bounded strategies are proposed to rectify unreliable targets and input, respectively. On this basis, we devise a model-agnostic Bidirectional Data Rectification (BirDRec) framework, which can be flexibly implemented with most existing SRSs for robust training against unreliable data. Additionally, a rectification sampling strategy is devised and a self-ensemble mechanism is adopted to reduce the (time and space) complexity of BirDRec. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets verify the generality, effectiveness, and efficiency of our proposed BirDRec.
tl;dr: We propose a novel semi-supervised learning framework for audio-visual source localization to achieve remarkable improvements with limited positional annotations.
Audio-Visual Source Localization (AVSL) aims to locate sounding objects within video frames given the paired audio clips. Existing methods predominantly rely on self-supervised contrastive learning of audio-visual correspondence. Without any bounding-box annotations, they struggle to achieve precise localization, especially for small objects, and suffer from blurry boundaries and false positives. Moreover, the naive semi-supervised method is poor in effectively utilizing the abundance of unlabeled audio-visual pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-Supervised Learning framework for AVSL, namely Dual Mean-Teacher (DMT), comprising two teacher-student structures to circumvent the confirmation bias issue. Specifically, two teachers, pre-trained on limited labeled data, are employed to filter out noisy samples via the consensus between their predictions, and then generate high-quality pseudo-labels by intersecting their confidence maps. The optimal utilization of both labeled and unlabeled data combined with this unbiased framework enable DMT to outperform current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, with CIoU of $\textbf{90.4\%}$ and $\textbf{48.8\%}$ on Flickr-SoundNet and VGG-Sound Source, obtaining $\textbf{8.9\%}$ and $\textbf{9.6\%}$ improvements respectively, given only $3\%$ of data positional-annotated. We also extend our framework to some existing AVSL methods and consistently boost their performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyx-gloria/DMT.
tl;dr: We provide a learning theoretic framework to understand the benefits of incorporating explanation constraints in the standard supervised learning setting.
As larger deep learning models are hard to interpret, there has been a recent focus on generating explanations of these black-box models.
In contrast, we may have apriori explanations of how models should behave. In this paper, we formalize this notion as learning from \emph{explanation constraints} and provide a learning theoretic framework to analyze how such explanations can improve the learning of our models.
One may naturally ask, ``When would these explanations be helpful?"
Our first key contribution addresses this question via a class of models that satisfies these explanation constraints in expectation over new data. We provide a characterization of the benefits of these models (in terms of the reduction of their Rademacher complexities) for a canonical class of explanations given by gradient information in the settings of both linear models and two layer neural networks. In addition, we provide an algorithmic solution for our framework, via a variational approximation that achieves better performance and satisfies these constraints more frequently, when compared to simpler augmented Lagrangian methods to incorporate these explanations. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach over a large array of synthetic and real-world experiments.
tl;dr: A simple normalization technique for improving a transformer's performance.
Self-supervised training methods for transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains. Previous transformer-based models, such as masked autoencoders (MAE), typically utilize a single normalization layer for both the [CLS] symbol and the tokens. We propose in this paper a simple modification that employs separate normalization layers for the tokens and the [CLS] symbol to better capture their distinct characteristics and enhance downstream task performance. Our method aims to alleviate the potential negative effects of using the same normalization statistics for both token types, which may not be optimally aligned with their individual roles. We empirically show that by utilizing a separate normalization layer, the [CLS] embeddings can better encode the global contextual information and are distributed more uniformly in its anisotropic space. When replacing the conventional normalization layer with the two separate layers, we observe an average 2.7% performance improvement over the image, natural language, and graph domains.
tl;dr: Expressivity analysis of recurrent neural circuits that can sample from any probability distribution
In sampling-based Bayesian models of brain function, neural activities are assumed to be samples from probability distributions that the brain uses for probabilistic computation. However, a comprehensive understanding of how mechanistic models of neural dynamics can sample from arbitrary distributions is still lacking. We use tools from functional analysis and stochastic differential equations to explore the minimum architectural requirements for $\textit{recurrent}$ neural circuits to sample from complex distributions. We first consider the traditional sampling model consisting of a network of neurons whose outputs directly represent the samples ($\textit{sampler-only}$ network). We argue that synaptic current and firing-rate dynamics in the traditional model have limited capacity to sample from a complex probability distribution. We show that the firing rate dynamics of a recurrent neural circuit with a separate set of output units can sample from an arbitrary probability distribution. We call such circuits $\textit{reservoir-sampler networks}$ (RSNs). We propose an efficient training procedure based on denoising score matching that finds recurrent and output weights such that the RSN implements Langevin sampling. We empirically demonstrate our model's ability to sample from several complex data distributions using the proposed neural dynamics and discuss its applicability to developing the next generation of sampling-based Bayesian brain models.
tl;dr: This paper presents uncoupled algorithms for learning in two-player zero-sum Markov games with non-asymptotic convergence rates under bandit feedback.
We revisit the problem of learning in two-player zero-sum Markov games, focusing on developing an algorithm that is *uncoupled*, *convergent*, and *rational*, with non-asymptotic convergence rates to Nash equilibrium. We start from the case of stateless matrix game with bandit feedback as a warm-up, showing an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-\frac{1}{8}})$ last-iterate convergence rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result that obtains finite last-iterate convergence rate given access to only bandit feedback. We extend our result to the case of irreducible Markov games, providing a last-iterate convergence rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-\frac{1}{9+\varepsilon}})$ for any $\varepsilon>0$. Finally, we study Markov games without any assumptions on the dynamics, and show a *path convergence* rate, a new notion of convergence we defined, of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(t^{-\frac{1}{10}})$. Our algorithm removes the synchronization and prior knowledge requirement of Wei et al. (2021), which pursued the same goals as us for irreducible Markov games. Our algorithm is related to Chen et al. (2021) and Cen et al. (2021)'s and also builds on the entropy regularization technique. However, we remove their requirement of communications on the entropy values, making our algorithm entirely uncoupled.
1330. Binary Radiance Fields
tl;dr: A storage-efficient radiance field representation with binary feature encoding.
In this paper, we propose binary radiance fields (BiRF), a storage-efficient radiance field representation employing binary feature encoding that encodes local features using binary encoding parameters in a format of either $+1$ or $-1$. This binarization strategy lets us represent the feature grid with highly compact feature encoding and a dramatic reduction in storage size. Furthermore, our 2D-3D hybrid feature grid design enhances the compactness of feature encoding as the 3D grid includes main components while 2D grids capture details. In our experiments, binary radiance field representation successfully outperforms the reconstruction performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) efficient radiance field models with lower storage allocation. In particular, our model achieves impressive results in static scene reconstruction, with a PSNR of 32.03 dB for Synthetic-NeRF scenes, 34.48 dB for Synthetic-NSVF scenes, 28.20 dB for Tanks and Temples scenes while only utilizing 0.5 MB of storage space, respectively. We hope the proposed binary radiance field representation will make radiance fields more accessible without a storage bottleneck.
tl;dr: We show that a simple variant of mask image modeling can be used to provide adversarial robustness in addition to pretrained features..
Recent advancements in masked image modeling (MIM) have made it a prevailing framework for self-supervised visual representation learning. The MIM pretrained models, like most deep neural network methods, remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, limiting their practical application, and this issue has received little research attention. In this paper, we investigate how this powerful self-supervised learning paradigm can provide adversarial robustness to downstream classifiers. During the exploration, we find that noisy image modeling (NIM), a simple variant of MIM that adopts denoising as the pre-text task, reconstructs noisy images surprisingly well despite severe corruption. Motivated by this observation, we propose an adversarial defense method, referred to as De^3, by exploiting the pretrained decoder for denoising. Through De^3, NIM is able to enhance adversarial robustness beyond providing pretrained features. Furthermore, we incorporate a simple modification, sampling the noise scale hyperparameter from random distributions, and enable the defense to achieve a better and tunable trade-off between accuracy and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that, in terms of adversarial robustness, NIM is superior to MIM thanks to its effective denoising capability. Moreover, the defense provided by NIM achieves performance on par with adversarial training while offering the extra tunability advantage. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/youzunzhi/NIM-AdvDef.
tl;dr: We show an isomorphism between in-context learning over natural language prompts and implicit understanding of composition rules over visual entities
Large language models are few-shot learners that can solve diverse tasks from a handful of demonstrations. This implicit understanding of tasks suggests that the attention mechanisms over word tokens may play a role in analogical reasoning. In this work, we investigate whether analogical reasoning can enable in-context composition over composable elements of visual stimuli. First, we introduce a suite of three benchmarks to test the generalization properties of a visual in-context learner. We formalize the notion of an analogy-based in-context learner and use it to design a meta-learning framework called Im-Promptu. Whereas the requisite token granularity for language is well established, the appropriate compositional granularity for enabling in-context generalization in visual stimuli is usually unspecified. To this end, we use Im-Promptu to train multiple agents with different levels of compositionality, including vector representations, patch representations, and object slots. Our experiments reveal tradeoffs between extrapolation abilities and the degree of compositionality, with non-compositional representations extending learned composition rules to unseen domains but performing poorly on combinatorial tasks. Patch-based representations require patches to contain entire objects for robust extrapolation. At the same time, object-centric tokenizers coupled with a cross-attention module generate consistent and high-fidelity solutions, with these inductive biases being particularly crucial for compositional generalization. Lastly, we demonstrate a use case of Im-Promptu as an intuitive programming interface for image generation.
We study the problem of generating arbitrarily large environments to improve the throughput of multi-robot systems. Prior work proposes Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms as an effective method for optimizing the environments of automated warehouses. However, these approaches optimize only relatively small environments, falling short when it comes to replicating real-world warehouse sizes. The challenge arises from the exponential increase in the search space as the environment size increases. Additionally, the previous methods have only been tested with up to 350 robots in simulations, while practical warehouses could host thousands of robots. In this paper, instead of optimizing environments, we propose to optimize Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) environment generators via QD algorithms. We train a collection of NCA generators with QD algorithms in small environments and then generate arbitrarily large environments from the generators at test time. We show that NCA environment generators maintain consistent, regularized patterns regardless of environment size, significantly enhancing the scalability of multi-robot systems in two different domains with up to 2,350 robots. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method scales a single-agent reinforcement learning policy to arbitrarily large environments with similar patterns. We include the source code at https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public.
tl;dr: FACTS is an auditing mechanism for fairness of recourse, i.e., how difficult is it to achieve the desired outcome
In this work, we present Fairness Aware Counterfactuals for Subgroups (FACTS), a framework for auditing subgroup fairness through counterfactual explanations. We start with revisiting (and generalizing) existing notions and introducing new, more refined notions of subgroup fairness. We aim to (a) formulate different aspects of the difficulty of individuals in certain subgroups to achieve recourse, i.e. receive the desired outcome, either at the micro level, considering members of the subgroup individually, or at the macro level, considering the subgroup as a whole, and (b) introduce notions of subgroup fairness that are robust, if not totally oblivious, to the cost of achieving recourse. We accompany these notions with an efficient, model-agnostic, highly parameterizable, and explainable framework for evaluating subgroup fairness. We demonstrate the advantages, the wide applicability, and the efficiency of our approach through a thorough experimental evaluation on different benchmark datasets.
tl;dr: This paper aims at finding the optimal latent product manifold for machine learning models and tasks via Bayesian optimization.
Recent research indicates that the performance of machine learning models can be improved by aligning the geometry of the latent space with the underlying data structure. Rather than relying solely on Euclidean space, researchers have proposed using hyperbolic and spherical spaces with constant curvature, or combinations thereof, to better model the latent space and enhance model performance. However, little attention has been given to the problem of automatically identifying the optimal latent geometry for the downstream task. We mathematically define this novel formulation and coin it as neural latent geometry search (NLGS). More specifically, we introduce an initial attempt to search for a latent geometry composed of a product of constant curvature model spaces with a small number of query evaluations, under some simplifying assumptions. To accomplish this, we propose a novel notion of distance between candidate latent geometries based on the Gromov-Hausdorff distance from metric geometry. In order to compute the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, we introduce a mapping function that enables the comparison of different manifolds by embedding them in a common high-dimensional ambient space. We then design a graph search space based on the notion of smoothness between latent geometries and employ the calculated distances as an additional inductive bias. Finally, we use Bayesian optimization to search for the optimal latent geometry in a query-efficient manner. This is a general method which can be applied to search for the optimal latent geometry for a variety of models and downstream tasks. We perform experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets to identify the optimal latent geometry for multiple machine learning problems.
In this paper we study the second-order optimality of decentralized stochastic algorithm that escapes saddle point efficiently for nonconvex optimization problems. We propose a new pure gradient-based decentralized stochastic algorithm PEDESTAL with a novel convergence analysis framework to address the technical challenges unique to the decentralized stochastic setting. Our method is the first decentralized stochastic algorithm to achieve second-order optimality with non-asymptotic analysis. We provide theoretical guarantees with the gradient complexity of $\tilde{O} (\epsilon^{-3})$ to find $O(\epsilon, \sqrt{\epsilon})$-second-order stationary point, which matches state-of-the-art results of centralized counterparts or decentralized methods to find first-order stationary point. We also conduct two decentralized tasks in our experiments, a matrix sensing task with synthetic data and a matrix factorization task with a real-world dataset to validate the performance of our method.
We propose a novel methodology that systematically analyzes ordinary differential equation (ODE) models for first-order optimization methods by converting the task of proving convergence rates into verifying the positive semidefiniteness of specific Hilbert-Schmidt integral operators. Our approach is based on the performance estimation problems (PEP) introduced by Drori and Teboulle. Unlike previous works on PEP, which rely on finite-dimensional linear algebra, we use tools from functional analysis. Using the proposed method, we establish convergence rates of various accelerated gradient flow models, some of which are new. As an immediate consequence of our framework, we show a correspondence between minimizing function values and minimizing gradient norms.
tl;dr: This paper presents PolyDiffuse, a novel structured reconstruction algorithm that transforms visual sensor data into polygonal shapes with Diffusion Models (DM), an emerging machinery amid exploding generative AI.
This paper presents \textit{PolyDiffuse}, a novel structured reconstruction algorithm that transforms visual sensor data into polygonal shapes with Diffusion Models (DM), an emerging machinery amid exploding generative AI, while formulating reconstruction as a generation process conditioned on sensor data.
The task of structured reconstruction poses two fundamental challenges to DM: 1) A structured geometry is a ''set'' (e.g., a set of polygons for a floorplan geometry), where a sample of $N$ elements has $N!$ different but equivalent representations, making the denoising highly ambiguous; and 2) A ''reconstruction'' task has a single solution, where an initial noise needs to be chosen carefully, while any initial noise works for a generation task.
Our technical contribution is the introduction of a Guided Set Diffusion Model where 1) the forward diffusion process learns \textit{guidance networks} to control noise injection so that one representation of a sample remains distinct from its other permutation variants, thus resolving denoising ambiguity; and 2) the reverse denoising process reconstructs polygonal shapes, initialized and directed by the guidance networks, as a conditional generation process subject to the sensor data.
We have evaluated our approach for reconstructing two types of polygonal shapes: floorplan as a set of polygons and HD map for autonomous cars as a set of polylines.
Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, we demonstrate that PolyDiffuse significantly advances the current state of the art and enables broader practical applications.
We obtain essentially tight upper bounds for a strengthened notion of regret in the stochastic linear bandits framework. The strengthening---referred to as Nash regret---is defined as the difference between the (a priori unknown) optimum and the geometric mean of expected rewards accumulated by the linear bandit algorithm. Since the geometric mean corresponds to the well-studied Nash social welfare (NSW) function, this formulation quantifies the performance of a bandit algorithm as the collective welfare it generates across rounds. NSW is known to satisfy fairness axioms and, hence, an upper bound on Nash regret provides a principled fairness guarantee.
We consider the stochastic linear bandits problem over a horizon of $\mathsf{T}$ rounds and with a set of arms ${\cal X}$ in ambient dimension $d$. Furthermore, we focus on settings in which the stochastic reward---associated with each arm in ${\cal X}$---is a non-negative, sub-Poisson random variable. For this setting, we develop an algorithm that achieves a Nash regret of $O\left( \sqrt{\frac{d}{\mathsf{T}}} \log(\mathsf{T} |{\cal X}|)\right)$. In addition, addressing linear bandit instances in which the set of arms ${\cal X}$ is not necessarily finite, we obtain a Nash regret upper bound of $O\left( \frac{d^\frac{5}{4}}{\sqrt{\mathsf{T}}} \log(\mathsf{T})\right)$. Since bounded random variables are sub-Poisson, these results hold for bounded, non-negative rewards. Our linear bandit algorithm is built upon the successive elimination method with novel technical insights, including tailored concentration bounds and the use of sampling via John ellipsoid in conjunction with the Kiefer–Wolfowitz optimal design.
tl;dr: We propose a novel binarization technique for Transformers applied to machine translation and show that one-bit Transformers scale and generalize well in both in-domain and out-of-domain setting.
The rapid scaling of language models is motivating research using low-bitwidth quantization.
In this work, we propose a novel binarization technique for Transformers applied to machine translation (BMT), the first of its kind. We identify and address the problem of inflated dot-product variance when using one-bit weights and activations. Specifically, BMT leverages additional LayerNorms and residual connections to improve binarization quality. Experiments on the WMT dataset show that a one-bit weight-only Transformer can achieve the same quality as a float one, while being 16$\times$ smaller in size. One-bit activations incur varying degrees of quality drop, but mitigated by the proposed architectural changes. We further conduct a scaling law study using production-scale translation datasets, which shows that one-bit weight Transformers scale and generalize well in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Implementation in JAX/Flax will be open sourced.
tl;dr: We prove that for certain neural networks used in mechanism design, two local optima are always connected via an almost optimal path.
Optimal auction design is a fundamental problem in algorithmic game theory. This problem is notoriously difficult already in very simple settings. Recent work in differentiable economics showed that neural networks can efficiently learn known optimal auction mechanisms and discover interesting new ones. In an attempt to theoretically justify their empirical success, we focus on one of the first such networks, RochetNet, and a generalized version for affine maximizer auctions. We prove that they satisfy mode connectivity, i.e., locally optimal solutions are connected by a simple, piecewise linear path such that every solution on the path is almost as good as one of the two local optima. Mode connectivity has been recently investigated as an intriguing empirical and theoretically justifiable property of neural networks used for prediction problems. Our results give the first such analysis in the context of differentiable economics, where neural networks are used directly for solving non-convex optimization problems.
tl;dr: We propose tractable Q-ensemble independence regularization for ensemble Q-learning based on the random matrix theory.
Alleviating overestimation bias is a critical challenge for deep reinforcement learning to achieve successful performance on more complex tasks or offline datasets containing out-of-distribution data.
In order to overcome overestimation bias, ensemble methods for Q-learning have been investigated to exploit the diversity of multiple Q-functions.
Since network initialization has been the predominant approach to promote diversity in Q-functions, heuristically designed diversity injection methods have been studied in the literature.
However, previous studies have not attempted to approach guaranteed independence over an ensemble from a theoretical perspective.
By introducing a novel regularization loss for Q-ensemble independence based on random matrix theory, we propose spiked Wishart Q-ensemble independence regularization (SPQR) for reinforcement learning.
Specifically, we modify the intractable hypothesis testing criterion for the Q-ensemble independence into a tractable KL divergence between the spectral distribution of the Q-ensemble and the target Wigner's semicircle distribution.
We implement SPQR in several online and offline ensemble Q-learning algorithms.
In the experiments, SPQR outperforms the baseline algorithms in both online and offline RL benchmarks.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel transformer-based planning framework for symbolic regression by leveraging priors of large-scale pretrained models and incorporating lookahead planning.
Symbolic regression (SR) is a challenging task in machine learning that involves finding a mathematical expression for a function based on its values. Recent advancements in SR have demonstrated the effectiveness of pre-trained transformer-based models in generating equations as sequences, leveraging large-scale pre-training on synthetic datasets and offering notable advantages in terms of inference time over classical Genetic Programming (GP) methods. However, these models primarily rely on supervised pre-training goals borrowed from text generation and overlook equation discovery objectives like accuracy and complexity. To address this, we propose TPSR, a Transformer-based Planning strategy for Symbolic Regression that incorporates Monte Carlo Tree Search into the transformer decoding process. Unlike conventional decoding strategies, TPSR enables the integration of non-differentiable feedback, such as fitting accuracy and complexity, as external sources of knowledge into the transformer-based equation generation process. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, enhancing the model's fitting-complexity trade-off, extrapolation abilities, and robustness to noise
We study distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks to find an optimal robust policy purely from an offline dataset that can perform well in perturbed environments. We propose a generic algorithm framework Doubly Pessimistic Model-based Policy Optimization ($\texttt{P}^2\texttt{MPO}$) for robust offline RL, which features a novel combination of a flexible model estimation subroutine and a doubly pessimistic policy optimization step. Here the double pessimism principle is crucial to overcome the distribution shift incurred by i) the mismatch between behavior policy and the family of target policies; and ii) the perturbation of the nominal model. Under certain accuracy assumptions on the model estimation subroutine, we show that $\texttt{P}^2\texttt{MPO}$ is provably sample-efficient with robust partial coverage data, which means that the offline dataset has good coverage of the distributions induced by the optimal robust policy and perturbed models around the nominal model. By tailoring specific model estimation subroutines for concrete examples including tabular Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP), factored RMDP, and RMDP with kernel and neural function approximations, we show that $\texttt{P}^2\texttt{MPO}$ enjoys a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{-1/2})$ convergence rate, where $n$ is the number of trajectories in the offline dataset. Notably, these models, except for the tabular case, are first identified and proven tractable by this paper. To the best of our knowledge, we first propose a general learning principle --- double pessimism --- for robust offline RL and show that it is provably efficient in the context of general function approximations.
tl;dr: RECKONING is a bi-level learning algorithm that improves language models' reasoning ability by folding contextual knowledge into parametric knowledge through back-propagation.
Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered for a particular question, in-context reasoning can be sensitive to distractor facts, additional content that is irrelevant to a question but that may be relevant for a different question (i.e., not necessarily random noise). In these situations, the model fails to
distinguish the necessary knowledge to answer the question, leading to spurious reasoning and degraded performance. This reasoning failure contrasts with the model’s apparent ability to distinguish its contextual knowledge from all the knowledge it has memorized during pre-training. Following this observation, we propose teaching the model to reason more robustly by folding the provided contextual knowledge into the model’s parameters before presenting it with a question. Our method, RECKONING, is a bi-level learning algorithm that teaches language models to reason by updating their parametric knowledge through back-propagation, allowing them to answer questions using the updated parameters. During training, the inner loop rapidly adapts a copy of the model weights to encode contextual knowledge into its parameters. In the outer loop, the model learns to use the updated weights to reproduce and answer reasoning questions about the memorized knowledge. Our experiments on three diverse multi-hop reasoning datasets show that RECKONING’s performance improves over the in-context reasoning baseline (by up to 4.5%). We also find that compared to in-context reasoning, RECKONING generalizes better to longer reasoning chains unseen during training, is more robust to distractors in the context, and is computationally more efficient when multiple questions are asked about the same knowledge.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a new Transformer-based architecture and a unified library for dynamic graph learning.
We propose DyGFormer, a new Transformer-based architecture for dynamic graph learning. DyGFormer is conceptually simple and only needs to learn from nodes' historical first-hop interactions by: (1) a neighbor co-occurrence encoding scheme that explores the correlations of the source node and destination node based on their historical sequences; (2) a patching technique that divides each sequence into multiple patches and feeds them to Transformer, allowing the model to effectively and efficiently benefit from longer histories. We also introduce DyGLib, a unified library with standard training pipelines, extensible coding interfaces, and comprehensive evaluating protocols to promote reproducible, scalable, and credible dynamic graph learning research. By performing exhaustive experiments on thirteen datasets for dynamic link prediction and dynamic node classification tasks, we find that DyGFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on most of the datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing nodes' correlations and long-term temporal dependencies. Moreover, some results of baselines are inconsistent with previous reports, which may be caused by their diverse but less rigorous implementations, showing the importance of DyGLib. All the used resources are publicly available at https://github.com/yule-BUAA/DyGLib.
tl;dr: We construct a novel knowledge tracing dataset, i.e., XES3G5M, which is made up of 18,066 students, 7,652 questions, 865 knowledge components(KCs) and 5,549,635 interactions.
Knowledge tracing (KT) is a task that predicts students' future performance based on their historical learning interactions. With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, existing KT approaches follow a data-driven paradigm that uses massive problem-solving records to model students' learning processes. However, although the educational contexts contain various factors that may have an influence on student learning outcomes, existing public KT datasets mainly consist of anonymized ID-like features, which may hinder the research advances towards this field. Therefore, in this work, we present, \emph{XES3G5M}, a large-scale dataset with rich auxiliary information about questions and their associated knowledge components (KCs)\footnote{\label{ft:kc}A KC is a generalization of everyday terms like concept, principle, fact, or skill.}. The XES3G5M dataset is collected from a real-world online math learning platform, which contains 7,652 questions, and 865 KCs with 5,549,635 interactions from 18,066 students. To the best of our knowledge, the XES3G5M dataset not only has the largest number of KCs in math domain but contains the richest contextual information including tree structured KC relations, question types, textual contents and analysis and student response timestamps. Furthermore, we build a comprehensive benchmark on 19 state-of-the-art deep learning based knowledge tracing (DLKT) models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging the auxiliary information in our XES3G5M with DLKT models. We hope the proposed dataset can effectively facilitate the KT research work.
tl;dr: Introduces a benchmark group of datasets for natural language understanding and generation in radiology
The radiology report is the main form of communication between radiologists and other clinicians. Prior work in natural language processing in radiology reports has shown the value of developing methods tailored for individual tasks such as identifying reports with critical results or disease detection. Meanwhile, English and biomedical natural language understanding benchmarks such as the General Language Understanding and Evaluation as well as Biomedical Language Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark have motivated the development of models that can be easily adapted to address many tasks in those domains. Here, we characterize the radiology report as a distinct domain and introduce RaLEs, the Radiology Language Evaluations, as a benchmark for natural language understanding and generation in radiology. RaLEs is comprised of seven natural language understanding and generation evaluations including the extraction of anatomical and disease entities and their relations, procedure selection, and report summarization. We characterize the performance of models designed for the general, biomedical, clinical and radiology domains across these tasks. We find that advances in the general and biomedical domains do not necessarily translate to radiology, and that improved models from the general domain can perform comparably to smaller clinical-specific models. The limited performance of existing pre-trained models on RaLEs highlights the opportunity to improve domain-specific self-supervised models for natural language processing in radiology. We propose RaLEs as a benchmark to promote and track the development of such domain-specific radiology language models.
Missing values in real-world data pose a significant and unique challenge to algorithmic fairness. Different demographic groups may be unequally affected by missing data, and the standard procedure for handling missing values where first data is imputed, then the imputed data is used for classification—a procedure referred to as "impute-then-classify"—can exacerbate discrimination. In this paper, we analyze how missing values affect algorithmic fairness. We first prove that training a classifier from imputed data can significantly worsen the achievable values of group fairness and average accuracy. This is because imputing data results in the loss of the missing pattern of the data, which often conveys information about the predictive label. We present scalable and adaptive algorithms for fair classification with missing values. These algorithms can be combined with any preexisting fairness-intervention algorithm to handle all possible missing patterns while preserving information encoded within the missing patterns. Numerical experiments with state-of-the-art fairness interventions demonstrate that our adaptive algorithms consistently achieve higher fairness and accuracy than impute-then-classify across different datasets.
tl;dr: Our work analyzes and addresses the robustness of visual models from the perspective of exploring long-tail issues in the image frequency domain.
A widely discussed hypothesis regarding the cause of visual models' lack of robustness is that they can exploit human-imperceptible high-frequency components (HFC) in images, which in turn leads to model vulnerabilities, such as the adversarial examples. However, (1) inconsistent findings regarding the validation of this hypothesis reflect in a limited understanding of HFC, and (2) solutions inspired by the hypothesis tend to involve a robustness-accuracy trade-off and leaning towards suppressing the model's learning on HFC. In this paper, inspired by the long-tailed characteristic observed in frequency spectrum, we first formally define the HFC from long-tailed perspective and then revisit the relationship between HFC and model robustness. In the frequency long-tailed scenario, experimental results on common datasets and various network structures consistently indicate that models in standard training exhibit high sensitivity to HFC. We investigate the reason of the sensitivity, which reflects in model's under-fitting behavior on HFC. Furthermore, the cause of the model's under-fitting behavior is attributed to the limited information content in HFC. Based on these findings, we propose a Balance Spectrum Sampling (BaSS) strategy, which effectively counteracts the long-tailed effect and enhances the model's learning on HFC. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a substantially better robustness-accuracy trade-off when combined with existing defense methods, while also indicating the potential of encouraging HFC learning in improving model performance.
Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control are foundational and extensively researched problems in optimal control. We investigate LQR and LQG problems with semi-adversarial perturbations and time-varying adversarial bandit loss functions. The best-known sublinear regret algorithm~\cite{gradu2020non} has a $T^{\frac{3}{4}}$ time horizon dependence, and its authors posed an open question about whether a tight rate of $\sqrt{T}$ could be achieved. We answer in the affirmative, giving an algorithm for bandit LQR and LQG which attains optimal regret, up to logarithmic factors. A central component of our method is a new scheme for bandit convex optimization with memory, which is of independent interest.
1352. Graph Neural Networks for Road Safety Modeling: Datasets and Evaluations for Accident Analysis
tl;dr: We introduce a new dataset of traffic accident records with road network features and evaluate existing graph neural networks on this dataset.
We consider the problem of traffic accident analysis on a road network based on road network connections and traffic volume. Previous works have designed various deep-learning methods using historical records to predict traffic accident occurrences. However, there is a lack of consensus on how accurate existing methods are, and a fundamental issue is the lack of public accident datasets for comprehensive evaluations. This paper constructs a large-scale, unified dataset of traffic accident records from official reports of various states in the US, totaling 9 million records, accompanied by road networks and traffic volume reports. Using this new dataset, we evaluate existing deep-learning methods for predicting the occurrence of accidents on road networks. Our main finding is that graph neural networks such as GraphSAGE can accurately predict the number of accidents on roads with less than 22% mean absolute error (relative to the actual count) and whether an accident will occur or not with over 87% AUROC, averaged over states. We achieve these results by using multitask learning to account for cross-state variabilities (e.g., availability of accident labels) and transfer learning to combine traffic volume with accident prediction. Ablation studies highlight the importance of road graph-structural features, amongst other features. Lastly, we discuss the implications of the analysis and develop a package for easily using our new dataset.
The objective of pedestrian trajectory prediction is to estimate the future paths of pedestrians by leveraging historical observations, which plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of self-driving vehicles and navigation robots. Previous works usually rely on a sufficient amount of observation time to accurately predict future trajectories. However, there are many real-world situations where the model lacks sufficient time to observe, such as when pedestrians abruptly emerge from blind spots, resulting in inaccurate predictions and even safety risks. Therefore, it is necessary to perform trajectory prediction based on instantaneous observations, which has rarely been studied before. In this paper, we propose a Bi-directional Consistent Diffusion framework tailored for instantaneous trajectory prediction, named BCDiff. At its heart, we develop two coupled diffusion models by designing a mutual guidance mechanism which can bidirectionally and consistently generate unobserved historical trajectories and future trajectories step-by-step, to utilize the complementary information between them. Specifically, at each step, the predicted unobserved historical trajectories and limited observed trajectories guide one diffusion model to generate future trajectories, while the predicted future trajectories and observed trajectories guide the other diffusion model to predict unobserved historical trajectories. Given the presence of relatively high noise in the generated trajectories during the initial steps, we introduce a gating mechanism to learn the weights between the predicted trajectories and the limited observed trajectories for automatically balancing their contributions. By means of this iterative and mutually guided generation process, both the future and unobserved historical trajectories undergo continuous refinement, ultimately leading to accurate predictions. Essentially, BCDiff is an encoder-free framework that can be compatible with existing trajectory prediction models in principle. Experiments show that our proposed BCDiff significantly improves the accuracy of instantaneous trajectory prediction on the ETH/UCY and Stanford Drone datasets, compared to related approaches.
tl;dr: We propose InfGCN, an equivariant neural operator learning architecture which can be interpreted as graphon convolution. InfGCN achieved SOTA performance across several electron density datasets.
We propose a general architecture that combines the coefficient learning scheme with a residual operator layer for learning mappings between continuous functions in the 3D Euclidean space. Our proposed model is guaranteed to achieve SE(3)-equivariance by design. From the graph spectrum view, our method can be interpreted as convolution on graphons (dense graphs with infinitely many nodes), which we term InfGCN. By leveraging both the continuous graphon structure and the discrete graph structure of the input data, our model can effectively capture the geometric information while preserving equivariance. Through extensive experiments on large-scale electron density datasets, we observed that our model significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art architectures. Multiple ablation studies were also carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
tl;dr: we present a high-quality benchmark suite for distribution shift on tabular data, plus a large empirical study comparing 19 SOTA models
Robustness to distribution shift has become a growing concern for text and image models as they transition from research subjects to deployment in the real world. However, high-quality benchmarks for distribution shift in tabular machine learning tasks are still lacking despite the widespread real-world use of tabular data and differences in the models used for tabular data in comparison to text and images. As a consequence, the robustness of tabular models to distribution shift is poorly understood. To address this issue, we introduce TableShift, a distribution shift benchmark for tabular data. TableShift contains 15 binary classification tasks in total, each with an associated shift, and includes a diverse set of data sources, prediction targets, and distribution shifts. The benchmark covers domains including finance, education, public policy, healthcare, and civic participation, and is accessible using only a few lines of Python code via the TableShift API. We conduct a large-scale study comparing several state-of-the-art tabular data models alongside robust learning and domain generalization methods on the benchmark tasks. Our study demonstrates (1) a linear trend between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy; (2) domain robustness methods can reduce shift gaps but at the cost of reduced ID accuracy; (3) a strong relationship between shift gap (difference between ID and OOD performance) and shifts in the label distribution. The benchmark data, Python package, model implementations, and more information about TableShift are available at https://github.com/mlfoundations/tableshift and https://tableshift.org .
Fairness in machine learning has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The fairness methods improving algorithmic fairness for in-distribution data may not perform well under distribution shifts. In this paper, we first theoretically demonstrate the inherent connection between distribution shift, data perturbation, and model weight perturbation.
Subsequently, we analyze the sufficient conditions to guarantee fairness (i.e., low demographic parity) for the target dataset, including fairness for the source dataset, and low prediction difference between the source and target datasets for each sensitive attribute group. Motivated by these sufficient conditions, we propose robust fairness regularization (RFR) by considering the worst case within the model weight perturbation ball for each sensitive attribute group. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed RFR algorithm on synthetic and real distribution shifts across various datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that RFR achieves better fairness-accuracy trade-off performance compared with several baselines. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhimengj0326/RFR_NeurIPS23}.
tl;dr: We propose a gradient-free method built upon an accelerated gradient method (Sadiev et al., 2023) with batching technique which is optimal with respect to iteration complexity and the maximal noise level with infinite variance.
In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the batched accelerated gradient method, was proposed in (Gasnikov et. al., 2022). This optimality is defined in terms of iteration and oracle complexity, as well as the maximal admissible level of adversarial noise. However, the assumption of finite variance is burdensome and it might not hold in many practical scenarios. To address this, we demonstrate how to adapt a refined clipped version of the accelerated gradient (Stochastic Similar Triangles) method from (Sadiev et al., 2023) for a two-point zero-order oracle. This adaptation entails extending the batching technique to accommodate infinite variance — a non-trivial task that stands as a distinct contribution of this paper.
Molecular Representation Learning (MRL) has emerged as a powerful tool for drug and materials discovery in a variety of tasks such as virtual screening and inverse design. While there has been a surge of interest in advancing model-centric techniques, the influence of both data quantity and quality on molecular representations is not yet clearly understood within this field.
In this paper, we delve into the neural scaling behaviors of MRL from a data-centric viewpoint, examining four key dimensions: (1) data modalities, (2) dataset splitting, (3) the role of pre-training, and (4) model capacity.
Our empirical studies confirm a consistent power-law relationship between data volume and MRL performance across these dimensions. Additionally, through detailed analysis, we identify potential avenues for improving learning efficiency.
To challenge these scaling laws, we adapt seven popular data pruning strategies to molecular data and benchmark their performance. Our findings underline the importance of data-centric MRL and highlight possible directions for future research.
tl;dr: Reflexion is a framework that reinforces language agents by updating language rather than model weights.
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, compilers, APIs) as goal-driven agents. However, it remains challenging for these language agents to quickly and efficiently learn from trial-and-error as traditional reinforcement learning methods require extensive training samples and expensive model fine-tuning. We propose \emph{Reflexion}, a novel framework to reinforce language agents not by updating weights, but instead through linguistic feedback. Concretely, Reflexion agents verbally reflect on task feedback signals, then maintain their own reflective text in an episodic memory buffer to induce better decision-making in subsequent trials. Reflexion is flexible enough to incorporate various types (scalar values or free-form language) and sources (external or internally simulated) of feedback signals, and obtains significant improvements over a baseline agent across diverse tasks (sequential decision-making, coding, language reasoning). For example, Reflexion achieves a 91\% pass@1 accuracy on the HumanEval coding benchmark, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art GPT-4 that achieves 80\%. We also conduct ablation and analysis studies using different feedback signals, feedback incorporation methods, and agent types, and provide insights into how they affect performance. We release all code, demos, and datasets at \url{https://github.com/noahshinn024/reflexion}.
tl;dr: Neural networks that know what they don't know, but are not necessarily Bayesian.
Intelligence relies on an agent's knowledge of what it does not know.
This capability can be assessed based on the quality of joint predictions of labels across multiple inputs.
In principle, ensemble-based approaches can produce effective joint predictions, but the computational costs of large ensembles become prohibitive.
We introduce the epinet: an architecture that can supplement any conventional neural network, including large pretrained models, and can be trained with modest incremental computation to estimate uncertainty.
With an epinet, conventional neural networks outperform very large ensembles, consisting of hundreds or more particles, with orders of magnitude less computation.
The epinet does not fit the traditional framework of Bayesian neural networks.
To accommodate development of approaches beyond BNNs, such as the epinet, we introduce the epistemic neural network (ENN) as a general interface for models that produce joint predictions.
High-level synthesis (HLS) aims to raise the abstraction layer in hardware design, enabling the design of domain-specific accelerators (DSAs) like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) using C/C++ instead of hardware description languages (HDLs). Compiler directives in the form of pragmas play a crucial role in modifying the microarchitecture within the HLS framework. However, the space of possible microarchitectures grows exponentially with the number of pragmas. Moreover, the evaluation of each candidate design using the HLS tool consumes significant time, ranging from minutes to hours, leading to a time-consuming optimization process. To accelerate this process, machine learning models have been used to predict design quality in milliseconds. However, existing open-source datasets for training such models are limited in terms of design complexity and available optimizations. In this paper, we present HLSyn, the first benchmark that addresses these limitations. It contains more complex programs with a wider range of optimization pragmas, making it a comprehensive dataset for training and evaluating design quality prediction models. The HLSyn benchmark consists of 42 unique programs/kernels, resulting in over 42,000 labeled designs. We conduct an extensive comparison of state-of-the-art baselines to assess their effectiveness in predicting design quality. As an ongoing project, we anticipate expanding the HLSyn benchmark in terms of both quantity and variety of programs to further support the development of this field.
tl;dr: We propose a per-sample gradient clipping that removes the need to tune the clipping threshold while achieving SOTA accuracy.
Per-example gradient clipping is a key algorithmic step that enables practical differential private (DP) training for deep learning models. The choice of clipping threshold $R$, however, is vital for achieving high accuracy under DP. We propose an easy-to-use replacement, called automatic clipping, that eliminates the need to tune $R$ for any DP optimizers, including DP-SGD, DP-Adam, DP-LAMB and many others.
The automatic variants are as private and computationally efficient as existing DP optimizers, but require no DP-specific hyperparameters and thus make DP training as amenable as the standard non-private training. We give a rigorous convergence analysis of automatic DP-SGD in the non-convex setting, showing that it can enjoy an asymptotic convergence rate that matches the standard SGD, under a symmetric gradient noise assumption of the per-sample gradients (commonly used in the non-DP literature). We demonstrate on various language and vision tasks that automatic clipping outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art, and can be easily employed with minimal changes to existing codebases.
tl;dr: A novel approach towards personalized federated learning under differential privacy protection.
Personalized federated learning with differential privacy has been considered a feasible solution to address non-IID distribution of data and privacy leakage risks. However, current personalized federated learning methods suffer from inflexible personalization and convergence difficulties due to two main factors: 1) Firstly, we observe that the prevailing personalization methods mainly achieve this by personalizing a fixed portion of the model, which lacks flexibility. 2) Moreover, we further demonstrate that the default gradient calculation is sensitive to the widely-used clipping operations in differential privacy, resulting in difficulties in convergence. Considering that Fisher information values can serve as an effective measure for estimating the information content of parameters by reflecting the model sensitivity to parameters, we aim to leverage this property to address the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning method with Dynamic Fisher Personalization and Adaptive Constraint (FedDPA) to handle these challenges. Firstly, by using layer-wise Fisher information to measure the information content of local parameters, we retain local parameters with high Fisher values during the personalization process, which are considered informative, simultaneously prevent these parameters from noise perturbation. Secondly, we introduce an adaptive approach by applying differential constraint strategies to personalized parameters and shared parameters identified in the previous for better convergence. Our method boosts performance through flexible personalization while mitigating the slow convergence caused by clipping operations. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, FEMNIST and SVHN dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving better performance and robustness against clipping, under personalized federated learning with differential privacy.
tl;dr: use the information contained in higher dimension that is usually tossed by word presentations to get more robust and data efficient unsupervised word translation
The striking ability of unsupervised word translation has been demonstrated recently with the help of low-dimensional word vectors / pretraining, which is used by all successful methods and assumed to be necessary. We test and challenge this assumption by developing a method that can also make use of high dimensional signal. Freed from the limits of low dimensions, we show that relying on low-dimensional vectors and their incidental properties miss out on better denoising methods and signals in high dimensions, thus stunting the potential of the data. Our results show that unsupervised translation can be achieved more easily and robustly than previously thought -- less than 80MB and minutes of CPU time is required to achieve over 50\% accuracy for English to Finnish, Hungarian, and Chinese translations when trained in the same domain; even under domain mismatch, the method still works fully unsupervised on English NewsCrawl to Chinese Wikipedia and English Europarl to Spanish Wikipedia, among others. These results challenge prevailing assumptions on the necessity and superiority of low-dimensional vectors and show that the higher dimension signal can be used rather than thrown away.
Solving complicated AI tasks with different domains and modalities is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. While there are numerous AI models available for various domains and modalities, they cannot handle complicated AI tasks autonomously. Considering large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional abilities in language understanding, generation, interaction, and reasoning, we advocate that LLMs could act as a controller to manage existing AI models to solve complicated AI tasks, with language serving as a generic interface to empower this. Based on this philosophy, we present HuggingGPT, an LLM-powered agent that leverages LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to connect various AI models in machine learning communities (e.g., Hugging Face) to solve AI tasks. Specifically, we use ChatGPT to conduct task planning when receiving a user request, select models according to their function descriptions available in Hugging Face, execute each subtask with the selected AI model, and summarize the response according to the execution results. By leveraging the strong language capability of ChatGPT and abundant AI models in Hugging Face, HuggingGPT can tackle a wide range of sophisticated AI tasks spanning different modalities and domains and achieve impressive results in language, vision, speech, and other challenging tasks, which paves a new way towards the realization of artificial general intelligence.
tl;dr: This work introduces MathNAS, the first architecturally-general NAS framework based on mathematical programming, which reduces network search complexity from exponential to polynomial levels while maintaining excellent network performance.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a favoured method for unearthing effective neural architectures.
Recent development of large models has intensified the demand for faster search speeds and more accurate search results.
However, designing large models by NAS is challenging due to the dramatical increase of search space and the associated huge performance evaluation cost.
Consider a typical modular search space widely used in NAS, in which a neural architecture consists of $m$ block nodes and a block node has $n$ alternative blocks.
Facing the space containing $n^m$ candidate networks, existing NAS methods attempt to find the best one by searching and evaluating candidate networks directly.
Different from the general strategy that takes architecture search as a whole problem, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer strategy by making use of the modular nature of the search space.
Here, we introduce MathNAS, a general NAS framework based on mathematical programming.
In MathNAS, the performances of all possible building blocks in the search space are calculated first, and then the performance of a network is directly predicted based on the performances of its building blocks.
Although estimating block performances involves network training, just as what happens for network performance evaluation in existing NAS methods, predicting network performance is completely training-free and thus extremely fast. In contrast to the $n^m$ candidate networks to evaluate in existing NAS methods, which requires training and a formidable computational burden, there are only $m*n$ possible blocks to handle in MathNAS.
Therefore, our approach effectively reduces the complexity of network performance evaluation.
The superiority of MathNAS is validated on multiple large-scale CV and NLP benchmark datasets.
Notably on ImageNet-1k, MathNAS achieves 82.5\% top-1 accuracy, 1.2\% and 0.96\% higher than Swin-T and LeViT-256, respectively.
In addition, when deployed on mobile device, MathNAS achieves real-time search and dynamic network switching within 1s (0.4s on TX2 GPU), surpassing baseline dynamic networks in on-device performance.
Over recent years, an increasing amount of compute and data has been poured into training large language models (LLMs), usually by doing one-pass learning on as many tokens as possible randomly selected from large-scale web corpora. While training on ever-larger portions of the internet leads to consistent performance improvements, the size of these improvements diminishes with scale, and there has been little work exploring the effect of data selection on pre-training and downstream performance beyond simple de-duplication methods such as MinHash. Here, we show that careful data selection (on top of de-duplicated data) via pre-trained model embeddings can speed up training (20% efficiency gains) and improves average downstream accuracy on 16 NLP tasks (up to 2%) at the 6.7B model scale. Furthermore, we show that repeating data intelligently consistently outperforms baseline training (while repeating random data performs worse than baseline training). Our results indicate that clever data selection can significantly improve LLM pre-training, calls into question the common practice of training for a single epoch on as much data as possible, and demonstrates a path to keep improving our models past the limits of randomly sampling web data.
tl;dr: This work provides an empirical study on the evaluation of synthesis performance and highlights several features for a more reliable and consistent evaluation.
A good metric, which promises a reliable comparison between solutions, is essential for any well-defined task. Unlike most vision tasks that have per-sample ground-truth, image synthesis tasks target generating unseen data and hence are usually evaluated through a distributional distance between one set of real samples and another set of generated samples. This study presents an empirical investigation into the evaluation of synthesis performance, with generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a representative of generative models. In particular, we make in-depth analyses of various factors, including how to represent a data point in the representation space, how to calculate a fair distance using selected samples, and how many instances to use from each set. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets and settings reveal several important findings. Firstly, a group of models that include both CNN-based and ViT-based architectures serve as reliable and robust feature extractors for measurement evaluation. Secondly, Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) provides a better comparison across various extractors and hierarchical layers in one model. Finally, CKA is more sample-efficient and enjoys better agreement with human judgment in characterizing the similarity between two internal data correlations. These findings contribute to the development of a new measurement system, which enables a consistent and reliable re-evaluation of current state-of-the-art generative models.
tl;dr: Visual correspondences emerge from image diffusion models without any explicit supervision.
Finding correspondences between images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. In this paper, we show that correspondence emerges in image diffusion models without any explicit supervision. We propose a simple strategy to extract this implicit knowledge out of diffusion networks as image features, namely DIffusion FeaTures (DIFT), and use them to establish correspondences between real images. Without any additional fine-tuning or supervision on the task-specific data or annotations, DIFT is able to outperform both weakly-supervised methods and competitive off-the-shelf features in identifying semantic, geometric, and temporal correspondences. Particularly for semantic correspondence, DIFT from Stable Diffusion is able to outperform DINO and OpenCLIP by 19 and 14 accuracy points respectively on the challenging SPair-71k benchmark. It even outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised methods on 9 out of 18 categories while remaining on par for the overall performance. Project page: https://diffusionfeatures.github.io.
tl;dr: ADGym is a novel platform for evaluating and automatically selecting optimal design choices in deep anomaly detection methods.
Deep learning (DL) techniques have recently found success in anomaly detection (AD) across various fields such as finance, medical services, and cloud computing. However, most of the current research tends to view deep AD algorithms as a whole, without dissecting the contributions of individual design choices like loss functions and network architectures. This view tends to diminish the value of preliminary steps like data preprocessing, as more attention is given to newly designed loss functions, network architectures, and learning paradigms. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by asking two key questions: (i) Which design choices in deep AD methods are crucial for detecting anomalies? (ii) How can we automatically select the optimal design choices for a given AD dataset, instead of relying on generic, pre-existing solutions? To address these questions, we introduce ADGym, a platform specifically crafted for comprehensive evaluation and automatic selection of AD design elements in deep methods. Our extensive experiments reveal that relying solely on existing leading methods is not sufficient. In contrast, models developed using ADGym significantly surpass current state-of-the-art techniques.
tl;dr: This paper is the first to explore the issue of robust fairness in adversarial robustness distillation and proposes a novel adaptive class re-weighting scheme that improves the robust fairness of student models.
Adversarial Robustness Distillation (ARD) aims to transfer the robustness of large teacher models to small student models, facilitating the attainment of robust performance on resource-limited devices. However, existing research on ARD primarily focuses on the overall robustness of student models, overlooking the crucial aspect of $\textit{robust fairness}$. Specifically, these models may demonstrate strong robustness on some classes of data while exhibiting high vulnerability on other classes. Unfortunately, the "buckets effect" implies that the robustness of the deployed model depends on the classes with the lowest level of robustness. In this paper, we first investigate the inheritance of robust fairness during ARD and reveal that student models only partially inherit robust fairness from teacher models. We further validate this issue through fine-grained experiments with various model capacities and find that it may arise due to the gap in capacity between teacher and student models, as well as the existing methods treating each class equally during distillation. Based on these observations, we propose $\textbf{Fair}$ $\textbf{A}$dversarial $\textbf{R}$obustness $\textbf{D}$istillation (Fair-ARD), a novel framework for enhancing the robust fairness of student models by increasing the weights of difficult classes, and design a geometric perspective-based method to quantify the difficulty of different classes for determining the weights. Extensive experiments show that Fair-ARD surpasses both state-of-the-art ARD methods and existing robust fairness algorithms in terms of robust fairness (e.g., the worst-class robustness under AutoAttack is improved by at most 12.3\% and 5.3\% using ResNet18 on CIFAR10, respectively), while also slightly improving overall robustness. Our code is available at: [https://github.com/NISP-official/Fair-ARD](https://github.com/NISP-official/Fair-ARD).
tl;dr: We propose GIT, a novel gradient-based intervention targeting method, which improves the performance of causal discovery, especially in the low data regime.
Inferring causal structure from data is a challenging task of fundamental importance in science. Often, observational data alone is not enough to uniquely identify a system’s causal structure. The use of interventional data can address this issue, however, acquiring these samples typically demands a considerable investment of time and physical or financial resources. In this work, we are concerned with the acquisition of interventional data in a targeted manner to minimize the number of required experiments. We propose a novel Gradient-based Intervention Targeting method, abbreviated GIT, that ’trusts’ the gradient estimator of a gradient-based causal discovery framework to provide signals for the intervention targeting function. We provide extensive experiments in simulated and real-world datasets and demonstrate that GIT performs on par with competitive baselines, surpassing them in the low-data regime.
tl;dr: $p$-Poisson eqquation-based implicit representation of surfaces that not only provides smooth reconstruction but also recover high-frequency features only from raw point clouds.
The aim of this paper is the reconstruction of a smooth surface from an unorganized point cloud sampled by a closed surface, with the preservation of geometric shapes, without any further information other than the point cloud. Implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently emerged as a promising approach to surface reconstruction. However, the reconstruction quality of existing methods relies on ground truth implicit function values or surface normal vectors. In this paper, we show that proper supervision of partial differential equations and fundamental properties of differential vector fields are sufficient to robustly reconstruct high-quality surfaces. We cast the $p$-Poisson equation to learn a signed distance function (SDF) and the reconstructed surface is implicitly represented by the zero-level set of the SDF. For efficient training, we develop a variable splitting structure by introducing a gradient of the SDF as an auxiliary variable and impose the $p$-Poisson equation directly on the auxiliary variable as a hard constraint. Based on the curl-free property of the gradient field, we impose a curl-free constraint on the auxiliary variable, which leads to a more faithful reconstruction. Experiments on standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed INR provides a superior and robust reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/Yebbi/PINC.
1374. Battle of the Backbones: A Large-Scale Comparison of Pretrained Models across Computer Vision Tasks
tl;dr: We benchmark a diverse suite of pretrained models across a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object detection to OOD generalization and more.
Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network. However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones pretrained using various algorithms and datasets. While this abundance of choice has led to performance increases for a range of systems, it is difficult for practitioners to make informed decisions about which backbone to choose. Battle of the Backbones (BoB) makes this choice easier by benchmarking a diverse suite of pretrained models, including vision-language models, those trained via self-supervised learning, and the Stable Diffusion backbone, across a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object detection to OOD generalization and more. Furthermore, BoB sheds light on promising directions for the research community to advance computer vision by illuminating strengths and weakness of existing approaches through a comprehensive analysis conducted on more than 1500 training runs. While vision transformers (ViTs) and self-supervised learning (SSL) are increasingly popular, we find that convolutional neural networks pretrained in a supervised fashion on large training sets still perform best on most tasks among the models we consider. Moreover, in apples-to-apples comparisons on the same architectures and similarly sized pretraining datasets, we find that SSL backbones are highly competitive, indicating that future works should perform SSL pretraining with advanced architectures and larger pretraining datasets. We release the raw results of our experiments along with code that allows researchers to put their own backbones through the gauntlet here: https://github.com/hsouri/Battle-of-the-Backbones.
Understanding model’s sensitivity to its training data is crucial but can also be challenging and costly, especially during training. To simplify such issues, we present the Memory-Perturbation Equation (MPE) which relates model's sensitivity to perturbation in its training data. Derived using Bayesian principles, the MPE unifies existing sensitivity measures, generalizes them to a wide-variety of models and algorithms, and unravels useful properties regarding sensitivities. Our empirical results show that sensitivity estimates obtained during training can be used to faithfully predict generalization on unseen test data. The proposed equation is expected to be useful for future research on robust and adaptive learning.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a Cluster Information Transfer mechanism to help GNNs learn invariant representations in the presence of structure shift problem.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become increasingly popular in modeling graph-structured data due to their ability to learn node representations by aggregating local structure information. However, it is widely acknowledged that the test graph structure may differ from the training graph structure, resulting in a structure shift. In this paper, we experimentally find that the performance of GNNs drops significantly when the structure shift happens, suggesting that the learned models may be biased towards specific structure patterns. To address this challenge, we propose the Cluster Information Transfer (\textbf{CIT}) mechanism, which can learn invariant representations for GNNs, thereby improving their generalization ability to various and unknown test graphs with structure shift. The CIT mechanism achieves this by combining different cluster information with the nodes while preserving their cluster-independent information. By generating nodes across different clusters, the mechanism significantly enhances the diversity of the nodes and helps GNNs learn the invariant representations. We provide a theoretical analysis of the CIT mechanism, showing that the impact of changing clusters during structure shift can be mitigated after transfer. Additionally, the proposed mechanism is a plug-in that can be easily used to improve existing GNNs. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed method on three typical structure shift scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing GNNs' performance.
Recently, the transformer has enabled the speed-oriented trackers to approach state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with high-speed thanks to the smaller input size or the lighter feature extraction backbone, though they still substantially lag behind their corresponding performance-oriented versions. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to narrow or even close this gap while achieving high tracking speed based on the smaller input size. To this end, we non-uniformly resize the cropped image to have a smaller input size while the resolution of the area where the target is more likely to appear is higher and vice versa. This enables us to solve the dilemma of attending to a larger visual field while retaining more raw information for the target despite a smaller input size. Our formulation for the non-uniform resizing can be efficiently solved through quadratic programming (QP) and naturally integrated into most of the crop-based local trackers. Comprehensive experiments on five challenging datasets based on two kinds of transformer trackers, \ie, OSTrack and TransT, demonstrate consistent improvements over them. In particular, applying our method to the speed-oriented version of OSTrack even outperforms its performance-oriented counterpart by 0.6\% AUC on TNL2K, while running 50\% faster and saving over 55\% MACs. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Kou-99/ZoomTrack.
tl;dr: We propose SwiFT, the first 4D Swin Transformer architecture that can learn from raw fMRI signals in an end-to-end manner.
Modeling spatiotemporal brain dynamics from high-dimensional data, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), is a formidable task in neuroscience. Existing approaches for fMRI analysis utilize hand-crafted features, but the process of feature extraction risks losing essential information in fMRI scans. To address this challenge, we present SwiFT (Swin 4D fMRI Transformer), a Swin Transformer architecture that can learn brain dynamics directly from fMRI volumes in a memory and computation-efficient manner. SwiFT achieves this by implementing a 4D window multi-head self-attention mechanism and absolute positional embeddings. We evaluate SwiFT using multiple large-scale resting-state fMRI datasets, including the Human Connectome Project (HCP), Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD), and UK Biobank (UKB) datasets, to predict sex, age, and cognitive intelligence. Our experimental outcomes reveal that SwiFT consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, by leveraging its end-to-end learning capability, we show that contrastive loss-based self-supervised pre-training of SwiFT can enhance performance on downstream tasks. Additionally, we employ an explainable AI method to identify the brain regions associated with sex classification. To our knowledge, SwiFT is the first Swin Transformer architecture to process dimensional spatiotemporal brain functional data in an end-to-end fashion. Our work holds substantial potential in facilitating scalable learning of functional brain imaging in neuroscience research by reducing the hurdles associated with applying Transformer models to high-dimensional fMRI.
tl;dr: 1) Buildings-900K, a simulated dataset for large-scale pretraining for short-term load forecasting (STLF), 2) a benchmark for zero-shot and transfer learning on real buildings, and 3) insights on model pretraining for STLF.
Short-term forecasting of residential and commercial building energy consumption is widely used in power systems and continues to grow in importance. Data-driven short-term load forecasting (STLF), although promising, has suffered from a lack of open, large-scale datasets with high building diversity. This has hindered exploring the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for STLF. To help address this, we present BuildingsBench, which consists of: 1) Buildings-900K, a large-scale dataset of 900K simulated buildings representing the U.S. building stock; and 2) an evaluation platform with over 1,900 real residential and commercial buildings from 7 open datasets. BuildingsBench benchmarks two under-explored tasks: zero-shot STLF, where a pretrained model is evaluated on unseen buildings without fine-tuning, and transfer learning, where a pretrained model is fine-tuned on a target building. The main finding of our benchmark analysis is that synthetically pretrained models generalize surprisingly well to real commercial buildings. An exploration of the effect of increasing dataset size and diversity on zero-shot commercial building performance reveals a power-law with diminishing returns. We also show that fine-tuning pretrained models on real commercial and residential buildings improves performance for a majority of target buildings. We hope that BuildingsBench encourages and facilitates future research on generalizable STLF. All datasets and code can be accessed from https://github.com/NREL/BuildingsBench.
We present a novel method for reconstructing 3D objects from a single RGB image. Our method leverages the latest image generation models to infer the hidden 3D structure while remaining faithful to the input image. While existing methods obtain impressive results in generating 3D models from text prompts, they do not provide an easy approach for conditioning on input RGB data. Naive extensions of these methods often lead to improper alignment in appearance between the input image and the 3D reconstructions. We address these challenges by introducing Image Constrained Radiance Fields (ConRad), a novel variant of neural radiance fields. ConRad is an efficient 3D representation that explicitly captures the appearance of an input image in one viewpoint. We propose a training algorithm that leverages the single RGB image in conjunction with pretrained Diffusion Models to optimize the parameters of a ConRad representation. Extensive experiments show that ConRad representations can simplify preservation of image details while producing a realistic 3D reconstruction. Compared to existing state-of-the-art baselines, we show that our 3D reconstructions remain more faithful to the input and produce more consistent 3D models while demonstrating significantly improved quantitative performance on a ShapeNet object benchmark.
tl;dr: We study a language model without stable token embedding and show that it converges to standard language model given a sufficiently long context, implicitly performs in-context deciphering, and has better in-context reasoning performance.
Token embeddings, a mapping from discrete lexical symbols to continuous vectors, are at the heart of any language model (LM). However, lexical symbol meanings can also be determined and even redefined by their structural role in a long context. In this paper, we ask: is it possible for a language model to be performant without \emph{any} fixed token embeddings? Such a language model would have to rely entirely on the co-occurence and repetition of tokens in the context rather than the \textit{a priori} identity of any token. To answer this, we study \textit{lexinvariant}language models that are invariant to lexical symbols and therefore do not need fixed token embeddings in practice. First, we prove that we can construct a lexinvariant LM to converge to the true language model at a uniform rate that is polynomial in terms of the context length, with a constant factor that is sublinear in the vocabulary size. Second, to build a lexinvariant LM, we simply encode tokens using random Gaussian vectors, such that each token maps to the same representation within each sequence but different representations across sequences. Empirically, we demonstrate that it can indeed attain perplexity comparable to that of a standard language model, given a sufficiently long context. We further explore two properties of the lexinvariant language models: First, given text generated from a substitution cipher of English, it implicitly implements Bayesian in-context deciphering and infers the mapping to the underlying real tokens with high accuracy. Second, it has on average 4X better accuracy over synthetic in-context reasoning tasks. Finally, we discuss regularizing standard language models towards lexinvariance and potential practical applications.
tl;dr: Human pattern learning is well explained by Bayesian inference over programmatic hypotheses.
People are adept at learning a wide variety of structured patterns from small amounts of data, presenting a conundrum from the standpoint of the bias-variance tradeoff: what kinds of representations and algorithms support the joint flexibility and data-paucity of human learning? One possibility is that people "learn by programming": inducing probabilistic models to fit observed data. Here, we experimentally test human learning in the domain of structured 2-dimensional patterns, using a task in which participants repeatedly predicted where a dot would move based on its previous trajectory. We evaluate human performance against standard parametric and non-parametric time-series models, as well as two Bayesian program synthesis models whose hypotheses vary in their degree of structure: a compositional Gaussian Process model and a structured "Language of Thought" (LoT) model. We find that signatures of human pattern learning are best explained by the LoT model, supporting the idea that the flexibility and data-efficiency of human structure learning can be understood as probabilistic inference over an expressive space of programs.
1383. Complex-valued Neurons Can Learn More but Slower than Real-valued Neurons via Gradient Descent
Complex-valued neural networks potentially possess better representations and performance than real-valued counterparts when dealing with some complicated tasks such as acoustic analysis, radar image classification, etc. Despite empirical successes, it remains unknown theoretically when and to what extent complex-valued neural networks outperform real-valued ones. We take one step in this direction by comparing the learnability of real-valued neurons and complex-valued neurons via gradient descent. We show that a complex-valued neuron can efficiently learn functions expressed by any one real-valued neuron and any one complex-valued neuron with convergence rate $O(t^{-3})$ and $O(t^{-1})$ where $t$ is the iteration index of gradient descent, respectively, whereas a two-layer real-valued neural network with finite width cannot learn a single non-degenerate complex-valued neuron. We prove that a complex-valued neuron learns a real-valued neuron with rate $\Omega (t^{-3})$, exponentially slower than the $O(\mathrm{e}^{- c t})$ rate of learning one real-valued neuron using a real-valued neuron with a constant $c$. We further verify and extend these results via simulation experiments in more general settings.
Random forests have been one successful ensemble algorithms in machine learning. Various techniques have been utilized to preserve the privacy of random forests from anonymization, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, etc., whereas it rarely takes into account some crucial ingredients of learning algorithm. This work presents a new encryption to preserve data's Gini impurity, which plays a crucial role during the construction of random forests. Our basic idea is to modify the structure of binary search tree to store several examples in each node, and encrypt data features by incorporating label and order information. Theoretically, we prove that our scheme preserves the minimum Gini impurity in ciphertexts without decrypting, and present the security guarantee for encryption. For random forests, we encrypt data features based on our Gini-impurity-preserving scheme, and take the homomorphic encryption scheme CKKS to encrypt data labels due to their importance and privacy. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness, efficiency and security of our proposed method.
In this work, we study the implications of the implicit bias of gradient flow on generalization and adversarial robustness in ReLU networks. We focus on a setting where the data consists of clusters and the correlations between cluster means are small, and show that in two-layer ReLU networks gradient flow is biased towards solutions that generalize well, but are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Our results hold even in cases where the network is highly overparameterized. Despite the potential for harmful overfitting in such settings, we prove that the implicit bias of gradient flow prevents it. However, the implicit bias also leads to non-robust solutions (susceptible to small adversarial $\ell_2$-perturbations), even though robust networks that fit the data exist.
tl;dr: We have studied approximate best arm identification in multi-armed bandits, in the fixed-confidence, fixed-budget and anytime settings.
We propose EB-TC$\varepsilon$, a novel sampling rule for $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in stochastic bandits.
It is the first instance of Top Two algorithm analyzed for approximate best arm identification. EB-TC$\varepsilon$ is an *anytime* sampling rule that can therefore be employed without modification for fixed confidence or fixed budget identification (without prior knowledge of the budget).
We provide three types of theoretical guarantees for EB-TC$\varepsilon$.
First, we prove bounds on its expected sample complexity in the fixed confidence setting, notably showing its asymptotic optimality in combination with an adaptive tuning of its exploration parameter.
We complement these findings with upper bounds on its probability of error at any time and for any slack parameter, which further yield upper bounds on its simple regret at any time.
Finally, we show through numerical simulations that EB-TC$\varepsilon$ performs favorably compared to existing algorithms for different approximate best arm identification tasks.
tl;dr: We show how to make long sequences of targeted edits to specific behaviors of pre-trained models by learning and caching discrete segments in their latent space in which their layer-to-layer transformations are modified
Deployed language models decay over time due to shifting inputs, changing user needs, or emergent world-knowledge gaps. When such problems are identified, we want to make targeted edits while avoiding expensive retraining. However, current model editors, which modify such behaviors of pre-trained models, degrade model performance quickly across multiple, sequential edits. We propose GRACE, a \textit{lifelong} model editing method, which implements spot-fixes on streaming errors of a deployed model, ensuring minimal impact on unrelated inputs. GRACE writes new mappings into a pre-trained model's latent space, creating a discrete, local codebook of edits without altering model weights. This is the first method enabling thousands of sequential edits using only streaming errors. Our experiments on T5, BERT, and GPT models show GRACE's state-of-the-art performance in making and retaining edits, while generalizing to unseen inputs. Our code is available at [github.com/thartvigsen/grace](https://www.github.com/thartvigsen/grace}).
We study the problem of designing mechanisms when agents' valuation functions are drawn from unknown and correlated prior distributions. In particular, we are given a prior distribution $D$, and we are interested in designing a (truthful) mechanism that has good performance for all "true distributions" that are close to $D$ in Total Variation (TV) distance. We show that DSIC and BIC mechanisms in this setting are strongly robust with respect to TV distance, for any bounded objective function $\mathcal{O}$, extending a recent result of Brustle et al. ([BCD20], EC 2020). At the heart of our result is a fundamental duality property of total variation distance. As direct applications of our result, we (i) demonstrate how to find approximately revenue-optimal and approximately BIC mechanisms for weakly dependent prior distributions; (ii) show how to find correlation-robust mechanisms when only ``noisy'' versions of marginals are accessible, extending recent results of Bei et. al. ([BGLT19], SODA 2019); (iii) prove that prophet-inequality type guarantees are preserved for correlated priors, recovering a variant of a result of D{\"u}tting and Kesselheim ([DK19], EC 2019) as a special case; (iv) give a new necessary condition for a correlated distribution to witness an infinite separation in revenue between simple and optimal mechanisms, complementing recent results of Psomas et al. ([PSCW22], NeurIPS 2022); (v) give a new condition for simple mechanisms to approximate revenue-optimal mechanisms for the case of a single agent whose type is drawn from a correlated distribution that can be captured by a Markov Random Field, complementing recent results of Cai and Oikonomou ([CO21], EC 2021).
1389. Exposing flaws of generative model evaluation metrics and their unfair treatment of diffusion models
tl;dr: The perceptual fidelity of diffusion models is not reflected in commonly reported metrics of generative model evaluation; we diagnose and fix the issue, providing a new leaderboard for image-based generative models.
We systematically study a wide variety of generative models spanning semantically-diverse image datasets to understand and improve the feature extractors and metrics used to evaluate them.
Using best practices in psychophysics, we measure human perception of image realism for generated samples by conducting the largest experiment evaluating generative models to date, and find that no existing metric strongly correlates with human evaluations.
Comparing to 17 modern metrics for evaluating the overall performance, fidelity, diversity, rarity, and memorization of generative models, we find that the state-of-the-art perceptual realism of diffusion models as judged by humans is not reflected in commonly reported metrics such as FID. This discrepancy is not explained by diversity in generated samples, though one cause is over-reliance on Inception-V3.
We address these flaws through a study of alternative self-supervised feature extractors, find that the semantic information encoded by individual networks strongly depends on their training procedure, and show that DINOv2-ViT-L/14 allows for much richer evaluation of generative models. Next, we investigate data memorization, and find that generative models do memorize training examples on simple, smaller datasets like CIFAR10, but not necessarily on more complex datasets like ImageNet. However, our experiments show that current metrics do not properly detect memorization: none in the literature is able to separate memorization from other phenomena such as underfitting or mode shrinkage. To facilitate further development of generative models and their evaluation we release all generated image datasets, human evaluation data, and a modular library to compute 17 common metrics for 9 different encoders at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/dgm-eval.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel theoretical framework for approximating solution of Schrödinger Bridges, and show that the associated numerical scheme scales better and is more accurate than existing algorithms.
Solving transport problems, i.e. finding a map transporting one given distribution to another, has numerous applications in machine learning. Novel mass transport methods motivated by generative modeling have recently been proposed, e.g. Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs) and Flow Matching Models (FMMs) implement such a transport through a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) or an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). However, while it is desirable in many applications to approximate the deterministic dynamic Optimal Transport (OT) map which admits attractive properties, DDMs and FMMs are not guaranteed to provide transports close to the OT map. In contrast, Schrödinger bridges (SBs) compute stochastic dynamic mappings which recover entropy-regularized versions of OT. Unfortunately, existing numerical methods approximating SBs either scale poorly with dimension or accumulate errors across iterations. In this work, we introduce Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF), a new methodology for solving SB problems, and Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge Matching (DSBM), a novel numerical algorithm for computing IMF iterates. DSBM significantly improves over previous SB numerics and recovers as special/limiting cases various recent transport methods. We demonstrate the performance of DSBM on a variety of problems.
The ability to discern and comprehend pragmatic meanings is a cornerstone of social and emotional intelligence, referred to as pragmatic reasoning. Despite the strides made in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, these models grapple with capturing the nuanced and ambiguous facets of language, falling short of the aspiration to build human-like conversational agents. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark, the **DiPlomat**, which delves into the fundamental components of conversational pragmatic reasoning, encompassing situational context reasoning, open-world knowledge acquisition, and unified figurative language understanding. We start by collecting a new human-annotated dialogue dataset, composed of 4,177 multi-turn dialogues and a vocabulary of 48,900 words. Along with the dataset, two tasks are proposed to evaluate machines' pragmatic reasoning capabilities, namely, Pragmatic Reasoning and Identification(PIR) and Conversational Question Answering (CQA). Furthermore, we probe into a zero-shot natural language inference task, where the significance of context in pragmatic reasoning is underscored. Experimental findings illustrate the existing limitations of current prevailing LLMs in the realm of pragmatic reasoning, shedding light on the pressing need for further research to facilitate the emergence of emotional intelligence within human-like conversational agents.
tl;dr: We propose a new method to enhance the transferability of adversarial examples by modifying the gradient calculation of non-linear layers, ReLU and maxpool.
Transfer-based attacks generate adversarial examples on the surrogate model, which can mislead other black-box models without access, making it promising to attack real-world applications. Recently, several works have been proposed to boost adversarial transferability, in which the surrogate model is usually overlooked. In this work, we identify that non-linear layers (e.g., ReLU, max-pooling, etc.) truncate the gradient during backward propagation, making the gradient w.r.t. input image imprecise to the loss function. We hypothesize and empirically validate that such truncation undermines the transferability of adversarial examples. Based on these findings, we propose a novel method called Backward Propagation Attack (BPA) to increase the relevance between the gradient w.r.t. input image and loss function so as to generate adversarial examples with higher transferability. Specifically, BPA adopts a non-monotonic function as the derivative of ReLU and incorporates softmax with temperature to smooth the derivative of max-pooling, thereby mitigating the information loss during the backward propagation of gradients. Empirical results on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that not only does our method substantially boost the adversarial transferability, but it is also general to existing transfer-based attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-AI-Group/RPA.
tl;dr: We present a new NeuralODE training method based on synchronization and homotopy optimization that boosts the training of NeuralODEs without introducing any architectural constraints.
Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NeuralODEs) present an attractive way to extract dynamical laws from time series data, as they bridge neural networks with the differential equation-based modeling paradigm of the physical sciences. However, these models often display long training times and suboptimal results, especially for longer duration data. While a common strategy in the literature imposes strong constraints to the NeuralODE architecture to inherently promote stable model dynamics, such methods are ill-suited for dynamics discovery as the unknown governing equation is not guaranteed to satisfy the assumed constraints. In this paper, we develop a new training method for NeuralODEs, based on synchronization and homotopy optimization, that does not require changes to the model architecture. We show that synchronizing the model dynamics and the training data tames the originally irregular loss landscape, which homotopy optimization can then leverage to enhance training. Through benchmark experiments, we demonstrate our method achieves competitive or better training loss while often requiring less than half the number of training epochs compared to other model-agnostic techniques. Furthermore, models trained with our method display better extrapolation capabilities, highlighting the effectiveness of our method.
Pre-training is crucial in 3D-related fields such as autonomous driving where point cloud annotation is costly and challenging. Many recent studies on point cloud pre-training, however, have overlooked the issue of incompleteness, where only a fraction of the points are captured by LiDAR, leading to ambiguity during the training phase. On the other hand, images offer more comprehensive information and richer semantics that can bolster point cloud encoders in addressing the incompleteness issue inherent in point clouds. Yet, incorporating images into point cloud pre-training presents its own challenges due to occlusions, potentially causing misalignments between points and pixels. In this work, we propose PRED, a novel image-assisted pre-training framework for outdoor point clouds in an occlusion-aware manner. The main ingredient of our framework is a Birds-Eye-View (BEV) feature map conditioned semantic rendering, leveraging the semantics of images for supervision through neural rendering. We further enhance our model's performance by incorporating point-wise masking with a high mask ratio (95%). Extensive experiments demonstrate PRED's superiority over prior point cloud pre-training methods, providing significant improvements on various large-scale datasets for 3D perception tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/PRED4pc/PRED.
tl;dr: CrossCodeEval is a multilingual benchmark built on diverse real-world repositories in Python, Java, TypeScript, and C#, evaluating code language models' capability in leveraging cross-file context for code completion.
Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years, yet current popular evaluation datasets, such as HumanEval and MBPP, predominantly focus on code completion tasks within a single file. This over-simplified setting falls short of representing the real-world software development scenario where repositories span multiple files with numerous cross-file dependencies, and accessing and understanding cross-file context is often required to complete the code correctly.
To fill in this gap, we propose CrossCodeEval, a diverse and multilingual code completion benchmark that necessitates an in-depth cross-file contextual understanding to complete the code accurately. CrossCodeEval is built on a diverse set of real-world, open-sourced, permissively-licensed repositories in four popular programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, and C#. To create examples that strictly require cross-file context for accurate completion, we propose a straightforward yet efficient static-analysis-based approach to pinpoint the use of cross-file context within the current file.
Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art code language models like CodeGen and StarCoder demonstrate that CrossCodeEval is extremely challenging when the relevant cross-file context is absent, and we see clear improvements when adding these context into the prompt. However, despite such improvements, the pinnacle of performance remains notably unattained even with the highest-performing model, indicating that CrossCodeEval is also capable of assessing model's capability in leveraging extensive context to make better code completion. Finally, we benchmarked various methods in retrieving cross-file context, and show that CrossCodeEval can also be used to measure the capability of code retrievers.
tl;dr: This paper presents a simple, general, and efficient active learning baseline for label-efficient LiDAR semantic segmentation from a voxel-centric perspective.
Active learning, a label-efficient paradigm, empowers models to interactively query an oracle for labeling new data. In the realm of LiDAR semantic segmentation, the challenges stem from the sheer volume of point clouds, rendering annotation labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive. This paper presents Annotator, a general and efficient active learning baseline, in which a voxel-centric online selection strategy is tailored to efficiently probe and annotate the salient and exemplar voxel girds within each LiDAR scan, even under distribution shift. Concretely, we first execute an in-depth analysis of several common selection strategies such as Random, Entropy, Margin, and then develop voxel confusion degree (VCD) to exploit the local topology relations and structures of point clouds. Annotator excels in diverse settings, with a particular focus on active learning (AL), active source-free domain adaptation (ASFDA), and active domain adaptation (ADA). It consistently delivers exceptional performance across LiDAR semantic segmentation benchmarks, spanning both simulation-to-real and real-to-real scenarios. Surprisingly, Annotator exhibits remarkable efficiency, requiring significantly fewer annotations, e.g., just labeling five voxels per scan in the SynLiDAR → SemanticKITTI task. This results in impressive performance, achieving 87.8% fully-supervised performance under AL, 88.5% under ASFDA, and 94.4% under ADA. We envision that Annotator will offer a simple, general, and efficient solution for label-efficient 3D applications.
The storage of continuous variables in working memory is hypothesized to be sustained in the brain by the dynamics of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) whose steady states form continuous manifolds. In some cases, it is thought that the synaptic connectivity supports multiple attractor manifolds, each mapped to a different context or task. For example, in hippocampal area CA3, positions in distinct environments are represented by distinct sets of population activity patterns, each forming a continuum. It has been argued that the embedding of multiple continuous attractors in a single RNN inevitably causes detrimental interference: quenched noise in the synaptic connectivity disrupts the continuity of each attractor, replacing it by a discrete set of steady states that can be conceptualized as lying on local minima of an abstract energy landscape. Consequently, population activity patterns exhibit systematic drifts towards one of these discrete minima, thereby degrading the stored memory over time. Here we show that it is possible to dramatically attenuate these detrimental interference effects by adjusting the synaptic weights. Synaptic weight adjustment are derived from a loss function that quantifies the roughness of the energy landscape along each of the embedded attractor manifolds. By minimizing this loss function, the stability of states can be dramatically improved, without compromising the capacity.
tl;dr: A corpus of UK court decisions for legal and AI research
We introduce the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC), a corpus for legal AI research. It consists of over 250 000 court cases from the UK. Most cases are from the 21st century, but the corpus includes cases as old as the 16th century. This paper presents the first release of the corpus, containing the raw text and meta-data. Together with the corpus, we provide annotations on case outcomes for 638 cases, done by legal experts. Using our annotated data, we have trained and evaluated case outcome extraction with GPT-3, GPT-4 and RoBERTa models to provide benchmarks. We include an extensive legal and ethical discussion to address the potentially sensitive nature of this material. As a consequence, the corpus will only be released for research purposes under certain restrictions.
We present a novel actor-critic algorithm for an environment with delayed feedback, which addresses the state-space explosion problem of conventional approaches. Conventional approaches use an augmented state constructed from the last observed state and actions executed since visiting the last observed state. Using the augmented state space, the correct Markov decision process for delayed environments can be constructed; however, this causes the state space to explode as the number of delayed timesteps increases, leading to slow convergence. Our proposed algorithm, called Belief-Projection-Based Q-learning (BPQL), addresses the state-space explosion problem by evaluating the values of the critic for which the input state size is equal to the original state-space size rather than that of the augmented one. We compare BPQL to traditional approaches in continuous control tasks and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms other algorithms in terms of asymptotic performance and sample efficiency. We also show that BPQL solves long-delayed environments, which conventional approaches are unable to do.
In this paper, we present ContExtual Imitation Learning (CEIL), a general and broadly applicable algorithm for imitation learning (IL). Inspired by the formulation of hindsight information matching, we derive CEIL by explicitly learning a hindsight embedding function together with a contextual policy using the hindsight embeddings. To achieve the expert matching objective for IL, we advocate for optimizing a contextual variable such that it biases the contextual policy towards mimicking expert behaviors. Beyond the typical learning from demonstrations (LfD) setting, CEIL is a generalist that can be effectively applied to multiple settings including: 1) learning from observations (LfO), 2) offline IL, 3) cross-domain IL (mismatched experts), and 4) one-shot IL settings. Empirically, we evaluate CEIL on the popular MuJoCo tasks (online) and the D4RL dataset (offline). Compared to prior state-of-the-art baselines, we show that CEIL is more sample-efficient in most online IL tasks and achieves better or competitive performances in offline tasks.
tl;dr: This paper presents a synthetic GPS trajectory dataset with high fidelity, offering an alternative solution to existing data accessibility issues.
Urban mobility analysis has been extensively studied in the past decade using a vast amount of GPS trajectory data, which reveals hidden patterns in movement and human activity within urban landscapes. Despite its significant value, the availability of such datasets often faces limitations due to privacy concerns, proprietary barriers, and quality inconsistencies. To address these challenges, this paper presents a synthetic trajectory dataset with high fidelity, offering a general solution to these data accessibility issues. Specifically, the proposed dataset adopts a diffusion model as its synthesizer, with the primary aim of accurately emulating the spatial-temporal behavior of the original trajectory data. These synthesized data can retain the geo-distribution and statistical properties characteristic of real-world datasets. Through rigorous analysis and case studies, we validate the high similarity and utility between the proposed synthetic trajectory dataset and real-world counterparts. Such validation underscores the practicality of synthetic datasets for urban mobility analysis and advocates for its wider acceptance within the research community. Finally, we publicly release the trajectory synthesizer and datasets, aiming to enhance the quality and availability of synthetic trajectory datasets and encourage continued contributions to this rapidly evolving field. The dataset is released for public online availability https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SynMob.
tl;dr: Scaling up training data and model size for robust and generalizable expressive human pose and shape estimation
Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods still depend largely on a confined set of training datasets. In this work, we investigate scaling up EHPS towards the first generalist foundation model (dubbed SMPLer-X), with up to ViT-Huge as the backbone and training with up to 4.5M instances from diverse data sources. With big data and the large model, SMPLer-X exhibits strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. 1) For the data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 32 EHPS datasets, including a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. 2) For the model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turn SMPLer-X into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation model SMPLer-X consistently delivers state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA (107.2 mm NMVE), UBody (57.4 mm PVE), EgoBody (63.6 mm PVE), and EHF (62.3 mm PVE without finetuning).
1403. Brain encoding models based on multimodal transformers can transfer across language and vision
tl;dr: Multimodal transformers were used to estimate encoding models on fMRI responses to language and visual stimuli that can predict fMRI responses to stimuli in the other modality.
Encoding models have been used to assess how the human brain represents concepts in language and vision. While language and vision rely on similar concept representations, current encoding models are typically trained and tested on brain responses to each modality in isolation. Recent advances in multimodal pretraining have produced transformers that can extract aligned representations of concepts in language and vision. In this work, we used representations from multimodal transformers to train encoding models that can transfer across fMRI responses to stories and movies. We found that encoding models trained on brain responses to one modality can successfully predict brain responses to the other modality, particularly in cortical regions that represent conceptual meaning. Further analysis of these encoding models revealed shared semantic dimensions that underlie concept representations in language and vision. Comparing encoding models trained using representations from multimodal and unimodal transformers, we found that multimodal transformers learn more aligned representations of concepts in language and vision. Our results demonstrate how multimodal transformers can provide insights into the brain’s capacity for multimodal processing.
tl;dr: We show that, in (symmetric) stochastic block model, PCA/SVD itself is a good clustering algorithm; this explains why using PCA/SVD before running clustering algorithms improves clustering results in practice.
A popular heuristic method for improving clustering results is to apply dimensionality reduction before running clustering algorithms.
It has been observed that spectral-based dimensionality reduction tools, such as PCA or SVD, improve the performance of clustering algorithms in many applications. This phenomenon indicates that spectral method not only serves as a dimensionality reduction tool, but also contributes to the clustering procedure in some sense. It is an interesting question to understand the behavior of spectral steps in clustering problems.
As an initial step in this direction, this paper studies the power of vanilla-SVD algorithm in the stochastic block model (SBM). We show that, in the symmetric setting, vanilla-SVD algorithm recovers all clusters correctly. This result answers an open question posed by Van Vu (Combinatorics Probability and Computing, 2018) in the symmetric setting.
At the heart of foundation models is the philosophy of "more is different", exemplified by the astonishing success in computer vision and natural language processing. However, the challenges of optimization and inherent complexity of transformer models call for a paradigm shift towards simplicity. In this study, we introduce VanillaNet, a neural network architecture that embraces elegance in design. By avoiding high depth, shortcuts, and intricate operations like self-attention, VanillaNet is refreshingly concise yet remarkably powerful. Each layer is carefully crafted to be compact and straightforward, with nonlinear activation functions pruned after training to restore the original architecture. VanillaNet overcomes the challenges of inherent complexity, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments. Its easy-to-understand and highly simplified architecture opens new possibilities for efficient deployment. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that VanillaNet delivers performance on par with renowned deep neural networks and vision transformers, showcasing the power of minimalism in deep learning. This visionary journey of VanillaNet has significant potential to redefine the landscape and challenge the status quo of foundation model, setting a new path for elegant and effective model design. Pre-trained models and codes are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/VanillaNet and https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/vanillanet
Recent curriculum Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown notable progress in solving complex tasks by proposing sequences of surrogate tasks. However, the previous approaches often face challenges when they generate curriculum goals in a high-dimensional space. Thus, they usually rely on manually specified goal spaces. To alleviate this limitation and improve the scalability of the curriculum, we propose a novel curriculum method that automatically defines the semantic goal space which contains vital information for the curriculum process, and suggests curriculum goals over it. To define the semantic goal space, our method discretizes continuous observations via vector quantized-variational autoencoders (VQ-VAE) and restores the temporal relations between the discretized observations by a graph. Concurrently, ours suggests uncertainty and temporal distance-aware curriculum goals that converges to the final goals over the automatically composed goal space. We demonstrate that the proposed method allows efficient explorations in an uninformed environment with raw goal examples only. Also, ours outperforms the state-of-the-art curriculum RL methods on data efficiency and performance, in various goal-reaching tasks even with ego-centric visual inputs.
We introduce OpenShape, a method for learning multi-modal joint representations of text, image, and point clouds. We adopt the commonly used multi-modal contrastive learning framework for representation alignment, but with a specific focus on scaling up 3D representations to enable open-world 3D shape understanding. To achieve this, we scale up training data by ensembling multiple 3D datasets and propose several strategies to automatically filter and enrich noisy text descriptions. We also explore and compare strategies for scaling 3D backbone networks and introduce a novel hard negative mining module for more efficient training. We evaluate OpenShape on zero-shot 3D classification benchmarks and demonstrate its superior capabilities for open-world recognition. Specifically, OpenShape achieves a zero-shot accuracy of 46.8% on the 1,156-category Objaverse-LVIS benchmark, compared to less than 10% for existing methods. OpenShape also achieves an accuracy of 85.3% on ModelNet40, outperforming previous zero-shot baseline methods by 20% and performing on par with some fully-supervised methods. Furthermore, we show that our learned embeddings encode a wide range of visual and semantic concepts (e.g., subcategories, color, shape, style) and facilitate fine-grained text-3D and image-3D interactions. Due to their alignment with CLIP embeddings, our learned shape representations can also be integrated with off-the-shelf CLIP-based models for various applications, such as point cloud captioning and point cloud-conditioned image generation.
Through a deeper understanding of predictions of neural networks, Influence Function (IF) has been applied to various tasks such as detecting and relabeling mislabeled samples, dataset pruning, and separation of data sources in practice. However, we found standard approximations of IF suffer from performance degradation due to oversimplified influence distributions caused by their bilinear approximation, suppressing the expressive power of samples with a relatively strong influence. To address this issue, we propose a new interpretation of existing IF approximations as an average relationship between two linearized losses over parameters sampled from the Laplace approximation (LA). In doing so, we highlight two significant limitations of current IF approximations: the linearity of gradients and the singularity of Hessian. Accordingly, by improving each point, we introduce a new IF approximation method with the following features: i) the removal of linearization to alleviate the bilinear constraint and ii) the utilization of Geometric Ensemble (GE) tailored for non-linear losses. Empirically, our approach outperforms existing IF approximations for downstream tasks with lighter computation, thereby providing new feasibility of low-complexity/nonlinear-based IF design.
tl;dr: We introduce a lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use framework for designing interactive code environments.
Humans write code in a fundamentally interactive manner and rely on constant execution feedback to correct errors, resolve ambiguities, and decompose tasks. While LLMs have recently exhibited promising coding capabilities, current coding benchmarks mostly consider a static instruction-to-code sequence transduction process, which has the potential for error propagation and a disconnect between the generated code and its final execution environment. To address this gap, we introduce InterCode, a lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use framework of interactive coding as a standard reinforcement learning (RL) environment, with code as actions and execution feedback as observations. Our framework is language and platform agnostic, uses self-contained Docker environments to provide safe and reproducible execution, and is compatible out-of-the-box with traditional seq2seq coding methods, while enabling the development of new methods for interactive code generation. We use InterCode to create three interactive code environments with Bash, SQL, and Python as action spaces, leveraging data from the static NL2Bash, Spider, and MBPP datasets. We demonstrate InterCode’s viability as a testbed by evaluating multiple state-of-the-art LLMs configured with different prompting strategies such as ReAct and Plan & Solve. Our results showcase the benefits of interactive code generation and demonstrate that InterCode can serve as a challenging benchmark for advancing code understanding and generation capabilities. InterCode is designed to be easily extensible and can even be used to create new tasks such as Capture the Flag, a popular coding puzzle that is inherently multi-step and involves multiple programming languages.
tl;dr: A massive dataset of layouts and structured article texts, constructed from nearly 20 million historical U.S. newspaper page scans
Existing full text datasets of U.S. public domain newspapers do not recognize the often complex layouts of newspaper scans, and as a result the digitized content scrambles texts from articles, headlines, captions, advertisements, and other layout regions. OCR quality can also be low. This study develops a novel, deep learning pipeline for extracting full article texts from newspaper images and applies it to the nearly 20 million scans in Library of Congress's public domain Chronicling America collection. The pipeline includes layout detection, legibility classification, custom OCR, and association of article texts spanning multiple bounding boxes. To achieve high scalability, it is built with efficient architectures designed for mobile phones. The resulting American Stories dataset provides high quality data that could be used for pre-training a large language model to achieve better understanding of historical English and historical world knowledge. The dataset could also be added to the external database of a retrieval-augmented language model to make historical information - ranging from interpretations of political events to minutiae about the lives of people's ancestors - more widely accessible. Furthermore, structured article texts facilitate using transformer-based methods for popular social science applications like topic classification, detection of reproduced content, and news story clustering. Finally, American Stories provides a massive silver quality dataset for innovating multimodal layout analysis models and other multimodal applications.
tl;dr: We show that the machine learning techniques can solve the error-floor issues of low-density parity-check codes, which can extend the applications of LDPC codes to 6G communication, crypto systems, and storage systems.
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been successfully commercialized in communication systems due to their strong error correction capabilities and simple decoding process. However, the error-floor phenomenon of LDPC codes, in which the error rate stops decreasing rapidly at a certain level, presents challenges for achieving extremely low error rates and deploying LDPC codes in scenarios demanding ultra-high reliability. In this work, we propose training methods for neural min-sum (NMS) decoders to eliminate the error-floor effect. First, by leveraging the boosting learning technique of ensemble networks, we divide the decoding network into two neural decoders and train the post decoder to be specialized for uncorrected words that the first decoder fails to correct. Secondly, to address the vanishing gradient issue in training, we introduce a block-wise training schedule that locally trains a block of weights while retraining the preceding block. Lastly, we show that assigning different weights to unsatisfied check nodes effectively lowers the error-floor with a minimal number of weights. By applying these training methods to standard LDPC codes, we achieve the best error-floor performance compared to other decoding methods. The proposed NMS decoder, optimized solely through novel training methods without additional modules, can be integrated into existing LDPC decoders without incurring extra hardware costs. The source code is available at https://github.com/ghy1228/LDPC_Error_Floor.
The ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to count certain graph substructures, especially cycles, is important for the success of GNNs on a wide range of tasks. It has been recently used as a popular metric for evaluating the expressive power of GNNs. Many of the proposed GNN models with provable cycle counting power are based on subgraph GNNs, i.e., extracting a bag of subgraphs from the input graph, generating representations for each subgraph, and using them to augment the representation of the input graph. However, those methods require heavy preprocessing, and suffer from high time and memory costs. In this paper, we overcome the aforementioned limitations of subgraph GNNs by proposing a novel class of GNNs---$d$-Distance-Restricted FWL(2) GNNs, or $d$-DRFWL(2) GNNs, based on the well-known FWL(2) algorithm. As a heuristic method for graph isomorphism testing, FWL(2) colors all node pairs in a graph and performs message passing among those node pairs. In order to balance the expressive power and complexity, $d$-DRFWL(2) GNNs simplify FWL(2) by restricting the range of message passing to node pairs whose mutual distances are at most $d$. This way, $d$-DRFWL(2) GNNs exploit graph sparsity while avoiding the expensive subgraph extraction operations in subgraph GNNs, making both the time and space complexity lower. We theoretically investigate both the discriminative power and the cycle counting power of $d$-DRFWL(2) GNNs. Our most important finding is that $d$-DRFWL(2) GNNs have provably strong cycle counting power even with $d=2$: they can count all 3, 4, 5, 6-cycles. Since 6-cycles (e.g., benzene rings) are ubiquitous in organic molecules, being able to detect and count them is crucial for achieving robust and generalizable performance on molecular tasks. Experiments on both synthetic datasets and molecular datasets verify our theory. To the best of our knowledge, 2-DRFWL(2) GNN is the most efficient GNN model to date (both theoretically and empirically) that can count up to 6-cycles.
Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) has emerged as an attractive technique for assisting domain adaptation by actively annotating a small subset of target samples. Most ADA methods focus on measuring the target representativeness beyond traditional active learning criteria to handle the domain shift problem, while leaving the uncertainty estimation to be performed by an uncalibrated deterministic model. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic framework that captures both data-level and prediction-level uncertainties beyond a point estimate. Specifically, we use variational inference to approximate the joint posterior distribution of latent representation and model prediction. The variational objective of labeled data can be formulated by a variational autoencoder and a latent diffusion classifier, and the objective of unlabeled data can be implemented in a knowledge distillation framework. We utilize adversarial learning to ensure an invariant latent space. The resulting diffusion classifier enables efficient sampling of all possible predictions for each individual to recover the predictive distribution. We then leverage a t-test-based criterion upon the sampling and select informative unlabeled target samples based on the p-value, which encodes both prediction variability and cross-category ambiguity. Experiments on both ADA and Source-Free ADA settings show that our method provides more calibrated predictions than previous ADA methods and achieves favorable performance on three domain adaptation datasets.
tl;dr: We propose alpha-RGS, a novel score/diffusion-based source separation method leveraging generalized Bayes’ and randomized Gaussian smoothing, focusing on sources with underlying discrete nature, with applications to digital communication systems.
We propose a new method for separating superimposed sources using diffusion-based generative models. Our method relies only on separately trained statistical priors of independent sources to establish a new objective function guided by $\textit{maximum a posteriori}$ estimation with an $\textit{$\alpha$-posterior}$, across multiple levels of Gaussian smoothing. Motivated by applications in radio-frequency (RF) systems, we are interested in sources with underlying discrete nature and the recovery of encoded bits from a signal of interest, as measured by the bit error rate (BER). Experimental results with RF mixtures demonstrate that our method results in a BER reduction of 95\% over classical and existing learning-based methods. Our analysis demonstrates that our proposed method yields solutions that asymptotically approach the modes of an underlying discrete distribution. Furthermore, our method can be viewed as a multi-source extension to the recently proposed score distillation sampling scheme, shedding additional light on its use beyond conditional sampling. The project webpage is available at https://alpha-rgs.github.io.
tl;dr: We propose an information-theoretic saliency-based framework for counterfactual reasoning in probabilistic forecasting. For common distributions, we obtain a closed-form expression for the saliency of observed timesteps towards a model's forecasts.
We propose a post hoc saliency-based explanation framework for counterfactual reasoning in probabilistic multivariate time-series forecasting (regression) settings. Building upon Miller's framework of explanations derived from research in multiple social science disciplines, we establish a conceptual link between counterfactual reasoning and saliency-based explanation techniques. To address the lack of a principled notion of saliency, we leverage a unifying definition of information-theoretic saliency grounded in preattentive human visual cognition and extend it to forecasting settings. Specifically, we obtain a closed-form expression for commonly used density functions to identify which observed timesteps appear salient to an underlying model in making its probabilistic forecasts. We empirically validate our framework in a principled manner using synthetic data to establish ground-truth saliency that is unavailable for real-world data. Finally, using real-world data and forecasting models, we demonstrate how our framework can assist domain experts in forming new data-driven hypotheses about the causal relationships between features in the wild.
1416. Beyond Deep Ensembles: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Bayesian Deep Learning under Distribution Shift
tl;dr: We present a large-scale evaluation of modern, scalable Bayesian deep learning algorithms under realistic distribution shift with a focus on ensembles of single-mode posterior approximations.
Bayesian deep learning (BDL) is a promising approach to achieve well-calibrated predictions on distribution-shifted data. Nevertheless, there exists no large-scale survey that evaluates recent SOTA methods on diverse, realistic, and challenging benchmark tasks in a systematic manner. To provide a clear picture of the current state of BDL research, we evaluate modern BDL algorithms on real-world datasets from the WILDS collection containing challenging classification and regression tasks, with a focus on generalization capability and calibration under distribution shift. We compare the algorithms on a wide range of large, convolutional and transformer-based neural network architectures. In particular, we investigate a signed version of the expected calibration error that reveals whether the methods are over- or underconfident, providing further insight into the behavior of the methods. Further, we provide the first systematic evaluation of BDL for fine-tuning large pre-trained models, where training from scratch is prohibitively expensive. Finally, given the recent success of Deep Ensembles, we extend popular single-mode posterior approximations to multiple modes by the use of ensembles. While we find that ensembling single-mode approximations generally improves the generalization capability and calibration of the models by a significant margin, we also identify a failure mode of ensembles when finetuning large transformer-based language models.
In this setting, variational inference based approaches such as last-layer Bayes By Backprop outperform other methods in terms of accuracy by a large margin, while modern approximate inference algorithms such as SWAG achieve the best calibration.
tl;dr: A unifying mathematical framework for learning operators is introduced, ensuring consistency at the continuous and discrete levels
Recently, operator learning, or learning mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, has garnered significant attention, notably in relation to learning partial differential equations from data. Conceptually clear when outlined on paper, neural operators necessitate discretization in the transition to computer implementations. This step can compromise their integrity, often causing them to deviate from the underlying operators. This research offers a fresh take on neural operators with a framework Representation equivalent Neural Operators (ReNO) designed to address these issues. At its core is the concept of operator aliasing, which measures inconsistency between neural operators and their discrete representations. We explore this for widely-used operator learning techniques. Our findings detail how aliasing introduces errors when handling different discretizations and grids and loss of crucial continuous structures. More generally, this framework not only sheds light on existing challenges but, given its constructive and broad nature, also potentially offers tools for developing new neural operators.
tl;dr: A simple yet effective method for finetuning large text-to-image diffusion models
Large text-to-image diffusion models have impressive capabilities in generating photorealistic images from text prompts. How to effectively guide or control these powerful models to perform different downstream tasks becomes an important open problem. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a principled finetuning method -- Orthogonal Finetuning (OFT), for adapting text-to-image diffusion models to downstream tasks. Unlike existing methods, OFT can provably preserve hyperspherical energy which characterizes the pairwise neuron relationship on the unit hypersphere. We find that this property is crucial for preserving the semantic generation ability of text-to-image diffusion models. To improve finetuning stability, we further propose Constrained Orthogonal Finetuning (COFT) which imposes an additional radius constraint to the hypersphere. Specifically, we consider two important finetuning text-to-image tasks: subject-driven generation where the goal is to generate subject-specific images given a few images of a subject and a text prompt, and controllable generation where the goal is to enable the model to take in additional control signals. We empirically show that our OFT framework outperforms existing methods in generation quality and convergence speed.
Current auxiliary learning methods mainly adopt the methodology of reweighing losses for the manually collected auxiliary data and tasks. However, these methods heavily rely on domain knowledge during data collection, which may be hardly available in reality. Therefore, current methods will become less effective and even do harm to the primary task when unhelpful auxiliary data and tasks are employed. To tackle the problem, we propose a joint data-task generation framework for auxiliary learning (DTG-AuxL), which can bring benefits to the primary task by generating the new auxiliary data and task in a joint manner. The proposed DTG-AuxL framework contains a joint generator and a bi-level optimization strategy. Specifically, the joint generator contains a feature generator and a label generator, which are designed to be applicable and expressive for various auxiliary learning scenarios. The bi-level optimization strategy optimizes the joint generator and the task learning model, where the joint generator is effectively optimized in the upper level via the implicit gradient from the primary loss and the explicit gradient of our proposed instance regularization, while the task learning model is optimized in the lower level by the generated data and task. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DTG-AuxL framework consistently outperforms existing methods in various auxiliary learning scenarios, particularly when the manually collected auxiliary data and tasks are unhelpful.
tl;dr: We propose an accelerated, scale-aware NeRF method that is competitive with Mip-NeRF (while training much faster)
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) can be dramatically accelerated by spatial grid representations. However, they do not explicitly reason about scale and so introduce aliasing artifacts when reconstructing scenes captured at different camera distances. Mip-NeRF and its extensions propose scale-aware renderers that project volumetric frustums rather than point samples. But such approaches rely on positional encodings that are not readily compatible with grid methods. We propose a simple modification to grid-based models by training model heads at different spatial grid resolutions. At render time, we simply use coarser grids to render samples that cover larger volumes. Our method can be easily applied to existing accelerated NeRF methods and significantly improves rendering quality (reducing error rates by 20–90% across synthetic and unbounded real-world scenes) while incurring minimal performance overhead (as each model head is quick to evaluate). Compared to Mip-NeRF, we reduce error rates by 20% while training over 60x faster.
tl;dr: We magnify motions in videos by differentiating through optical flow, allowing for a self-supervised magification algorithm
This paper presents a simple, self-supervised method for magnifying subtle motions in video: given an input video and a magnification factor, we manipulate the video such that its new optical flow is scaled by the desired amount. To train our model, we propose a loss function that estimates the optical flow of the generated video and penalizes how far if deviates from the given magnification factor. Thus, training involves differentiating through a pretrained optical flow network. Since our model is self-supervised, we can further improve its performance through test-time adaptation, by finetuning it on the input video. It can also be easily extended to magnify the motions of only user-selected objects. Our approach avoids the need for synthetic magnification datasets that have been used to train prior learning-based approaches. Instead, it leverages the existing capabilities of off-the-shelf motion estimators. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through evaluations of both visual quality and quantitative metrics on a range of real-world and synthetic videos, and we show our method works for both supervised and unsupervised optical flow methods.
tl;dr: This paper investigates the implications of directly learning the most likely function, instead of the most likely parameters, implied by a model and the data.
Standard regularized training procedures correspond to maximizing a posterior distribution over parameters, known as maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. However, model parameters are of interest only insomuch as they combine with the functional form of a model to provide a function that can make good predictions. Moreover, the most likely parameters under the parameter posterior do not generally correspond to the most likely function induced by the parameter posterior. In fact, we can re-parametrize a model such that any setting of parameters can maximize the parameter posterior. As an alternative, we investigate the benefits and drawbacks of directly estimating the most likely function implied by the model and the data. We show that this procedure leads to pathological solutions when using neural networks and prove conditions under which the procedure is well-behaved, as well as a scalable approximation. Under these conditions, we find that function-space MAP estimation can lead to flatter minima, better generalization, and improved robustness to overfitting.
1423. The Curious Price of Distributional Robustness in Reinforcement Learning with a Generative Model
This paper investigates model robustness in reinforcement learning (RL) via the framework of distributionally robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs). Despite recent efforts, the sample complexity of RMDPs is much less understood regardless of the uncertainty set in use; in particular, there exist large gaps between existing upper and lower bounds, and it is unclear if distributional robustness bears any statistical implications when benchmarked against standard RL. In this paper, assuming access to a generative model, we derive the sample complexity of RMDPs---when the uncertainty set is measured via either total variation or $\chi^2$ divergence over the full range of uncertainty levels---using a model-based algorithm called distributionally robust value iteration, and develop minimax lower bounds to benchmark its tightness. Our results not only strengthen the prior art in both directions of upper and lower bounds, but also deliver surprising messages that learning RMDPs is not necessarily easier or more difficult than standard MDPs. In the case of total variation, we establish the minimax-optimal sample complexity of RMDPs which is always smaller than that of standard MDPs. In the case of $\chi^2$ divergence, we establish the sample complexity of RMDPs that is tight up to polynomial factors of the effective horizon, and grows linearly with respect to the uncertainty level when it approaches infinity.
We study the multi-agent game within the innovative framework of decision-dependent games, which establishes a feedback mechanism that population data reacts to agents’ actions and further characterizes the strategic interactions between agents. We focus on finding the Nash equilibrium of decision-dependent games in the bandit feedback setting. However, since agents are strategically coupled, traditional gradient-based methods are infeasible without the gradient oracle. To overcome this challenge, we model the strategic interactions by a general parametric model and propose a novel online algorithm, Online Performative Gradient Descent (OPGD), which leverages the ideas of online stochastic approximation and projected gradient descent to learn the Nash equilibrium in the context of function approximation for the unknown gradient. In particular, under mild assumptions on the function classes defined in the parametric model, we prove that OPGD can find the Nash equilibrium efficiently for strongly monotone decision-dependent games. Synthetic numerical experiments validate our theory.
tl;dr: We present a monotonous, unbiased, fast alternative to the Standardized Mutual information for clustering comparison and external validation.
Popular metrics for clustering comparison, like the Adjusted Rand Index and the Adjusted Mutual Information, are type II biased. The Standardized Mutual Information removes this bias but suffers from counterintuitive non-monotonicity and poor computational efficiency. We introduce the $p$-value adjusted Rand Index ($\operatorname{PMI}_2$), the first cluster comparison method that is type II unbiased and provably monotonous. The $\operatorname{PMI}_2$ has fast approximations that outperform the Standardized Mutual information. We demonstrate its unbiased clustering selection, approximation quality, and runtime efficiency on synthetic benchmarks. In experiments on image and social network datasets, we show how the $\operatorname{PMI}_2$ can help practitioners choose better clustering and community detection algorithms.
Large-scale generative models such as GPT and DALL-E have revolutionized the research community. These models not only generate high fidelity outputs, but are also generalists which can solve tasks not explicitly taught. In contrast, speech generative models are still primitive in terms of scale and task generalization. In this paper, we present Voicebox, the most versatile text-guided generative model for speech at scale. Voicebox is a non-autoregressive flow-matching model trained to infill speech, given audio context and text, trained on over 50K hours of speech that are not filtered or enhanced. Similar to GPT, Voicebox can perform many different tasks through in-context learning, but is more flexible as it can also condition on future context. Voicebox can be used for mono or cross-lingual zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis, noise removal, content editing, style conversion, and diverse sample generation. In particular, Voicebox outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS model VALL-E on both intelligibility (5.9\% vs 1.9\% word error rates) and audio similarity (0.580 vs 0.681) while being up to 20 times faster. Audio samples can be found in \url{https://voicebox.metademolab.com}.
tl;dr: Value-based offline RL under single realizability, single-policy coverage, and without explicit pessimism
We consider offline reinforcement learning (RL) where we only have only access to offline data. In contrast to numerous offline RL algorithms that necessitate the uniform coverage of the offline data over state and action space, we propose value-based algorithms with PAC guarantees under partial coverage, specifically, coverage of offline data against a single policy, and realizability of soft Q-function (a.k.a., entropy-regularized Q-function) and another function, which is defined as a solution to a saddle point of certain minimax optimization problem). Furthermore, we show the analogous result for Q-functions instead of soft Q-functions. To attain these guarantees, we use novel algorithms with minimax loss functions to accurately estimate soft Q-functions and Q-functions with
-convergence guarantees measured on the offline data. We introduce these loss functions by casting the estimation problems into nonlinear convex optimization problems and taking the Lagrange functions.
Algorithmic stability is an important notion that has proven powerful for deriving generalization bounds for practical algorithms. The last decade has witnessed an increasing number of stability bounds for different algorithms applied on different classes of loss functions. While these bounds have illuminated various properties of optimization algorithms, the analysis of each case typically required a different proof technique with significantly different mathematical tools. In this study, we make a novel connection between learning theory and applied probability and introduce a unified guideline for proving Wasserstein stability bounds for stochastic optimization algorithms. We illustrate our approach on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and we obtain time-uniform stability bounds (i.e., the bound does not increase with the number of iterations) for strongly convex losses and non-convex losses with additive noise, where we recover similar results to the prior art or extend them to more general cases by using a single proof technique. Our approach is flexible and can be generalizable to other popular optimizers, as it mainly requires developing Lyapunov functions, which are often readily available in the literature. It also illustrates that ergodicity is an important component for obtaining time-uniform bounds -- which might not be achieved for convex or non-convex losses unless additional noise is injected to the iterates. Finally, we slightly stretch our analysis technique and prove time-uniform bounds for SGD under convex and non-convex losses (without additional additive noise), which, to our knowledge, is novel.
tl;dr: The proposed bottleneck cross-attention module enables a balanced spatio-temporal understanding in video action recognition
Recognizing human actions in videos requires spatial and temporal understanding. Most existing action recognition models lack a balanced spatio-temporal understanding of videos. In this work, we propose a novel two-stream architecture, called Cross-Attention in Space and Time (CAST), that achieves a balanced spatio-temporal understanding of videos using only RGB input. Our proposed bottleneck cross-attention mechanism enables the spatial and temporal expert models to exchange information and make synergistic predictions, leading to improved performance. We validate the proposed method with extensive experiments on public benchmarks with different characteristics: EPIC-Kitchens-100, Something-Something-V2, and Kinetics-400. Our method consistently shows favorable performance across these datasets, while the performance of existing methods fluctuates depending on the dataset characteristics. The code is available at https://github.com/KHU-VLL/CAST.
tl;dr: One Fits All: Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM, a work that synthesis practical performance and theoretical analysis
Although we have witnessed great success of pre-trained models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), limited progress has been made for general time series analysis. Unlike NLP and CV where a unified model can be used to perform different tasks, specially designed approach still dominates in each time series analysis task such as classification, anomaly detection, forecasting, and few-shot learning. The main challenge that blocks the development of pre-trained model for time series analysis is the lack of a large amount of data for training. In this work, we address this challenge by leveraging language or CV models, pre-trained from billions of tokens, for time series analysis. Specifically, we refrain from altering the self-attention and feedforward layers of the residual blocks in the pre-trained language or image model. This model, known as the Frozen Pretrained Transformer (FPT), is evaluated through fine-tuning on all major types of tasks involving time series. Our results demonstrate that pre-trained models on natural language or images can lead to a comparable or state-of-the-art performance in all main time series analysis tasks, as illustrated in Figure1. We also found both theoretically and empirically that the self-attention module behaviors similarly to principle component analysis (PCA), an observation that helps explains how transformer bridges the domain gap and a crucial step towards understanding the universality of a pre-trained transformer.
The code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Pretrained-LM-for-TSForcasting-C561.
tl;dr: We provide algorithms for Gaussian mean estimation and linear regression under Huber contamination that achieve optimal error and sample complexity and have almost linear runtime
We study the fundamental problems of Gaussian mean
estimation and linear regression with Gaussian covariates
in the presence of Huber contamination. Our main
contribution is the design of the first sample near-optimal
and almost linear-time algorithms with optimal error
guarantees for both these problems. Specifically, for
Gaussian robust mean estimation on $\mathbb R^d$ with
contamination parameter $\epsilon \in (0, \epsilon_0)$ for a small
absolute constant $\epsilon_0$, we give an
algorithm with sample complexity $n = \tilde{O}(d/\epsilon^2)$
and almost linear runtime that approximates the target
mean within $\ell_2$-error $O(\epsilon)$.
This improves on
prior work that achieved this error guarantee with
polynomially suboptimal sample and time complexity.
For robust linear
regression, we give the first algorithm with sample
complexity $n = \tilde{O}(d/\epsilon^2)$ and almost linear
runtime that approximates the target regressor within
$\ell_2$-error $O(\epsilon)$. This is the first polynomial
sample and time algorithm achieving the optimal error
guarantee, answering an open question in the literature.
At the technical level, we develop a methodology that
yields almost-linear time algorithms for multi-directional
filtering that may be of broader interest.
tl;dr: We propose a monolithic framework for implicitly exploring applicable to both off- and on-policy algorithms that learns more energy efficient policies.
In Reinforcement Learning, agents learn policies by exploring and interacting with the environment. Due to the curse of dimensionality, learning policies that map high-dimensional sensory input to motor output is particularly challenging. During training, state of the art methods (SAC, PPO, etc.) explore the environment by perturbing the actuation with independent Gaussian noise. While this unstructured exploration has proven successful in numerous tasks, it can be suboptimal for overactuated systems. When multiple actuators, such as motors or muscles, drive behavior, uncorrelated perturbations risk diminishing each other's effect, or modifying the behavior in a task-irrelevant way. While solutions to introduce time correlation across action perturbations exist, introducing correlation across actuators has been largely ignored. Here, we propose LATent TIme-Correlated Exploration (Lattice), a method to inject temporally-correlated noise into the latent state of the policy network, which can be seamlessly integrated with on- and off-policy algorithms. We demonstrate that the noisy actions generated by perturbing the network's activations can be modeled as a multivariate Gaussian distribution with a full covariance matrix. In the PyBullet locomotion tasks, Lattice-SAC achieves state of the art results, and reaches 18\% higher reward than unstructured exploration in the Humanoid environment. In the musculoskeletal control environments of MyoSuite, Lattice-PPO achieves higher reward in most reaching and object manipulation tasks, while also finding more energy-efficient policies with reductions of 20-60\%. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of structured action noise in time and actuator space for complex motor control tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/amathislab/lattice.
tl;dr: An empirical and theoretical study arguing why distillation counter-intuitively induces deviations between the student and teacher, and why that helps generalization.
Knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely used to improve the test accuracy of a "student" network, by training it to mimic the soft probabilities of a trained "teacher" network. Yet, it has been shown in recent work that, despite being trained to fit the teacher's probabilities, the student may not only significantly deviate from the teacher probabilities, but may also outdo than the teacher in performance. Our work aims to reconcile this seemingly paradoxical observation. Specifically, we characterize the precise nature of the student-teacher deviations, and argue how they _can_ co-occur with better generalization. First, through experiments on image and language data, we identify that these probability deviations correspond to the student systematically _exaggerating_ the confidence levels of the teacher.
Next, we theoretically and empirically establish another form of exaggeration in some simple settings: KD exaggerates the implicit bias of gradient descent in converging faster along the top eigendirections of the data. Finally, we tie these two observations together: we demonstrate that the exaggerated bias of KD can simultaneously result in both (a) the exaggeration of confidence and (b) the improved generalization of the student, thus offering a resolution to the apparent paradox. Our analysis brings existing theory and practice closer by considering the role of gradient descent in KD and by demonstrating the exaggerated bias effect in both theoretical and empirical settings.
tl;dr: We present a simple method for multitask optimization in the presence of data imbalance, and verify its efficacy via thorough empirical evaluations.
In this paper, we empirically study the optimization dynamics of multi-task learning, particularly focusing on those that govern a collection of tasks with significant data imbalance. We present a simple yet effective method of pre-training on high-resource tasks, followed by fine-tuning on a mixture of high/low-resource tasks. We provide a thorough empirical study and analysis of this method's benefits showing that it achieves consistent improvements relative to the performance trade-off profile of standard static weighting. We analyze under what data regimes this method is applicable and show its improvements empirically in neural machine translation (NMT) and multi-lingual language modeling.
tl;dr: We proposed the first certified backdoor detection method with the condition under which the attacks are guaranteed to be detectable, as well as a probabilistic upper bound for the false positive rate.
Backdoor attack is a common threat to deep neural networks. During testing, samples embedded with a backdoor trigger will be misclassified as an adversarial target by a backdoored model, while samples without the backdoor trigger will be correctly classified. In this paper, we present the first certified backdoor detector (CBD), which is based on a novel, adjustable conformal prediction scheme based on our proposed statistic local dominant probability. For any classifier under inspection, CBD provides 1) a detection inference, 2) the condition under which the attacks are guaranteed to be detectable for the same classification domain, and 3) a probabilistic upper bound for the false positive rate. Our theoretical results show that attacks with triggers that are more resilient to test-time noise and have smaller perturbation magnitudes are more likely to be detected with guarantees. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets considering various backdoor types, such as BadNet, CB, and Blend. CBD achieves comparable or even higher detection accuracy than state-of-the-art detectors, and it in addition provides detection certification. Notably, for backdoor attacks with random perturbation triggers bounded by $\ell_2\leq0.75$ which achieves more than 90\% attack success rate, CBD achieves 100\% (98\%), 100\% (84\%), 98\% (98\%), and 72\% (40\%) empirical (certified) detection true positive rates on the four benchmark datasets GTSRB, SVHN, CIFAR-10, and TinyImageNet, respectively, with low false positive rates.
tl;dr: We propose a characterization of Markov equivalence with bounded degree conditional independence statements, and propose an algorithm for learning it from data to address finite-sample issues of current causal discovery algorithms.
Constraint-based causal discovery algorithms learn part of the causal graph structure by systematically testing conditional independences observed in the data. These algorithms, such as the PC algorithm and its variants, rely on graphical characterizations of the so-called equivalence class of causal graphs proposed by Pearl. However, constraint-based causal discovery algorithms struggle when data is limited since conditional independence tests quickly lose their statistical power, especially when the conditioning set is large. To address this, we propose using conditional independence tests where the size of the conditioning set is upper bounded by some integer k for robust causal discovery. The existing graphical characterizations of the equivalence classes of causal graphs are not applicable when we cannot leverage all the conditional independence statements. We first define the notion of k-Markov equivalence: Two causal graphs are k-Markov equivalent if they entail the same conditional independence constraints where the conditioning set size is upper bounded by k. We propose a novel representation that allows us to graphically characterize k-Markov equivalence between two causal graphs. We propose a sound constraint-based algorithm called the k-PC algorithm for learning this equivalence class. Finally, we conduct synthetic, and semi-synthetic experiments to demonstrate that the k-PC algorithm enables more robust causal discovery in the small sample regime compared to the baseline algorithms.
tl;dr: We provide optimal convergence rate in high probability for clipped gradient methods under heavy-tailed noise, closing the logarithmic suboptimality gap and addressing several open questions in this setting left by previous works.
In this work, we study the convergence in high probability of clipped gradient methods when the noise distribution has heavy tails, i.e., with bounded $p$th moments, for some $1<p\le2$. Prior works in this setting follow the same recipe of using concentration inequalities and an inductive argument with union bound to bound the iterates across all iterations. This method results in an increase in the failure probability by a factor of $T$, where $T$ is the number of iterations. We instead propose a new analysis approach based on bounding the moment generating function of a well chosen supermartingale sequence. We improve the dependency on $T$ in the convergence guarantee for a wide range of algorithms with clipped gradients, including stochastic (accelerated) mirror descent for convex objectives and stochastic gradient descent for nonconvex objectives. Our high probability bounds achieve the optimal convergence rates and match the best currently known in-expectation bounds. Our approach naturally allows the algorithms to use time-varying step sizes and clipping parameters when the time horizon is unknown, which appears difficult or even impossible using the techniques from prior works. Furthermore, we show that in the case of clipped stochastic mirror descent, several problem constants, including the initial distance to the optimum, are not required when setting step sizes and clipping parameters.
We study the performance of empirical risk minimization on the $p$-norm linear regression problem for $p \in (1, \infty)$. We show that, in the realizable case, under no moment assumptions, and up to a distribution-dependent constant, $O(d)$ samples are enough to exactly recover the target. Otherwise, for $p \in [2, \infty)$, and under weak moment assumptions on the target and the covariates, we prove a high probability excess risk bound on the empirical risk minimizer whose leading term matches, up to a constant that depends only on $p$, the asymptotically exact rate. We extend this result to the case $p \in (1, 2)$ under mild assumptions that guarantee the existence of the Hessian of the risk at its minimizer.
tl;dr: We introduce and attack the problem of predicting which sequences will be memorized by a LLM
Memorization, or the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to output entire sequences from their training data verbatim, is a key concern for deploying language models. In particular, it is vital to minimize a model's memorization of sensitive datapoints such as those containing personal identifiable information (PII). The prevalence of such undesirable memorization can pose issues for model trainers, and may even require discarding an otherwise functional model. We therefore seek to predict which sequences will be memorized before a large model's full train-time by extrapolating the memorization behavior of lower-compute trial runs. We measure memorization in the Pythia model suite and plot scaling laws for forecasting memorization, allowing us to provide equi-compute recommendations to maximize the reliability (recall) of such predictions. We additionally provide further novel discoveries on the distribution of memorization scores across models and data. We release all code and data necessary to reproduce the results in this paper at https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia.
Finding tight linear bounds for activation functions in neural networks
is an essential part of several state of the art neural network robustness
certification tools. An activation function is an arbitrary, nonlinear,
scalar function $f: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$. In the existing work
on robustness certification, such bounds have been computed using human
ingenuity for a handful of the most popular activation functions. While a
number of heuristics have been proposed for bounding arbitrary functions,
no analysis of the tightness optimality for general scalar functions has been
offered yet, to the best of our knowledge. We fill this gap by formulating a concise
optimality criterion for tightness of the approximation which allows us to
build optimal bounds for any function convex in the region of interest $R$. For
a more general class of functions Lipshitz-continuous in $R$ we propose a
sampling-based approach (SOL) which, given an instance of the bounding problem,
efficiently computes the tightest linear bounds within a given $\varepsilon > 0$
threshold. We leverage an adaptive sampling technique to iteratively build a set
of sample points suitable for representing the target activation function. While
the theoretical worst case time complexity of our approach is
$O(\varepsilon^{-2d})$,
it typically only takes $O(\log^{\beta} \frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ time for some $\beta \ge 1$ and is
thus
sufficiently fast in practice. We provide empirical evidence of SOL's practicality
by incorporating it into a robustness certifier and observing that it
produces similar or higher certification rates while taking as low as quarter of the time compared to the other methods.
1441. EMMA-X: An EM-like Multilingual Pre-training Algorithm for Cross-lingual Representation Learning
Expressing universal semantics common to all languages is helpful to understand the meanings of complex and culture-specific sentences. The research theme underlying this scenario focuses on learning universal representations across languages with the usage of massive parallel corpora. However, due to the sparsity and scarcity of parallel data, there is still a big challenge in learning authentic ``universals'' for any two languages. In this paper, we propose Emma-X: an EM-like Multilingual pre-training Algorithm, to learn Cross-lingual universals with the aid of excessive multilingual non-parallel data. Emma-X unifies the cross-lingual representation learning task and an extra semantic relation prediction task within an EM framework. Both the extra semantic classifier and the cross-lingual sentence encoder approximate the semantic relation of two sentences, and supervise each other until convergence. To evaluate Emma-X, we conduct experiments on xrete, a newly introduced benchmark containing 12 widely studied cross-lingual tasks that fully depend on sentence-level representations. Results reveal that Emma-X achieves state-of-the-art performance. Further geometric analysis of the built representation space with three requirements demonstrates the superiority of Emma-X over advanced models.
tl;dr: We develop a novel model-free offline policy optimization algorithm for fixed datasets without sufficient exploration.
We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration, especially under function approximation. To tackle this issue, we propose a bi-level structured policy optimization algorithm that models a hierarchical interaction between the policy (upper-level) and the value function (lower-level). The lower level focuses on constructing a confidence set of value estimates that maintain sufficiently small weighted average Bellman errors, while controlling uncertainty arising from distribution mismatch. Subsequently, at the upper level, the policy aims to maximize a conservative value estimate from the confidence set formed at the lower level. This novel formulation preserves the maximum flexibility of the implicitly induced exploratory data distribution, enabling the power of model extrapolation. In practice, it can be solved through a computationally efficient, penalized adversarial estimation procedure. Our theoretical regret guarantees do not rely on any data-coverage and completeness-type assumptions, only requiring realizability. These guarantees also demonstrate that the learned policy represents the ``best effort'' among all policies, as no other policies can outperform it. We evaluate our model using a blend of synthetic, benchmark, and real-world datasets for offline RL, showing that it performs competitively with state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: We provide certified unlearning algorithms for the minimax model with generalization rates and deletion capacity.
We study the problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-certified machine unlearning for minimax models. Most of the existing works focus on unlearning from standard statistical learning models that have a single variable and their unlearning steps hinge on the \emph{direct Hessian-based conventional Newton} update. We develop a new $(\epsilon,\delta)$-certified machine unlearning algorithm for minimax models. It proposes a minimax unlearning step consisting of a \emph{total-Hessian-based complete Newton} update and the Gaussian mechanism borrowed from differential privacy. To obtain the unlearning certification, our method injects calibrated Gaussian noises by carefully analyzing the ``sensitivity'' of the minimax unlearning step (i.e., the closeness between the minimax unlearning variables and the retraining-from-scratch variables). We derive the generalization rates in terms of population strong and weak primal-dual risk for three different cases of loss functions, i.e., (strongly-)convex-(strongly-)concave losses. We also provide the deletion capacity to guarantee that a desired population risk can be maintained as long as the number of deleted samples does not exceed the derived amount. With training samples $n$ and model dimension $d$, it yields the order $\mathcal O(n/d^{1/4})$, which shows a strict gap over the baseline method of differentially private minimax learning that has $\mathcal O(n/d^{1/2})$. In addition, our rates of generalization and deletion capacity match the state-of-the-art rates derived previously for standard statistical learning models.
tl;dr: We develop new kernel quadrature schemes based on the randomly pivoted Cholesky sampling algorithm
This paper presents new quadrature rules for functions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space using nodes drawn by a sampling algorithm known as randomly pivoted Cholesky. The resulting computational procedure compares favorably to previous kernel quadrature methods, which either achieve low accuracy or require solving a computationally challenging sampling problem. Theoretical and numerical results show that randomly pivoted Cholesky is fast and achieves comparable quadrature error rates to more computationally expensive quadrature schemes based on continuous volume sampling, thinning, and recombination. Randomly pivoted Cholesky is easily adapted to complicated geometries with arbitrary kernels, unlocking new potential for kernel quadrature.
tl;dr: Model-free off-policy evaluation in POMDPs without a curse of horizon
We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) for partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) with general function approximation. Existing methods such as sequential importance sampling estimators and fitted-Q evaluation suffer from the curse of horizon in POMDPs. To circumvent this problem, we develop a novel model-free OPE method by introducing future-dependent value functions that take future proxies as inputs. Future-dependent value functions play similar roles as classical value functions in fully-observable MDPs. We derive a new off-policy Bellman equation for future-dependent value functions as conditional moment equations that use history proxies as instrumental variables. We further propose a minimax learning method to learn future-dependent value functions using the new Bellman equation. We obtain the PAC result, which implies our OPE estimator is close to the true policy value as long as futures and histories contain sufficient information about latent states, and the Bellman completeness. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiueola/neurips2023-future-dependent-ope
tl;dr: We develop estimators for identifying causal effects by combining multiple observational and experimental samples.
Learning cause and effect relations is arguably one of the central challenges found throughout the data sciences.
Formally, determining whether a collection of observational and interventional distributions can be combined to learn a target causal relation is known as the problem of generalized identification (or g-identification) [Lee et al., 2019].
Although g-identification has been well understood and solved in theory, it turns out to be challenging to apply these results in practice, in particular when considering the estimation of the target distribution from finite samples.
In this paper, we develop a new, general estimator that exhibits multiply robustness properties for g-identifiable causal functionals.
Specifically, we show that any g-identifiable causal effect can be expressed as a function of generalized multi-outcome sequential back-door adjustments that are amenable to estimation.
We then construct a corresponding estimator for the g-identification expression that exhibits robustness properties to bias. We analyze the asymptotic convergence properties of the estimator. Finally, we illustrate the use of the proposed estimator in experimental studies. Simulation results corroborate the theory.
tl;dr: We study the dynamic regret of adversarial linear mixture MDPs with full-information rewards and the unknown transition kernel.
We study reinforcement learning in episodic inhomogeneous MDPs with adversarial full-information rewards and the unknown transition kernel. We consider the linear mixture MDPs whose transition kernel is a linear mixture model and choose the \emph{dynamic regret} as the performance measure. Denote by $d$ the dimension of the feature mapping, $H$ the horizon, $K$ the number of episodes, $P_T$ the non-stationary measure, we propose a novel algorithm that enjoys an $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(\sqrt{d^2 H^3K} + \sqrt{H^4(K+P_T)(1+P_T)}\big)$ dynamic regret under the condition that $P_T$ is known, which improves previously best-known dynamic regret for adversarial linear mixture MDP and adversarial tabular MDPs. We also establish an $\Omega\big(\sqrt{d^2 H^3 K} + \sqrt{H K (H+P_T)}\big)$ lower bound, indicating our algorithm is \emph{optimal} in $K$ and $P_T$. Furthermore, when the non-stationary measure $P_T$ is unknown, we design an online ensemble algorithm with a meta-base structure, which is proved to achieve an $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\big(\sqrt{d^2 H^3K} + \sqrt{H^4(K+P_T)(1+P_T) + H^2 S_T^2}\big)$ dynamic regret and here $S_T$ is the expected switching number of the best base-learner. The result can be optimal under certain regimes.
tl;dr: This paper presents a framework that unifies existing gradient clipping techniques and improves upon them.
A well-known numerical bottleneck in the differentially-private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) algorithm is the computation of the gradient norm for each example in a large input batch. When the loss function in DP-SGD is consists of an intermediate linear operation, existing methods in the literature have proposed decompositions of gradients that are amenable to fast norm computations. In this paper, we present a framework that generalizes the above approach to arbitrary (possibly nonlinear) intermediate operations. Moreover, we show that for certain operations, such as fully-connected and embedding layer computations, further improvements to the runtime and storage costs of existing decompositions can be deduced using certain components of our framework. Finally, preliminary numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the substantial effects of the aforementioned improvements.
tl;dr: State-space models with layer-wise nonlinearity are universal approximators
State-space models have gained popularity in sequence modelling due to their simple and efficient network structures. However, the absence of nonlinear activation along the temporal direction limits the model's capacity. In this paper, we prove that stacking state-space models with layer-wise nonlinear activation is sufficient to approximate any continuous sequence-to-sequence relationship. Our findings demonstrate that the addition of layer-wise nonlinear activation enhances the model's capacity to learn complex sequence patterns. Meanwhile, it can be seen both theoretically and empirically that the state-space models do not fundamentally resolve the issue of exponential decaying memory. Theoretical results are justified by numerical verifications.
tl;dr: We propose a Koopman-based model for time series forecasting and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance with remarkable efficiency.
Real-world time series are characterized by intrinsic non-stationarity that poses a principal challenge for deep forecasting models. While previous models suffer from complicated series variations induced by changing temporal distribution, we tackle non-stationary time series with modern Koopman theory that fundamentally considers the underlying time-variant dynamics. Inspired by Koopman theory of portraying complex dynamical systems, we disentangle time-variant and time-invariant components from intricate non-stationary series by Fourier Filter and design Koopman Predictor to advance respective dynamics forward. Technically, we propose Koopa as a novel Koopman forecaster composed of stackable blocks that learn hierarchical dynamics. Koopa seeks measurement functions for Koopman embedding and utilizes Koopman operators as linear portraits of implicit transition. To cope with time-variant dynamics that exhibits strong locality, Koopa calculates context-aware operators in the temporal neighborhood and is able to utilize incoming ground truth to scale up forecast horizon. Besides, by integrating Koopman Predictors into deep residual structure, we ravel out the binding reconstruction loss in previous Koopman forecasters and achieve end-to-end forecasting objective optimization. Compared with the state-of-the-art model, Koopa achieves competitive performance while saving 77.3% training time and 76.0% memory.
tl;dr: Sequential nonparametric two-sample and independence testing by betting
We study the problems of sequential nonparametric two-sample and independence testing. Sequential tests process data online and allow using observed data to decide whether to stop and reject the null hypothesis or to collect more data, while maintaining type I error control. We build upon the principle of (nonparametric) testing by betting, where a gambler places bets on future observations and their wealth measures evidence against the null hypothesis. While recently developed kernel-based betting strategies often work well on simple distributions, selecting a suitable kernel for high-dimensional or structured data, such as images, is often nontrivial. To address this drawback, we design prediction-based betting strategies that rely on the following fact: if a sequentially updated predictor starts to consistently determine (a) which distribution an instance is drawn from, or (b) whether an instance is drawn from the joint distribution or the product of the marginal distributions (the latter produced by external randomization), it provides evidence against the two-sample or independence nulls respectively. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of our tests over kernel-based approaches under structured settings. Our tests can be applied beyond the case of independent and identically distributed data, remaining valid and powerful even when the data distribution drifts over time.
tl;dr: We demonstrate that by optimizing the standard components of deep learning pipelines, we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on imbalanced datasets, eliminating the need for specialized loss functions or samplers.
Real-world datasets are often highly class-imbalanced, which can adversely impact the performance of deep learning models. The majority of research on training neural networks under class imbalance has focused on specialized loss functions and sampling techniques. Notably, we demonstrate that simply tuning existing components of standard deep learning pipelines, such as the batch size, data augmentation, architecture size, pre-training, optimizer, and label smoothing, can achieve state-of-the-art performance without any specialized loss functions or samplers. We also provide key prescriptions and considerations for training under class imbalance, and an understanding of why imbalance methods succeed or fail.
tl;dr: V&L models can summarize spurious features in your data with language, which can be used to augment your training data
Many fine-grained classification tasks, like rare animal identification, have limited training data and consequently classifiers trained on these datasets often fail to generalize to variations in the domain like changes in weather or location. As such, we explore how natural language descriptions of the domains seen in training data can be used with large vision models trained on diverse pretraining datasets to generate useful variations of the training data. We introduce ALIA (Automated Language-guided Image Augmentation), a method which utilizes large vision and language models to automatically generate natural language descriptions of a dataset's domains and augment the training data via language-guided image editing. To maintain data integrity, a model trained on the original dataset filters out minimal image edits and those which corrupt class-relevant information. The resulting dataset is visually consistent with the original training data and offers significantly enhanced diversity. We show that ALIA is able to surpasses traditional data augmentation and text-to-image generated data on fine-grained classification tasks, including cases of domain generalization and contextual bias. Code is available at https://github.com/lisadunlap/ALIA.
tl;dr: We motivate counterfactual fairness via out-of-distribution accuracy and develop a correspondence between counterfactual fairness and group fairness metrics.
Counterfactual fairness requires that a person would have been classified in the same way by an AI or other algorithmic system if they had a different protected class, such as a different race or gender. This is an intuitive standard, as reflected in the U.S. legal system, but its use is limited because counterfactuals cannot be directly observed in real-world data. On the other hand, group fairness metrics (e.g., demographic parity or equalized odds) are less intuitive but more readily observed. In this paper, we use \textit{causal context} to bridge the gaps between counterfactual fairness, robust prediction, and group fairness. First, we motivate counterfactual fairness by showing that there is not necessarily a fundamental trade-off between fairness and accuracy because, under plausible conditions, the counterfactually fair predictor is in fact accuracy-optimal in an unbiased target distribution. Second, we develop a correspondence between the causal graph of the data-generating process and which, if any, group fairness metrics are equivalent to counterfactual fairness. Third, we show that in three common fairness contexts—measurement error, selection on label, and selection on predictors—counterfactual fairness is equivalent to demographic parity, equalized odds, and calibration, respectively. Counterfactual fairness can sometimes be tested by measuring relatively simple group fairness metrics.
tl;dr: We learn a single hypernetwork model capable of characterizing the accuracy-efficiency for different resizing factors
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the predominant model used for a variety of medical image analysis tasks. At inference time, these models are computationally intensive, especially with volumetric data.In principle, it is possible to trade accuracy for computational efficiency by manipulating the rescaling factor in the downsample and upsample layers of CNN architectures.However, properly exploring the accuracy-efficiency trade-off is prohibitively expensive with existing models.To address this, we introduce Scale-Space HyperNetworks (SSHN), a method that learns a spectrum of CNNs with varying internal rescaling factors.A single SSHN characterizes an entire Pareto accuracy-efficiency curve of models that match, and occasionally surpass, the outcomes of training many separate networks with fixed rescaling factors.We demonstrate the proposed approach in several medical image analysis applications, comparing SSHN against strategies with both fixed and dynamic rescaling factors.We find that SSHN consistently provides a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off at a fraction of the training cost. Trained SSHNs enable the user to quickly choose a rescaling factor that appropriately balances accuracy and computational efficiency for their particular needs at inference.
The recent popularity of text-to-image diffusion models (DM) can largely be attributed to the intuitive interface they provide to users. The intended generation can be expressed in natural language, with the model producing faithful interpretations of text prompts. However, expressing complex or nuanced ideas in text alone can be difficult. To ease image generation, we propose MultiFusion that allows one to express complex and nuanced concepts with arbitrarily interleaved inputs of multiple modalities and languages. MultiFusion leverages pre-trained models and aligns them for integration into a cohesive system, thereby avoiding the need for extensive training from scratch. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficient transfer of capabilities from individual modules to the downstream model. Specifically, the fusion of all independent components allows the image generation module to utilize multilingual, interleaved multimodal inputs despite being trained solely on monomodal data in a single language.
tl;dr: We study emergent communication in the cognition-oriented environment (i.e., RPM-based Reasoning Game) and show the emerged language's generalization and transfer ability.
Research on emergent communication between deep-learning-based agents has received extensive attention due to its inspiration for linguistics and artificial intelligence.
However, previous attempts have hovered around emerging communication under perception-oriented environmental settings,
that forces agents to describe low-level perceptual features intra image or symbol contexts.
In this work, inspired by the classic human reasoning test (namely Raven's Progressive Matrix), we propose the Reasoning Game, a cognition-oriented environment that encourages agents to reason and communicate high-level rules, rather than perceived low-level contexts.
Moreover, we propose 1) an unbiased dataset (namely rule-RAVEN) as a benchmark to avoid overfitting, 2) and a two-stage curriculum agent training method as a baseline for more stable convergence in the Reasoning Game,
where contexts and semantics are bilaterally drifting.
Experimental results show that, in the Reasoning Game, a semantically stable and compositional language emerges to solve reasoning problems.
The emerged language helps agents apply the extracted rules to the generalization of unseen context attributes, and to the transfer between different context attributes or even tasks.
tl;dr: We study the strategic classification problem when the agents' manipulations are personalized and unknown.
We study the fundamental mistake bound and sample complexity in the strategic classification, where agents can strategically manipulate their feature vector up to an extent in order to be predicted as positive. For example, given a classifier determining college admission, student candidates may try to take easier classes to improve their GPA, retake SAT and change schools in an effort to fool the classifier. *Ball manipulations* are a widely studied class of manipulations in the literature, where agents can modify their feature vector within a bounded radius ball. Unlike most prior work, our work consider manipulations to be *personalized*, meaning that agents can have different levels of manipulation abilities (e.g., varying radii for ball manipulations), and *unknown* to the learner.
We formalize the learning problem in an interaction model where the learner first deploys a classifier and the agent manipulates the feature vector within their manipulation set to game the deployed classifier. We investigate various scenarios in terms of the information available to the learner during the interaction, such as observing the original feature vector before or after deployment, observing the manipulated feature vector, or not seeing either the original or the manipulated feature vector. We begin by providing online mistake bounds and PAC sample complexity in these scenarios for ball manipulations. We also explore non-ball manipulations and show that, even in the simplest scenario where both the original and the manipulated feature vectors are revealed, the mistake bounds and sample complexity are lower bounded by $\Omega(|\mathcal H|)$ when the target function belongs to a known class $\mathcal H$.
Pandora’s Box is a central problem in decision making under uncertainty that can model various real life scenarios. In this problem we are given n boxes, each with a fixed opening cost, and an unknown value drawn from a known distribution, only revealed if we pay the opening cost. Our goal is to find a strategy for opening boxes to minimize the sum of the value selected and the opening cost paid.
In this work we revisit Pandora’s Box when the value distributions are correlated, first studied in [CGT+20]. We show that the optimal algorithm for the independent case, given by Weitzman’s rule, directly works for the correlated case. In fact, our algorithm results in significantly improved approximation guarantees compared to the previous work, while also being substantially simpler. We also show how to implement the rule given only sample access to the correlated distribution of values. Specifically, we find that a number of samples that is polynomial in the number of boxes is sufficient for the algorithm to work.
Vision-and-Language Navigation requires the agent to follow language instructions to navigate through 3D environments. One main challenge in Vision-and-Language Navigation is the limited availability of photorealistic training environments, which makes it hard to generalize to new and unseen environments. To address this problem, we propose PanoGen, a generation method that can potentially create an infinite number of diverse panoramic environments conditioned on text. Specifically, we collect room descriptions by captioning the room images in existing Matterport3D environments, and leverage a state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion model to generate the new panoramic environments. We use recursive outpainting over the generated images to create consistent 360-degree panorama views. Our new panoramic environments share similar semantic information with the original environments by conditioning on text descriptions, which ensures the co-occurrence of objects in the panorama follows human intuition, and creates enough diversity in room appearance and layout with image outpainting. Lastly, we explore two ways of utilizing PanoGen in VLN pre-training and fine-tuning. We generate instructions for paths in our PanoGen environments with a speaker built on a pre-trained vision-and-language model for VLN pre-training, and augment the visual observation with our panoramic environments during agents' fine-tuning to avoid overfitting to seen environments. Empirically, learning with our PanoGen environments achieves the new state-of-the-art on the Room-to-Room, Room-for-Room, and CVDN datasets. Besides, we find that pre-training with our PanoGen speaker data is especially effective for CVDN, which has under-specified instructions and needs commonsense knowledge to reach the target. Lastly, we show that the agent can benefit from training with more generated panoramic environments, suggesting promising results for scaling up the PanoGen environments to enhance agents' generalization to unseen environments.
tl;dr: We develop an approach which optimally explores unknown nonlinear dynamical systems with the goal of learning a good controller.
Learning to control unknown nonlinear dynamical systems is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control theory. A commonly applied approach is to first explore the environment (exploration), learn an accurate model of it (system identification), and then compute an optimal controller with the minimum cost on this estimated system (policy optimization). While existing work has shown that it is possible to learn a uniformly good model of the system (Mania et al., 2020), in practice, if we aim to learn a good controller with a low cost on the actual system, certain system parameters may be significantly more critical than others, and we therefore ought to focus our exploration on learning such parameters.
In this work, we consider the setting of nonlinear dynamical systems and seek to formally quantify, in such settings, (a) which parameters are most relevant to learning a good controller, and (b) how we can best explore so as to minimize uncertainty in such parameters. Inspired by recent work in linear systems (Wagenmaker et al., 2021), we show that minimizing the controller loss in nonlinear systems translates to estimating the system parameters in a particular, task-dependent metric. Motivated by this, we develop an algorithm able to efficiently explore the system to reduce uncertainty in this metric, and prove a lower bound showing that our approach learns a controller at a near-instance-optimal rate. Our algorithm relies on a general reduction from policy optimization to optimal experiment design in arbitrary systems, and may be of independent interest. We conclude with experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in realistic nonlinear robotic systems.
tl;dr: The work analyses and solves the problem adversarial effects and lack of diversity by a simple progressive guidance
This paper tackles two critical challenges encountered in classifier guidance for diffusion generative models, i.e., the lack of diversity and the presence of adversarial effects. These issues often result in a scarcity of diverse samples or the generation of non-robust features. The underlying cause lies in the mechanism of classifier guidance, where discriminative gradients push samples to be recognized as conditions aggressively. This inadvertently suppresses information with common features among relevant classes, resulting in a limited pool of features with less diversity or the absence of robust features for image construction. We propose a generalized classifier guidance method called Progressive Guidance, which mitigates the problems by allowing relevant classes' gradients to contribute to shared information construction when the image is noisy in early sampling steps. In the later sampling stage, we progressively enhance gradients to refine the details in the image toward the primary condition. This helps to attain a high level of diversity and robustness compared to the vanilla classifier guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method further improves the image quality while offering a significant level of diversity as well as robust features.
For partially observable environments, imitation learning with observation histories (ILOH) assumes that control-relevant information is sufficiently captured in the observation histories for imitating the expert actions. In the offline setting wherethe agent is required to learn to imitate without interaction with the environment, behavior cloning (BC) has been shown to be a simple yet effective method for imitation learning. However, when the information about the actions executed in the past timesteps leaks into the observation histories, ILOH via BC often ends up imitating its own past actions. In this paper, we address this catastrophic failure by proposing a principled regularization for BC, which we name Past Action Leakage Regularization (PALR). The main idea behind our approach is to leverage the classical notion of conditional independence to mitigate the leakage. We compare different instances of our framework with natural choices of conditional independence metric and its estimator. The result of our comparison advocates the use of a particular kernel-based estimator for the conditional independence metric. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on benchmark datasets in order to assess the effectiveness of our regularization method. The experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms prior related approaches, highlighting its potential to successfully imitate expert actions when the past action information leaks into the observation histories.
Explanation methods for machine learning models tend not to provide any formal guarantees and may not reflect the underlying decision-making process.
In this work, we analyze stability as a property for reliable feature attribution methods.
We prove that relaxed variants of stability are guaranteed if the model is sufficiently Lipschitz with respect to the masking of features.
We develop a smoothing method called Multiplicative Smoothing (MuS) to achieve such a model.
We show that MuS overcomes the theoretical limitations of standard smoothing techniques and can be integrated with any classifier and feature attribution method.
We evaluate MuS on vision and language models with various feature attribution methods, such as LIME and SHAP, and demonstrate that MuS endows feature attributions with non-trivial stability guarantees.
tl;dr: The recently introduced Tempered Exponential Measures allow to generalise AdaBoost "above" its classical entropic optimisation framework -- while keeping exponential convergence
One of the most popular ML algorithms, AdaBoost, can be
derived from the dual of a relative entropy
minimization problem subject to the fact that the positive weights
on the examples sum to one. Essentially, harder examples receive higher probabilities. We generalize this setup to the recently introduced *tempered
exponential measure*s (TEMs) where normalization is enforced on a specific power of the measure and not the measure itself.
TEMs are indexed by a parameter $t$ and generalize exponential families ($t=1$). Our algorithm, $t$-AdaBoost, recovers AdaBoost as a special case ($t=1$). We show that $t$-AdaBoost retains AdaBoost's celebrated exponential convergence rate when $t\in [0,1)$ while allowing a slight improvement of the rate's hidden constant compared to $t=1$. $t$-AdaBoost partially computes on a generalization of classical arithmetic over the reals and brings notable properties like guaranteed bounded leveraging coefficients for $t\in [0,1)$. From the loss that $t$-AdaBoost minimizes (a generalization of the exponential loss), we show how to derive a new family of *tempered* losses for the induction of domain-partitioning classifiers like decision trees. Crucially, strict properness is ensured for all while their boosting rates span the full known spectrum. Experiments using $t$-AdaBoost+trees display that significant leverage can be achieved by tuning $t$.
tl;dr: We suggest wrapping the environment with a world model, thereby enabling a reinforcement learning agent to interact with the world model in this augmented environment and autonomously learn to plan.
We propose the Thinker algorithm, a novel approach that enables reinforcement learning agents to autonomously interact with and utilize a learned world model. The Thinker algorithm wraps the environment with a world model and introduces new actions designed for interacting with the world model. These model-interaction actions enable agents to perform planning by proposing alternative plans to the world model before selecting a final action to execute in the environment. This approach eliminates the need for handcrafted planning algorithms by enabling the agent to learn how to plan autonomously and allows for easy interpretation of the agent's plan with visualization. We demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness through experimental results in the game of Sokoban and the Atari 2600 benchmark, where the Thinker algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance and competitive results, respectively. Visualizations of agents trained with the Thinker algorithm demonstrate that they have learned to plan effectively with the world model to select better actions. Thinker is the first work showing that an RL agent can learn to plan with a learned world model in complex environments.
tl;dr: We generalise Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature to modern deep neural network architectures like transformers, graph, and convolutional neural networks.
The core components of many modern neural network architectures, such as transformers, convolutional, or graph neural networks, can be expressed as linear layers with *weight-sharing*. Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC), a second-order optimisation method, has shown promise to speed up neural network training and thereby reduce computational costs. However, there is currently no framework to apply it to generic architectures, specifically ones with linear weight-sharing layers. In this work, we identify two different settings of linear weight-sharing layers which motivate two flavours of K-FAC -- *expand* and *reduce*. We show that they are exact for deep linear networks with weight-sharing in their respective setting. Notably, K-FAC-reduce is generally faster than K-FAC-expand, which we leverage to speed up automatic hyperparameter selection via optimising the marginal likelihood for a Wide ResNet. Finally, we observe little difference between these two K-FAC variations when using them to train both a graph neural network and a vision transformer. However, both variations are able to reach a fixed validation metric target in $50$-$75$\% of the number of steps of a first-order reference run, which translates into a comparable improvement in wall-clock time. This highlights the potential of applying K-FAC to modern neural network architectures.
1468. ScaleLong: Towards More Stable Training of Diffusion Model via Scaling Network Long Skip Connection
In diffusion models, UNet is the most popular network backbone, since its long skip connects (LSCs) to connect distant network blocks can aggregate long-distant information and alleviate vanishing gradient. Unfortunately, UNet often suffers from unstable training in diffusion models which can be alleviated by scaling its LSC coefficients smaller. However, theoretical understandings of the instability of UNet in diffusion models and also the performance improvement of LSC scaling remain absent yet. To solve this issue, we theoretically show that the coefficients of LSCs in UNet have big effects on the stableness of the forward and backward propagation and robustness of UNet. Specifically, the hidden feature and gradient of UNet at any layer can oscillate and their oscillation ranges are actually large which explains the instability of UNet training. Moreover, UNet is also provably sensitive to perturbed input, and predicts an output distant from the desired output, yielding oscillatory loss and thus oscillatory gradient. Besides, we also observe the theoretical benefits of the LSC coefficient scaling of UNet in the stableness of hidden features and gradient and also robustness. Finally, inspired by our theory, we propose an effective coefficient scaling framework ScaleLong that scales the coefficients of LSC in UNet and better improve the training stability of UNet. Experimental results on CIFAR10, CelebA, ImageNet and COCO show that our methods are superior to stabilize training, and yield about 1.5x training acceleration on different diffusion models with UNet or UViT backbones.
We develop a versatile new methodology for multidimensional mechanism design that incorporates side information about agent types to generate high social welfare and high revenue simultaneously. Prominent sources of side information in practice include predictions from a machine-learning model trained on historical agent data, advice from domain experts, and even the mechanism designer's own gut instinct. In this paper we adopt a prior-free perspective that makes no assumptions on the correctness, accuracy, or source of the side information. First, we design a meta-mechanism that integrates input side information with an improvement of the classical VCG mechanism. The welfare, revenue, and incentive properties of our meta-mechanism are characterized by novel constructions we introduce based on the notion of a weakest competitor, which is an agent that has the smallest impact on welfare. We show that our meta-mechanism, when carefully instantiated, simultaneously achieves strong welfare and revenue guarantees parameterized by errors in the side information. When the side information is highly informative and accurate, our mechanism achieves welfare and revenue competitive with the total social surplus, and its performance decays continuously and gradually as the quality of the side information decreases. Finally, we apply our meta-mechanism to a setting where each agent's type is determined by a constant number of parameters. Specifically, agent types lie on constant-dimensional subspaces (of the potentially high-dimensional ambient type space) that are known to the mechanism designer. We use our meta-mechanism to obtain the first known welfare and revenue guarantees in this setting.
tl;dr: We provide the first formal guarantees for meta-learning with adversarial bandit feedback.
We study online meta-learning with bandit feedback, with the goal of improving performance across multiple tasks if they are similar according to some natural similarity measure.
As the first to target the adversarial online-within-online partial-information setting, we design meta-algorithms that combine outer learners to simultaneously tune the initialization and other hyperparameters of an inner learner for two important cases:
multi-armed bandits (MAB) and bandit linear optimization (BLO).
For MAB, the meta-learners initialize and set hyperparameters of the Tsallis-entropy generalization of Exp3, with the task-averaged regret improving if the entropy of the optima-in-hindsight is small.
For BLO, we learn to initialize and tune online mirror descent (OMD) with self-concordant barrier regularizers, showing that task-averaged regret varies directly with an action space-dependent measure they induce.
Our guarantees rely on proving that unregularized follow-the-leader combined with two levels of low-dimensional hyperparameter tuning is enough to learn a sequence of affine functions of non-Lipschitz and sometimes non-convex Bregman divergences bounding the regret of OMD.
tl;dr: We study the average reward restless bandits, and propose the first asymptotically optimal policy that does not make the uniform global attractor assumption.
We study the infinite-horizon Restless Bandit problem with the average reward criterion, under both discrete-time and continuous-time settings.
A fundamental goal is to design computationally efficient policies that achieve a diminishing optimality gap as the number of arms, $N$, grows large.
Existing results on asymptotic optimality all rely on the uniform global attractor property (UGAP), a complex and challenging-to-verify assumption.
In this paper, we propose a general, simulation-based framework, Follow-the-Virtual-Advice, that converts any single-armed policy into a policy for the original $N$-armed problem.
This is done by simulating the single-armed policy on each arm and carefully steering the real state towards the simulated state.
Our framework can be instantiated to produce a policy with an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap.
In the discrete-time setting, our result holds under a simpler synchronization assumption, which covers some problem instances that violate UGAP.
More notably, in the continuous-time setting, we do not require \emph{any} additional assumptions beyond the standard unichain condition.
In both settings, our work is the first asymptotic optimality result that does not require UGAP.
tl;dr: We propose G2MILP, the first deep generative framework for mixed-integer linear program (MILP) instances, thus enhancing MILP solvers under limited data availability.
In the past few years, there has been an explosive surge in the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to address combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, especially mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs). Despite the achievements, the limited availability of real-world instances often leads to sub-optimal decisions and biased solver assessments, which motivates a suite of synthetic MILP instance generation techniques. However, existing methods either rely heavily on expert-designed formulations or struggle to capture the rich features of real-world instances. To tackle this problem, we propose G2MILP, *the first* deep generative framework for MILP instances. Specifically, G2MILP represents MILP instances as bipartite graphs, and applies a masked variational autoencoder to iteratively corrupt and replace parts of the original graphs to generate new ones. The appealing feature of G2MILP is that it can learn to generate novel and realistic MILP instances without prior expert-designed formulations, while preserving the structures and computational hardness of real-world datasets, simultaneously. Thus the generated instances can facilitate downstream tasks for enhancing MILP solvers under limited data availability. We design a suite of benchmarks to evaluate the quality of the generated MILP instances. Experiments demonstrate that our method can produce instances that closely resemble real-world datasets in terms of both structures and computational hardness. The deliverables are released at [https://miralab-ustc.github.io/L2O-G2MILP](https://miralab-ustc.github.io/L2O-G2MILP).
tl;dr: We propose an efficient and generalizable non-adaptive subset selection method to quickly select subsets for a set of architectures.
Existing subset selection methods for efficient learning predominantly employ discrete combinatorial and model-specific approaches, which lack generalizability--- for each new model, the algorithm has to be executed from the beginning. Therefore, for an unseen architecture, one cannot use the subset chosen for a different model. In this work, we propose $\texttt{SubSelNet}$, a non-adaptive subset selection framework, which tackles these problems. Here, we first introduce an attention-based neural gadget that leverages the graph structure of architectures and acts as a surrogate to trained deep neural networks for quick model prediction. Then, we use these predictions to build subset samplers. This naturally provides us two variants of $\texttt{SubSelNet}$. The first variant is transductive (called Transductive-$\texttt{SubSelNet}$), which computes the subset separately for each model by solving a small optimization problem. Such an optimization is still super fast, thanks to the replacement of explicit model training by the model approximator. The second variant is inductive (called Inductive-$\texttt{SubSelNet}$), which computes the subset using a trained subset selector, without any optimization.
Our experiments show that our model outperforms several methods across several real datasets.
We present a discretization-free scalable framework for solving a large class of mass-conserving partial differential equations (PDEs), including the time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation and the Wasserstein gradient flow. The main observation is that the time-varying velocity field of the PDE solution needs to be self-consistent: it must satisfy a fixed-point equation involving the probability flow characterized by the same velocity field. Instead of directly minimizing the residual of the fixed-point equation with neural parameterization, we use an iterative formulation with a biased gradient estimator that bypasses significant computational obstacles with strong empirical performance. Compared to existing approaches, our method does not suffer from temporal or spatial discretization, covers a wider range of PDEs, and scales to high dimensions. Experimentally, our method recovers analytical solutions accurately when they are available and achieves superior performance in high dimensions with less training time compared to alternatives.
tl;dr: We propose a pretraining-based model to conduct patient-independent seizure detection on SEEG in the clinical scenario.
Automated seizure detection is of great importance to epilepsy diagnosis and treatment. An emerging method used in seizure detection, stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG), can provide detailed and stereoscopic brainwave information. However, modeling SEEG in clinical scenarios will face challenges like huge domain shift between different patients and dramatic pattern evolution among different brain areas. In this study, we propose a Pretraining-based model for Patient-independent seizure detection (PPi) to address these challenges. Firstly, we design two novel self-supervised tasks which can extract rich information from abundant SEEG data while preserving the unique characteristics between brain signals recorded from different brain areas. Then two techniques channel background subtraction and brain region enhancement are proposed to effectively tackle the domain shift problem. Extensive experiments show that PPi outperforms the SOTA baselines on two public datasets and a real-world clinical dataset collected by ourselves, which demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of PPi. Finally, visualization analysis illustrates the rationality of the two domain generalization techniques.
Federated zeroth-order optimization (FedZO) algorithm enjoys the advantages of both zeroth-order optimization and federated learning, and has shown exceptional performance on black-box attack and softmax regression tasks. However, there is no generalization analysis for FedZO, and its analysis on computing convergence rate is slower than the corresponding first-order optimization setting. This paper aims to establish systematic theoretical assessments of FedZO by developing the analysis technique of on-average model stability. We establish the first generalization error bound of FedZO under the Lipschitz continuity and smoothness conditions. Then, refined generalization and optimization bounds are provided by replacing bounded gradient with heavy-tailed gradient noise and utilizing the second-order Taylor expansion for gradient approximation. With the help of a new error decomposition strategy, our theoretical analysis is also extended to the asynchronous case. For FedZO, our fine-grained analysis fills the theoretical gap on the generalization guarantees and polishes the convergence characterization of the computing algorithm.
tl;dr: We carefully define the continual reinforcement learning problem.
In a standard view of the reinforcement learning problem, an agent’s goal is to efficiently identify a policy that maximizes long-term reward. However, this perspective is based on a restricted view of learning as finding a solution, rather than treating learning as endless adaptation. In contrast, continual reinforcement learning refers to the setting in which the best agents never stop learning. Despite the importance of continual reinforcement learning, the community lacks a simple definition of the problem that highlights its commitments and makes its primary concepts precise and clear. To this end, this paper is dedicated to carefully defining the continual reinforcement learning problem. We formalize the notion of agents that “never stop learning” through a new mathematical language for analyzing and cataloging agents. Using this new language, we define a continual learning agent as one that can be understood as carrying out an implicit search process indefinitely, and continual reinforcement learning as the setting in which the best agents are all continual learning agents. We provide two motivating examples, illustrating that traditional views of multi-task reinforcement learning and continual supervised learning are special cases of our definition. Collectively, these definitions and perspectives formalize many intuitive concepts at the heart of learning, and open new research pathways surrounding continual learning agents.
Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is a crucial ability in applications spanning various computer vision and robotic tasks. While significant progress has been made in object-level Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS), i.e., segmenting objects with arbitrary text, the corresponding part-level research poses additional challenges. Firstly, part segmentation inherently involves intricate boundaries, while limited annotated data compounds the challenge. Secondly, part segmentation introduces an open granularity challenge due to the diverse and often ambiguous definitions of parts in the open world. Furthermore, the large-scale vision and language models, which play a key role in the open vocabulary setting, struggle to recognize parts as effectively as objects. To comprehensively investigate and tackle these challenges, we propose an Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (OV-PARTS) benchmark. OV-PARTS includes refined versions of two publicly available datasets: Pascal-Part-116 and ADE20K-Part-234. And it covers three specific tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Part Segmentation, Cross-Dataset Part Segmentation, and Few-Shot Part Segmentation, providing insights into analogical reasoning, open granularity and few-shot adapting abilities of models. Moreover, we analyze and adapt two prevailing paradigms of existing object-level OVSS methods for OV-PARTS. Extensive experimental analysis is conducted to inspire future research in leveraging foundational models for OV-PARTS. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/kellyiss/OV_PARTS.
tl;dr: This paper explores when unbiased compression can reduce the total communication cost and how much it can do so
Communication compression is a common technique in distributed optimization that can alleviate communication overhead by transmitting compressed gradients and model parameters. However, compression can introduce information distortion, which slows down convergence and incurs more communication rounds to achieve desired solutions. Given the trade-off between lower per-round communication costs and additional rounds of communication, it is unclear whether communication compression reduces the total communication cost.
This paper explores the conditions under which unbiased compression, a widely used form of compression, can reduce the total communication cost, as well as the extent to which it can do so. To this end, we present the first theoretical formulation for characterizing the total communication cost in distributed optimization with communication compression. We demonstrate that unbiased compression alone does not necessarily save the total communication cost, but this outcome can be achieved if the compressors used by all workers are further assumed independent. We establish lower bounds on the communication rounds required by algorithms using independent unbiased compressors to minimize smooth convex functions, and show that these lower bounds are tight by refining the analysis for ADIANA. Our results reveal that using independent unbiased compression can reduce the total communication cost by a factor of up to $\Theta(\\sqrt{\\min\\{n, \\kappa\\}})$, where $n$ is the number of workers and $\\kappa$ is the condition number of the functions being minimized. These theoretical findings are supported by experimental results.
Explainable recommendation has attracted much attention from the industry and academic communities. It has shown great potential to improve the recommendation persuasiveness, informativeness and user satisfaction. In the past few years, while a lot of promising explainable recommender models have been proposed, the datasets used to evaluate them still suffer from several limitations, for example, the explanation ground truths are not labeled by the real users, the explanations are mostly single-modal and around only one aspect. To bridge these gaps, in this paper, we build a new explainable recommendation dataset, which, to our knowledge, is the first contribution that provides a large amount of real user labeled multi-modal and multi-aspect explaination ground truths. In specific, we firstly develop a video recommendation platform, where a series of questions around the recommendation explainability are carefully designed. Then, we recruit about 3000 high-quality labelers with different backgrounds to use the system, and collect their behaviors and feedback to our questions. In this paper, we detail the construction process of our dataset and also provide extensive analysis on its characteristics. In addition, we develop a library, where ten well-known explainable recommender models are implemented in a unified framework. Based on this library, we build several benchmarks for different explainable recommendation tasks. At last, we present many new opportunities brought by our dataset, which are expected to promote the field of explainable recommendation. Our dataset, library and the related documents have been released at https://reasoner2023.github.io/.
1481. OpenIllumination: A Multi-Illumination Dataset for Inverse Rendering Evaluation on Real Objects
tl;dr: A multi-illumination multiview dataset for inverse rendering evaluation on real objects
We introduce OpenIllumination, a real-world dataset containing over 108K images of 64 objects with diverse materials, captured under 72 camera views and a large number of different illuminations. For each image in the dataset, we provide accurate camera parameters, illumination ground truth, and foreground segmentation masks. Our dataset enables the quantitative evaluation of most inverse rendering and material decomposition methods for real objects. We examine several state-of-the-art inverse rendering methods on our dataset and compare their performances. The dataset and code can be found on the project page: https://oppo-us-research.github.io/OpenIllumination.
Deep learning methods have gained popularity in high energy physics for fast modeling of particle showers in detectors. Detailed simulation frameworks such as the gold standard \textsc{Geant4} are computationally intensive, and current deep generative architectures work on discretized, lower resolution versions of the detailed simulation. The development of models that work at higher spatial resolutions is currently hindered by the complexity of the full simulation data, and by the lack of simpler, more interpretable benchmarks. Our contribution is \textsc{SUPA}, the SUrrogate PArticle propagation simulator, an algorithm and software package for generating data by simulating simplified particle propagation, scattering and shower development in matter. The generation is extremely fast and easy to use compared to \textsc{Geant4}, but still exhibits the key characteristics and challenges of the detailed simulation. The proposed simulator generates thousands of particle showers per second on a desktop machine, a speed up of up to 6 orders of magnitudes over \textsc{Geant4}, and stores detailed geometric information about the shower propagation. \textsc{\textsc{SUPA}} provides much greater flexibility for setting initial conditions and defining multiple benchmarks for the development of models. Moreover, interpreting particle showers as point clouds creates a connection to geometric machine learning and provides challenging and fundamentally new datasets for the field.
1483. AirDelhi: Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Particulate Matter Dataset From Delhi For ML based Modeling
tl;dr: Particulate Matter (PM) dataset collected from a highly polluted region, that has unique characteristics compared to existing datasets, opening new challenges of modeling and forecasting for ML researchers.
Air pollution poses serious health concerns in developing countries, such as India, necessitating large-scale measurement for correlation analysis, policy recommendations, and informed decision-making. However, fine-grained data collection is costly. Specifically, static sensors for pollution measurement cost several thousand dollars per unit, leading to inadequate deployment and coverage. To complement the existing sparse static sensor network, we propose a mobile sensor network utilizing lower-cost PM2.5 sensors mounted on public buses in the Delhi-NCR region of India. Through this exercise, we introduce a novel dataset AirDelhi comprising PM2.5 and PM10 measurements. This dataset is made publicly available, at https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/pollutiondata, serving as a valuable resource for machine learning (ML) researchers and environmentalists. We present three key contributions with the release of this dataset. Firstly, through in-depth statistical analysis, we demonstrate that the released dataset significantly differs from existing pollution datasets, highlighting its uniqueness and potential for new insights. Secondly, the dataset quality been validated against existing expensive sensors. Thirdly, we conduct a benchmarking exercise (https://github.com/sachin-iitd/DelhiPMDatasetBenchmark), evaluating state-of-the-art methods for interpolation, feature imputation, and forecasting on this dataset, which is the largest publicly available PM dataset to date. The results of the benchmarking exercise underscore the substantial disparities in accuracy between the proposed dataset and other publicly available datasets. This finding highlights the complexity and richness of our dataset, emphasizing its value for advancing research in the field of air pollution.
tl;dr: We provides a benchmark for discrete sampling for sampling from distributions in discrete space and solving combinatorial optimizations.
Sampling in discrete spaces, with critical applications in simulation and optimization, has recently been boosted by significant advances in gradient-based approaches that exploit modern accelerators like GPUs. However, two key challenges are hindering further advancement in research on discrete sampling. First, since there is no consensus on experimental settings and evaluation setups, the empirical results in different research papers are often not comparable. Second, implementing samplers and target distributions often requires a nontrivial amount of effort in terms of calibration and parallelism. To tackle these challenges, we propose DISCS (DISCrete Sampling), a tailored package and benchmark that supports unified and efficient experiment implementation and evaluations for discrete sampling in three types of tasks: sampling from classical graphical models and energy based generative models, and sampling for solving combinatorial optimization. Throughout the comprehensive evaluations in DISCS, we gained new insights into scalability, design principles for proposal distributions, and lessons for adaptive sampling design. DISCS efficiently implements representative discrete samplers in existing research works as baselines and offers a simple interface that researchers can conveniently add new discrete samplers and directly compare their performance with the benchmark result in a calibrated setup.
Analyzing representational similarity among neural networks (NNs) is essential for interpreting or transferring deep models. In application scenarios where numerous NN models are learned, it becomes crucial to assess model similarities in computationally efficient ways. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for reducing NN representational similarity to filter subspace distance. Specifically, when convolutional filters are decomposed as a linear combination of a set of filter subspace elements, denoted as filter atoms, and have those decomposed atom coefficients shared across networks, NN representational similarity can be significantly simplified as calculating the cosine distance among respective filter atoms, to achieve millions of times computation reduction over popular probing-based methods. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence that such simplified filter subspace-based similarity preserves a strong linear correlation with other popular probing-based metrics, while being significantly more efficient to obtain and robust to probing data. We further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in various application scenarios where numerous models exist, such as federated and continual learning as well as analyzing training dynamics. We hope our findings can help further explorations of real-time large-scale representational similarity analysis in neural networks.
tl;dr: We propose OneNet, which trains models with different inductive biases and uses a data-driven combination weight to ensemble them. OneNet reduces online forecasting error under concept drift by more than $\mathbf{50\%}$ compared to the SOTA model.
Online updating of time series forecasting models aims to address the concept drifting problem by efficiently updating forecasting models based on streaming data. Many algorithms are designed for online time series forecasting, with some exploiting cross-variable dependency while others assume independence among variables. Given every data assumption has its own pros and cons in online time series modeling, we propose **On**line **e**nsembling **Net**work (**OneNet**). It dynamically updates and combines two models, with one focusing on modeling the dependency across the time dimension and the other on cross-variate dependency. Our method incorporates a reinforcement learning-based approach into the traditional online convex programming framework, allowing for the linear combination of the two models with dynamically adjusted weights. OneNet addresses the main shortcoming of classical online learning methods that tend to be slow in adapting to the concept drift. Empirical results show that OneNet reduces online forecasting error by more than $\mathbf{50}\\%$ compared to the State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) method.
tl;dr: In this paper, we proposed to exploit contextually affinitive neighborhood for more informative neighbors for deep clustering as well as a progressively relaxed boundary filtering strategy for noise-robust neighbors.
Previous endeavors in self-supervised learning have enlightened the research of deep clustering from an instance discrimination perspective. Built upon this foundation, recent studies further highlight the importance of grouping semantically similar instances. One effective method to achieve this is by promoting the semantic structure preserved by neighborhood consistency. However, the samples in the local neighborhood may be limited due to their close proximity to each other,
which may not provide substantial and diverse supervision signals. Inspired by the versatile re-ranking methods in the context of image retrieval, we propose to employ an efficient online re-ranking process to mine more informative neighbors in a Contextually Affinitive (ConAff) Neighborhood, and then encourage the cross-view neighborhood consistency. To further mitigate the intrinsic neighborhood noises near cluster boundaries, we propose a progressively relaxed boundary filtering strategy to circumvent the issues brought by noisy neighbors. Our method can be easily integrated into the generic self-supervised frameworks and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several popular benchmarks.
tl;dr: This paper propose a method to plan latent milestones with diffusion model for multi-task, long-horizon decision-making.
Addressing decision-making problems using sequence modeling to predict future trajectories shows promising results in recent years.
In this paper, we take a step further to leverage the sequence predictive method in wider areas such as long-term planning, vision-based control, and multi-task decision-making.
To this end, we propose a method to utilize a diffusion-based generative sequence model to plan a series of milestones in a latent space and to have an agent to follow the milestones to accomplish a given task.
The proposed method can learn control-relevant, low-dimensional latent representations of milestones, which makes it possible to efficiently perform long-term planning and vision-based control.
Furthermore, our approach exploits generation flexibility of the diffusion model, which makes it possible to plan diverse trajectories for multi-task decision-making.
We demonstrate the proposed method across offline reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks and an visual manipulation environment.
The results show that our approach outperforms offline RL methods in solving long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks and multi-task problems,
while also achieving the state-of-the-art performance on the most challenging vision-based manipulation benchmark.
tl;dr: We propose an alternative risk measure, Gini deviation, as a substitute for variance, and derive a policy gradient algorithm to minimize it.
Restricting the variance of a policy’s return is a popular choice in risk-averse Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its clear mathematical definition and easy interpretability. Traditional methods directly restrict the total return variance. Recent methods restrict the per-step reward variance as a proxy. We thoroughly examine the limitations of these variance-based methods, such as sensitivity to numerical scale and hindering of policy learning, and propose to use an alternative risk measure, Gini deviation, as a substitute. We study various properties of this new risk measure and derive a policy gradient algorithm to minimize it. Empirical evaluation in domains where risk-aversion can be clearly defined, shows that our algorithm can mitigate the limitations of variance-based risk measures and achieves high return with low risk in terms of variance and Gini deviation when others fail to learn a reasonable policy.
The lack of standardized benchmarks for reinforcement learning (RL) in sustainability applications has made it difficult to both track progress on specific domains and identify bottlenecks for researchers to focus their efforts. In this paper, we present SustainGym, a suite of five environments designed to test the performance of RL algorithms on realistic sustainable energy system tasks, ranging from electric vehicle charging to carbon-aware data center job scheduling. The environments test RL algorithms under realistic distribution shifts as well as in multi-agent settings. We show that standard off-the-shelf RL algorithms leave significant room for improving performance and highlight the challenges ahead for introducing RL to real-world sustainability tasks.
tl;dr: We develop an alternative of KNN-Shapley with improved efficiency and can be easily extended to incorporate differential privacy.
Data valuation, a growing field that aims at quantifying the usefulness of individual data sources for training machine learning (ML) models, faces notable yet often overlooked privacy challenges. This paper studies these challenges with a focus on KNN-Shapley, one of the most practical data valuation methods nowadays. We first emphasize the inherent privacy risks of KNN-Shapley, and demonstrate the significant technical challenges in adapting KNN-Shapley to accommodate differential privacy (DP). To overcome these challenges, we introduce TKNN-Shapley, a refined variant of KNN-Shapley that is privacy-friendly, allowing for straightforward modifications to incorporate DP guarantee (DP-TKNN-Shapley). We show that DP-TKNN-Shapley has several advantages and offers a superior privacy-utility tradeoff compared to naively privatized KNN-Shapley. Moreover, even non-private TKNN-Shapley matches KNN-Shapley's performance in discerning data quality. Overall, our findings suggest that TKNN-Shapley is a promising alternative to KNN-Shapley, particularly for real-world applications involving sensitive data.
One of the recent trends in vision problems is to use natural language captions to describe the objects of interest. This approach can overcome some limitations of traditional methods that rely on bounding boxes or category annotations. This paper introduces a novel paradigm for Multiple Object Tracking called Type-to-Track, which allows users to track objects in videos by typing natural language descriptions. We present a new dataset for that Grounded Multiple Object Tracking task, called GroOT, that contains videos with various types of objects and their corresponding textual captions describing their appearance and action in detail. Additionally, we introduce two new evaluation protocols and formulate evaluation metrics specifically for this task. We develop a new efficient method that models a transformer-based eMbed-ENcoDE-extRact framework (MENDER) using the third-order tensor decomposition. The experiments in five scenarios show that our MENDER approach outperforms another two-stage design in terms of accuracy and efficiency, up to 14.7\% accuracy and $4\times$ speed faster.
This paper considers the problem of inferring the behaviors of multiple interacting experts by estimating their reward functions and constraints where the distributed demonstrated trajectories are sequentially revealed to a group of learners. We formulate the problem as a distributed online bi-level optimization problem where the outer-level problem is to estimate the reward functions and the inner-level problem is to learn the constraints and corresponding policies. We propose a novel ``multi-agent behavior inference from distributed and streaming demonstrations" (MA-BIRDS) algorithm that allows the learners to solve the outer-level and inner-level problems in a single loop through intermittent communications. We formally guarantee that the distributed learners achieve consensus on reward functions, constraints, and policies, the average local regret (over $N$ online iterations) decreases at the rate of $O(1/N^{1-\eta_1}+1/N^{1-\eta_2}+1/N)$, and the cumulative constraint violation increases sub-linearly at the rate of $O(N^{\eta_2}+1)$ where $\eta_1,\eta_2\in (1/2,1)$.
tl;dr: For a non-monotone family of games, we provide novel algorithms with convergence guarantess
A wide array of modern machine learning applications – from adversarial models to multi-agent reinforcement learning – can be formulated as non-cooperative games whose Nash equilibria represent the system’s desired operational states. Despite having a highly non-convex loss landscape, many cases of interest possess a latent convex structure that could potentially be leveraged to yield convergence to an equilibrium. Driven by this observation, our paper proposes a flexible first-order method that successfully exploits such “hidden structures” and achieves convergence under minimal assumptions for the transformation connecting the players’ control variables to the game’s latent, convex-structured layer. The proposed method – which we call preconditioned hidden gradient descent (PHGD) – hinges on a judiciously chosen gradient preconditioning scheme related to natural gradient methods. Importantly, we make no separability assumptions for the game’s hidden structure, and we provide explicit convergence rate guarantees for both deterministic and stochastic environments.
tl;dr: We study the impact of initialization scale on the singular values of the hidden layer of a two layer fully connected linear network.
This paper studies the behaviour of two-layer fully connected networks with linear activations trained with gradient flow on the square loss. We show how the optimization process carries an implicit bias on the parameters that depends on the scale of its initialization. The main result of the paper is a variational characterization of the loss minimizers retrieved by the gradient flow for a specific initialization shape. This characterization reveals that, in the small scale initialization regime, the linear neural network's hidden layer is biased toward having a low-rank structure. To complement our results, we showcase a hidden mirror flow that tracks the dynamics of the singular values of the weights matrices and describe their time evolution. We support our findings with numerical experiments illustrating the phenomena.
tl;dr: A framework that discovers causally disentangled generative factors under inductive bias of confounder
Representation learning assumes that real-world data is generated by a few semantically meaningful generative factors (i.e., sources of variation) and aims to discover them in the latent space. These factors are expected to be causally disentangled, meaning that distinct factors are encoded into separate latent variables, and changes in one factor will not affect the values of the others. Compared to statistical independence, causal disentanglement allows more controllable data generation, improved robustness, and better generalization. However, most existing work assumes unconfoundedness in the discovery process, that there are no common causes to the generative factors and thus obtain only statistical independence. In this paper, we recognize the importance of modeling confounders in discovering causal generative factors. Unfortunately, such factors are not identifiable without proper inductive bias. We fill the gap by introducing a framework entitled Confounded-Disentanglement (C-Disentanglement), the first framework that explicitly introduces the inductive bias of confounder via labels from domain expertise. In addition, we accordingly propose an approach to sufficiently identify the causally-disentangled factors under any inductive bias of the confounder. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our method demonstrates competitive results compared to various SOTA baselines in obtaining causally disentangled features and downstream tasks under domain shifts.
Offline model-based optimization aims to find a design that maximizes a property of interest using only an offline dataset, with applications in robot, protein, and molecule design, among others. A prevalent approach is gradient ascent, where a proxy model is trained on the offline dataset and then used to optimize the design. This method suffers from an out-of-distribution issue, where the proxy is not accurate for unseen designs. To mitigate this issue, we explore using a pseudo-labeler to generate valuable data for fine-tuning the proxy.
Specifically, we propose $\textit{\textbf{I}mportance-aware \textbf{C}o-\textbf{T}eaching for Offline Model-based Optimization}~(\textbf{ICT})$. This method maintains three symmetric proxies with their mean ensemble as the final proxy, and comprises two steps. The first step is $\textit{pseudo-label-driven co-teaching}$. In this step, one proxy is iteratively selected as the pseudo-labeler for designs near the current optimization point, generating pseudo-labeled data. Subsequently, a co-teaching process identifies small-loss samples as valuable data and exchanges them between the other two proxies for fine-tuning, promoting knowledge transfer. This procedure is repeated three times, with a different proxy chosen as the pseudo-labeler each time, ultimately enhancing the ensemble performance.
To further improve accuracy of pseudo-labels, we perform a secondary step of $\textit{meta-learning-based sample reweighting}$,
which assigns importance weights to samples in the pseudo-labeled dataset and updates them via meta-learning. ICT achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple design-bench tasks, achieving the best mean rank $3.1$ and median rank $2$ among $15$ methods.
Our source code can be accessed here.
Several recent unsupervised learning methods use probabilistic approaches to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems based on the assumption of statistically independent solution variables. We demonstrate that this assumption imposes performance limitations in particular on difficult problem instances. Our results corroborate that an autoregressive approach which captures statistical dependencies among solution variables yields superior performance on many popular CO problems. We introduce Subgraph Tokenization in which the configuration of a set of solution variables is represented by a single token. This tokenization technique alleviates the drawback of the long sequential sampling procedure which is inherent to autoregressive methods without sacrificing expressivity. Importantly, we theoretically motivate an annealed entropy regularization and show empirically that it is essential for efficient and stable learning.
tl;dr: We propose a scalable unlearning algorithm that is by far the most consistent in performing strongly among all SOTA methods we evaluated, across different sets of evaluation metrics and application scenarios
Deep machine unlearning is the problem of 'removing' from a trained neural network a subset of its training set. This problem is very timely and has many applications, including the key tasks of removing biases (RB), resolving confusion (RC) (caused by mislabelled data in trained models), as well as allowing users to exercise their 'right to be forgotten' to protect User Privacy (UP). This paper is the first, to our knowledge, to study unlearning for different applications (RB, RC, UP), with the view that each has its own desiderata, definitions for 'forgetting' and associated metrics for forget quality. For UP, we propose a novel adaptation of a strong Membership Inference Attack for unlearning. We also propose SCRUB, a novel unlearning algorithm, which is the only method that is consistently a top performer for forget quality across the different application-dependent metrics for RB, RC, and UP. At the same time, SCRUB is also consistently a top performer on metrics that measure model utility (i.e. accuracy on retained data and generalization), and is more efficient than previous work. The above are substantiated through a comprehensive empirical evaluation against previous state-of-the-art.
tl;dr: We present a novel exploration technique that maximizes the value-conditional state entropy, which takes account into the value estimates of visited states for computing intrinsic bonus.
A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to struggle in a supervised setup with a task reward, where an agent prefers to visit high-value states to exploit the task reward. Such a preference can cause an imbalance between the distributions of high-value states and low-value states, which biases exploration towards low-value state regions as a result of the state entropy increasing when the distribution becomes more uniform. This issue is exacerbated when high-value states are narrowly distributed within the state space, making it difficult for the agent to complete the tasks. In this paper, we present a novel exploration technique that maximizes the value-conditional state entropy, which separately estimates the state entropies that are conditioned on the value estimates of each state, then maximizes their average. By only considering the visited states with similar value estimates for computing the intrinsic bonus, our method prevents the distribution of low-value states from affecting exploration around high-value states, and vice versa. We demonstrate that the proposed alternative to the state entropy baseline significantly accelerates various reinforcement learning algorithms across a variety of tasks within MiniGrid, DeepMind Control Suite, and Meta-World benchmarks. Source code is available at https://sites.google.com/view/rl-vcse.
1501. D4Explainer: In-distribution Explanations of Graph Neural Network via Discrete Denoising Diffusion
The widespread deployment of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) sparks significant interest in their explainability, which plays a vital role in model auditing and ensuring trustworthy graph learning. The objective of GNN explainability is to discern the underlying graph structures that have the most significant impact on model predictions. Ensuring that explanations generated are reliable necessitates consideration of the in-distribution property, particularly due to the vulnerability of GNNs to out-of-distribution data. Unfortunately, prevailing explainability methods tend to constrain the generated explanations to the structure of the original graph, thereby downplaying the significance of the in-distribution property and resulting in explanations that lack reliability.
To address these challenges, we propose D4Explainer, a novel approach that provides in-distribution GNN explanations for both counterfactual and model-level explanation scenarios. The proposed D4Explainer incorporates generative graph distribution learning into the optimization objective, which accomplishes two goals: 1) generate a collection of diverse counterfactual graphs that conform to the in-distribution property for a given instance, and 2) identify the most discriminative graph patterns that contribute to a specific class prediction, thus serving as model-level explanations. It is worth mentioning that D4Explainer is the first unified framework that combines both counterfactual and model-level explanations.
Empirical evaluations conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets provide compelling evidence of the state-of-the-art performance achieved by D4Explainer in terms of explanation accuracy, faithfulness, diversity, and robustness.
tl;dr: Hierarchically Gated Recurrent Neural Network for Sequence Modeling
Transformers have surpassed RNNs in popularity due to their superior abilities in parallel training and long-term dependency modeling.
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in using linear RNNs for efficient sequence modeling.
These linear RNNs often employ gating mechanisms in the output of the linear recurrence layer while ignoring the significance of using forget gates within the recurrence. In this paper, we propose a gated linear RNN model dubbed Hierarchically Gated Recurrent Neural Network (HGRN), which includes forget gates that are lower bounded by a learnable value. The lower bound increases monotonically when moving up layers. This allows the upper layers to model long-term dependencies and the lower layers to model more local, short-term dependencies. Experiments on language modeling, image classification, and long-range arena benchmarks showcase the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed model. The source code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/HGRN.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative model training across dispersed nodes without having to force individual nodes to share data.
However, its broad adoption is hindered by the high communication costs of transmitting a large number of model parameters.
This paper presents EvoFed, a novel approach that integrates Evolutionary Strategies (ES) with FL to address these challenges.
EvoFed employs a concept of `fitness-based information sharing’, deviating significantly from the conventional model-based FL.
Rather than exchanging the actual updated model parameters, each node transmits a distance-based similarity measure between the locally updated model and each member of the noise-perturbed model population. Each node, as well as the server, generates an identical population set of perturbed models in a completely synchronized fashion using the same random seeds.
With properly chosen noise variance and population size, perturbed models can be combined to closely reflect the actual model updated using the local dataset, allowing the transmitted similarity measures (or fitness values) to carry nearly the complete information about the model parameters.
As the population size is typically much smaller than the number of model parameters, the savings in communication load is large. The server aggregates these fitness values and is able to update the global model. This global fitness vector is then disseminated back to the nodes, each of which applies the same update to be synchronized to the global model. Our analysis shows that EvoFed converges, and our experimental results validate that at the cost of increased local processing loads, EvoFed achieves performance comparable to FedAvg while reducing overall communication requirements drastically in various practical settings.
tl;dr: Our paper proposes a new method for detecting distributional deviations in deep neural networks. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves superior performance while also significantly reducing computational complexity.
To deploy and operate deep neural models in production, the quality of their predictions, which might be contaminated benignly or manipulated maliciously by input distributional deviations, must be monitored and assessed. Specifically, we study the case of monitoring the healthy operation of a deep neural network (DNN) receiving a stream of data, with the aim of detecting input distributional deviations over which the quality of the network's predictions is potentially damaged. Using selective prediction principles, we propose a distribution deviation detection method for DNNs. The proposed method is derived from a tight coverage generalization bound computed over a sample of instances drawn from the true underlying distribution. Based on this bound, our detector continuously monitors the operation of the network over a test window and fires off an alarm whenever a deviation is detected. Our novel detection method performs on-par or better than the state-of-the-art, while consuming substantially lower computation time (five orders of magnitude reduction) and space complexity. Unlike previous methods, which require at least linear dependence on the size of the source distribution for each detection, rendering them inapplicable to ``Google-Scale'' datasets, our approach eliminates this dependence, making it suitable for real-world applications. Code is available at [https://github.com/BarSGuy/Window-Based-Distribution-Shift-Detection](https://github.com/BarSGuy/Window-Based-Distribution-Shift-Detection).
tl;dr: The progress in GSL field remains unclear due to inconsistent experimental protocols. We introduce OpenGSL, the first comprehensive benchmark for GSL to enable a fair comparison and provide helpful insights.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the *de facto* standard for representation learning on graphs, owing to their ability to effectively integrate graph topology and node attributes. However, the inherent suboptimal nature of node connections, resulting from the complex and contingent formation process of graphs, presents significant challenges in modeling them effectively. To tackle this issue, Graph Structure Learning (GSL), a family of data-centric learning approaches, has garnered substantial attention in recent years. The core concept behind GSL is to jointly optimize the graph structure and the corresponding GNN models. Despite the proposal of numerous GSL methods, the progress in this field remains unclear due to inconsistent experimental protocols, including variations in datasets, data processing techniques, and splitting strategies. In this paper, we introduce OpenGSL, the first comprehensive benchmark for GSL, aimed at addressing this gap. OpenGSL enables a fair comparison among state-of-the-art GSL methods by evaluating them across various popular datasets using uniform data processing and splitting strategies. Through extensive experiments, we observe that existing GSL methods do not consistently outperform vanilla GNN counterparts. We also find that there is no significant correlation between the homophily of the learned structure and task performance, challenging the common belief. Moreover, we observe that the learned graph structure demonstrates a strong generalization ability across different GNN models, despite the high computational and space consumption. We hope that our open-sourced library will facilitate rapid and equitable evaluation and inspire further innovative research in this field. The code of the benchmark can be found in https://github.com/OpenGSL/OpenGSL.
1506. Cause-Effect Inference in Location-Scale Noise Models: Maximum Likelihood vs. Independence Testing
tl;dr: We propose a new independence-based cause-effect inference method that is robust in the settings where likelihood-based methods fail.
A fundamental problem of causal discovery is cause-effect inference, to learn the correct causal direction between two random variables. Significant progress has been made through modelling the effect as a function of its cause and a noise term, which allows us to leverage assumptions about the generating function class. The recently introduced heteroscedastic location-scale noise functional models (LSNMs) combine expressive power with identifiability guarantees. LSNM model selection based on maximizing likelihood achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, when the noise distributions are correctly specified. However, through an extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that the accuracy deteriorates sharply when the form of the noise distribution is misspecified by the user. Our analysis shows that the failure occurs mainly when the conditional variance in the anti-causal direction is smaller than that in the causal direction. As an alternative, we find that causal model selection through residual independence testing is much more robust to noise misspecification and misleading conditional variance.
tl;dr: We provide the first lower bound for the first-order query complexity of approximate Nash equilibria, and discuss why this problem is difficult.
In the first-order query model for zero-sum $K\times K$ matrix games, players observe the expected pay-offs for all their possible actions under the randomized action played by their opponent. This classical model has received renewed interest after the discovery by Rakhlin and Sridharan that $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibria can be computed efficiently from $O(\frac{\ln K}{\epsilon})$ instead of $O(\frac{\ln K}{\epsilon^2})$ queries. Surprisingly, the optimal number of such queries, as a function of both $\epsilon$ and $K$, is not known. We make progress on this question on two fronts. First, we fully characterise the query complexity of learning exact equilibria ($\epsilon=0$), by showing that they require a number of queries that is linear in $K$, which means that it is essentially as hard as querying the whole matrix, which can also be done with $K$ queries. Second, for $\epsilon > 0$, the current query complexity upper bound stands at $O(\min(\frac{\ln(K)}{\epsilon} , K))$. We argue that, unfortunately, obtaining a matching lower bound is not possible with existing techniques: we prove that no lower bound can be derived by constructing hard matrices whose entries take values in a known countable set, because such matrices can be fully identified by a single query. This rules out, for instance, reducing to an optimization problem over the hypercube by encoding it as a binary payoff matrix. We then introduce a new technique for lower bounds, which allows us to obtain lower bounds of order $\tilde\Omega(\log(\frac{1}{K\epsilon})$ for any $\epsilon \leq 1 / (cK^4)$, where $c$ is a constant independent of $K$. We further discuss possible future directions to improve on our techniques in order to close the gap with the upper bounds.
Experimental results have shown that curriculum learning, i.e., presenting simpler examples before more complex ones, can improve the efficiency of learning. Some recent theoretical results also showed that changing the sampling distribution can help neural networks learn parities, with formal results only for large learning rates and one-step arguments. Here we show a separation result in the number of training steps with standard (bounded) learning rates on a common sample distribution: if the data distribution is a mixture of sparse and dense inputs, there exists a regime in which a 2-layer ReLU neural network trained by a curriculum noisy-GD (or SGD) algorithm that uses sparse examples first, can learn parities of sufficiently large degree, while any fully connected neural network of possibly larger width or depth trained by noisy-GD on the unordered samples cannot learn without additional steps. We also provide experimental results supporting the qualitative separation beyond the specific regime of the theoretical results.
Numerous real-world systems, ranging from healthcare to energy grids, involve users competing for finite and potentially scarce resources. Designing policies for resource allocation in such real-world systems is challenging for many reasons, including the changing nature of user types and their (possibly urgent) need for resources. Researchers have developed numerous machine learning solutions for determining resource allocation policies in these challenging settings. However, a key limitation has been the absence of good methods and test-beds for benchmarking these policies; almost all resource allocation policies are benchmarked in environments which are either completely synthetic or do not allow _any_ deviation from historical data. In this paper we introduce AllSim, which is a benchmarking environment for realistically simulating the impact and utility of policies for resource allocation in systems in which users compete for such scarce resources. Building such a benchmarking environment is challenging because it needs to successfully take into account _the entire collective_ of potential users and the impact a resource allocation policy has on all the other users in the system. AllSim's benchmarking environment is modular (each component being parameterized individually), learnable (informed by historical data), and customizable (adaptable to changing conditions). These, when interacting with an allocation policy, produce a dataset of simulated outcomes for evaluation and comparison of such policies. We believe AllSim is an essential step towards a more systematic evaluation of policies for scarce resource allocation compared to current approaches for benchmarking such methods.
tl;dr: AmadeusGPT is a natural language interface that turns language descriptions of animal behaviors into machine-executable code, utilizing a novel dual-memory mechanism augmented GPT3.5/4 to overcome its context window limitation
The process of quantifying and analyzing animal behavior involves translating the naturally occurring descriptive language of their actions into machine-readable code. Yet, codifying behavior analysis is often challenging without deep understanding of animal behavior and technical machine learning knowledge. To limit this gap, we introduce AmadeusGPT: a natural language interface that turns natural language descriptions of behaviors into machine-executable code. Large-language models (LLMs) such as GPT3.5 and GPT4 allow for interactive language-based queries that are potentially well suited for making interactive behavior analysis. However, the comprehension capability of these LLMs is limited by the context window size, which prevents it from remembering distant conversations. To overcome the context window limitation, we implement a novel dual-memory mechanism to allow communication between short-term and long-term memory using symbols as context pointers for retrieval and saving. Concretely, users directly use language-based definitions of behavior and our augmented GPT develops code based on the core AmadeusGPT API, which contains machine learning, computer vision, spatio-temporal reasoning, and visualization modules. Users then can interactively refine results, and seamlessly add new behavioral modules as needed. We used the MABe 2022 behavior challenge tasks to benchmark AmadeusGPT and show excellent performance. Note, an end-user would not need to write any code to achieve this. Thus, collectively AmadeusGPT presents a novel way to merge deep biological knowledge, large-language models, and core computer vision modules into a more naturally intelligent system. Code and demos can be found at: https://github.com/AdaptiveMotorControlLab/AmadeusGPT
Discovering causal relationship using multivariate functional data has received a significant amount of attention very recently. In this article, we introduce a functional linear structural equation model for causal structure learning when the underlying graph involving the multivariate functions may have cycles. To enhance interpretability, our model involves a low-dimensional causal embedded space such that all the relevant causal information in the multivariate functional data is preserved in this lower-dimensional subspace. We prove that the proposed model is causally identifiable under standard assumptions that are often made in the causal discovery literature. To carry out inference of our model, we develop a fully Bayesian framework with suitable prior specifications and uncertainty quantification through posterior summaries. We illustrate the superior performance of our method over existing methods in terms of causal graph estimation through extensive simulation studies. We also demonstrate the proposed method using a brain EEG dataset.
tl;dr: A new and better-justified policy diversity regularization for improving the Nash Equilibrium approximation in Policy-Space Response Oracles.
Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is an influential algorithm framework for approximating a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in multi-agent non-transitive games. Many previous studies have been trying to promote policy diversity in PSRO. A major weakness with existing diversity metrics is that a more diverse (according to their diversity metrics) population does not necessarily mean (as we proved in the paper) a better approximation to a NE. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new diversity metric, the improvement of which guarantees a better approximation to a NE. Meanwhile, we develop a practical and well-justified method to optimize our diversity metric using only state-action samples. By incorporating our diversity regularization into the best response solving of PSRO, we obtain a new PSRO variant, \textit{Policy Space Diversity} PSRO (PSD-PSRO). We present the convergence property of PSD-PSRO. Empirically, extensive experiments on single-state games, Leduc, and Goofspiel demonstrate that PSD-PSRO is more effective in producing significantly less exploitable policies than state-of-the-art PSRO variants.
tl;dr: In this study, we propose the novel topology, Base-(k+1) Graph, which enables Decentralized SGD to more successfully reconcile accuracy and communication efficiency than the existing topologies.
Decentralized learning has recently been attracting increasing attention for its applications in parallel computation and privacy preservation. Many recent studies stated that the underlying network topology with a faster consensus rate (a.k.a. spectral gap) leads to a better convergence rate and accuracy for decentralized learning. However, a topology with a fast consensus rate, e.g., the exponential graph, generally has a large maximum degree, which incurs significant communication costs. Thus, seeking topologies with both a fast consensus rate and small maximum degree is important. In this study, we propose a novel topology combining both a fast consensus rate and small maximum degree called the Base-$\left(k+1\right)$ Graph. Unlike the existing topologies, the Base-$\left(k+1\right)$ Graph enables all nodes to reach the exact consensus after a finite number of iterations for any number of nodes and maximum degree $k$. Thanks to this favorable property, the Base-$\left(k+1\right)$ Graph endows Decentralized SGD (DSGD) with both a faster convergence rate and more communication efficiency than the exponential graph. We conducted experiments with various topologies, demonstrating that the Base-$\left(k+1\right)$ Graph enables various decentralized learning methods to achieve higher accuracy with better communication efficiency than the existing topologies. Our code is available at https://github.com/yukiTakezawa/BaseGraph.
Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must conceal in the candidate label set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate label set. To address this challenging problem, most of the existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are unavoidable. These errors can accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To this end, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL with theoretical interpretations, called ``Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism (ALIM)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs. ALIM is a plug-in strategy that can be integrated with existing PLL approaches. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on noisy PLL. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/ALIM.
This paper presents a comprehensive and quality collection of functional human brain network data for potential research in the intersection of neuroscience, machine learning, and graph analytics.
Anatomical and functional MRI images have been used to understand the functional connectivity of the human brain and are particularly important in identifying underlying neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Autism. Recently, the study of the brain in the form of brain networks using machine learning and graph analytics has become increasingly popular, especially to predict the early onset of these conditions. A brain network, represented as a graph, retains rich structural and positional information that traditional examination methods are unable to capture. However, the lack of publicly accessible brain network data prevents researchers from data-driven explorations. One of the main difficulties lies in the complicated domain-specific preprocessing steps and the exhaustive computation required to convert the data from MRI images into brain networks. We bridge this gap by collecting a large amount of MRI images from public databases and a private source, working with domain experts to make sensible design choices, and preprocessing the MRI images to produce a collection of brain network datasets. The datasets originate from 6 different sources, cover 4 brain conditions, and consist of a total of 2,702 subjects.
We test our graph datasets on 12 machine learning models to provide baselines and validate the data quality on a recent graph analysis model. To lower the barrier to entry and promote the research in this interdisciplinary field, we release our brain network data and complete preprocessing details including codes at https://doi.org/10.17608/k6.auckland.21397377 and https://github.com/brainnetuoa/data_driven_network_neuroscience.
tl;dr: A generic test-time adaptation method for improving robustness of classifiers in the presence of changes in latent group shifts
Changes in the data distribution at test time can have deleterious effects on the performance of predictive models $p(y|x)$.
We consider situations where there are additional meta-data labels (such as group labels), denoted by $z$, that can account for such changes in the distribution.
In particular, we assume that the prior distribution $p(y,z)$, which models the dependence between the class label $y$ and the "nuisance" factors $z$, may change across domains, either due to a change in the correlation between these terms, or a change in one of their marginals.
However, we assume that the generative model for features $p(x|y,z)$ is invariant across domains.
We note that this corresponds to an expanded version of the widely used "label shift" assumption, where the labels now also include the nuisance factors $z$.
Based on this observation, we propose a test-time label shift correction that adapts to changes in the joint distribution $p(y, z)$ using EM applied to unlabeled samples from the target domain distribution, $p_t(x)$.
Importantly, we are able to avoid fitting a generative model $p(x|y,z)$, and merely need to reweight the outputs of a discriminative model $p_s(y,z|x)$ trained on the source distribution.
We evaluate our method, which we call "Test-Time Label-Shift Adaptation" (TTLSA), on several standard image and text datasets, as well as the CheXpert chest X-ray dataset, and show that it improves performance over methods that target invariance to changes in the distribution, as well as baseline empirical risk minimization methods.
Code for reproducing experiments is available at https://github.com/nalzok/test-time-label-shift.
In this paper, we study the problem of learning in quantum games - and other classes of semidefinite games - with scalar, payoff-based feedback.
For concreteness, we focus on the widely used matrix multiplicative weights (MMW) algorithm and, instead of requiring players to have full knowledge of the game (and/or each other's chosen states), we introduce a suite of minimal-information matrix multiplicative weights (3MW) methods tailored to different information frameworks.
The main difficulty to attaining convergence in this setting is that, in contrast to classical finite games, quantum games have an infinite continuum of pure states (the quantum equivalent of pure strategies), so standard importance-weighting techniques for estimating payoff vectors cannot be employed.
Instead, we borrow ideas from bandit convex optimization and we design a zeroth-order gradient sampler adapted to the semidefinite geometry of the problem at hand.
As a first result, we show that the 3MW method with deterministic payoff feedback retains the $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate of the vanilla, full information MMW algorithm in quantum min-max games, even though the players only observe a single scalar.
Subsequently, we relax the algorithm's information requirements even further and we provide a 3MW method that only requires players to observe a random realization of their payoff observable, and converges to equilibrium at an $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/4})$ rate.
Finally, going beyond zero-sum games, we show that a regularized variant of the proposed 3MW method guarantees local convergence with high probability to all equilibria that satisfy a certain first-order stability condition.
tl;dr: Introducing long-range modulatory feedback connections to deep neural networks enables cognitive-guided visual encoding
Given the rich visual information available in each glance, humans can internally direct their visual attention to enhance goal-relevant information---a capacity often absent in standard vision models. Here we introduce cognitively and biologically-inspired long-range modulatory pathways to enable `cognitive steering’ in vision models. First, we show that models equipped with these feedback pathways naturally show improved image recognition, adversarial robustness, and increased brain alignment, relative to baseline models. Further, these feedback projections from the final layer of the vision backbone provide a meaningful steering interface, where goals can be specified as vectors in the output space. We show that there are effective ways to steer the model that dramatically improve recognition of categories in composite images of multiple categories, succeeding where baseline feed-forward models without flexible steering fail. And, our multiplicative modulatory motif prevents rampant hallucination of the top-down goal category, dissociating what the model is looking for, from what it is looking at. Thus, these long-range modulatory pathways enable new behavioral capacities for goal-directed visual encoding, offering a flexible communication interface between cognitive and visual systems.
1519. Overcoming Recency Bias of Normalization Statistics in Continual Learning: Balance and Adaptation
tl;dr: We theoretically analyze the recency bias of normalization layers in continual learning, and propose an innovative approach to overcome this particular challenge in both training and testing phases.
Continual learning entails learning a sequence of tasks and balancing their knowledge appropriately. With limited access to old training samples, much of the current work in deep neural networks has focused on overcoming catastrophic forgetting of old tasks in gradient-based optimization. However, the normalization layers provide an exception, as they are updated interdependently by the gradient and statistics of currently observed training samples, which require specialized strategies to mitigate recency bias. In this work, we focus on the most popular Batch Normalization (BN) and provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of its sub-optimality in continual learning. Our analysis demonstrates the dilemma between balance and adaptation of BN statistics for incremental tasks, which potentially affects training stability and generalization. Targeting on these particular challenges, we propose Adaptive Balance of BN (AdaB$^2$N), which incorporates appropriately a Bayesian-based strategy to adapt task-wise contributions and a modified momentum to balance BN statistics, corresponding to the training and testing stages. By implementing BN in a continual learning fashion, our approach achieves significant performance gains across a wide range of benchmarks, particularly for the challenging yet realistic online scenarios (e.g., up to 7.68\%, 6.86\% and 4.26\% on Split CIFAR-10, Split CIFAR-100 and Split Mini-ImageNet, respectively). Our code is available at https://github.com/lvyilin/AdaB2N.
tl;dr: We provide a large scale video highlight detection / summarization dataset using YouTube's Most replayed statistics.
Video highlight detection is a task to automatically select the most engaging moments from a long video. This problem is highly challenging since it aims to learn a general way of finding highlights from a variety of videos in the real world.The task has an innate subjectivity because the definition of a highlight differs across individuals. Therefore, to detect consistent and meaningful highlights, prior benchmark datasets have been labeled by multiple (5-20) raters. Due to the high cost of manual labeling, most existing public benchmarks are in extremely small scale, containing only a few tens or hundreds of videos. This insufficient benchmark scale causes multiple issues such as unstable evaluation or high sensitivity in traintest splits. We present Mr. HiSum, a large-scale dataset for video highlight detection and summarization, containing 31,892 videos and reliable labels aggregated over 50,000+ users per video. We empirically prove reliability of the labels as frame importance by cross-dataset transfer and user study.
tl;dr: We demonstrate a distillation method that is capable of imparting knowledge about entities into the parameters of pretrained LMs, exceeding the performance of fine-tuning and other gradient-based methods.
Modern language models have the capacity to store and use immense amounts of knowledge about real-world entities, but it remains unclear how to update such knowledge stored in model parameters. While prior methods for updating knowledge in LMs successfully inject atomic facts, updated LMs fail to make inferences based on injected facts. In this work, we demonstrate that a context distillation-based approach can both impart knowledge about entities \emph{and} propagate that knowledge to enable broader inferences. Our approach consists of two stages: transfer set generation and distillation on the transfer set. We first generate a transfer set by prompting a language model to generate continuations from the entity definition. Then, we update the model parameters so that the distribution of the LM (the 'student') matches the distribution of the LM conditioned on the definition (the 'teacher') on the transfer set. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach is more effective at propagating knowledge updates than fine-tuning and other gradient-based knowledge-editing methods. Moreover, it does not compromise performance in other contexts, even when injecting the definitions of up to 150 entities at once.
tl;dr: This work studies different ways in which knowledge can get transferred from a teacher to a student.
Knowledge distillation aims to transfer useful information from a teacher network to a student network, with the primary goal of improving the student's performance for the task at hand. Over the years, there has a been a deluge of novel techniques and use cases of knowledge distillation. Yet, despite the various improvements, there seems to be a glaring gap in the community's fundamental understanding of the process. Specifically, what is the knowledge that gets distilled in knowledge distillation? In other words, in what ways does the student become similar to the teacher? Does it start to localize objects in the same way? Does it get fooled by the same adversarial samples? Does its data invariance properties become similar? Our work presents a comprehensive study to try to answer these questions.
We show that existing methods can indeed indirectly distill these properties beyond improving task performance. We further study why knowledge distillation might work this way, and show that our findings have practical implications as well.
LiDAR-based 3D detection methods currently use bird's-eye view (BEV) or range view (RV) as their primary basis. The former relies on voxelization and 3D convolutions, resulting in inefficient training and inference processes. Conversely, RV-based methods demonstrate higher efficiency due to their compactness and compatibility with 2D convolutions, but their performance still trails behind that of BEV-based methods. To eliminate this performance gap while preserving the efficiency of RV-based methods, this study presents an efficient and accurate RV-based 3D object detection framework termed RangePerception. Through meticulous analysis, this study identifies two critical challenges impeding the performance of existing RV-based methods: 1) there exists a natural domain gap between the 3D world coordinate used in output and 2D range image coordinate used in input, generating difficulty in information extraction from range images; 2) native range images suffer from vision corruption issue, affecting the detection accuracy of the objects located on the margins of the range images. To address the key challenges above, we propose two novel algorithms named Range Aware Kernel (RAK) and Vision Restoration Module (VRM), which facilitate information flow from range image representation and world-coordinate 3D detection results. With the help of RAK and VRM, our RangePerception achieves 3.25/4.18 higher averaged L1/L2 AP compared to previous state-of-the-art RV-based method RangeDet, on Waymo Open Dataset. For the first time as an RV-based 3D detection method, RangePerception achieves slightly superior averaged AP compared with the well-known BEV-based method CenterPoint and the inference speed of RangePerception is 1.3 times as fast as CenterPoint.
tl;dr: We propose a suite of robust Transformers, capable of mitigating the impact of contaminated data across diverse data modalities.
Transformer-based architectures have recently exhibited remarkable successes across different domains beyond just powering large language models. However, existing approaches typically focus on predictive accuracy and computational cost, largely ignoring certain other practical issues such as robustness to contaminated samples. In this paper, by re-interpreting the self-attention mechanism as a non-parametric kernel density estimator, we adapt classical robust kernel density estimation methods to develop novel classes of transformers that are resistant to adversarial attacks and data contamination. We first propose methods that down-weight outliers in RKHS when computing the self-attention operations. We empirically show that these methods produce improved performance over existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly on image data under adversarial attacks. Then we leverage the median-of-means principle to obtain another efficient approach that results in noticeably enhanced performance and robustness on language modeling and time series classification tasks. Our methods can be combined with existing transformers to augment their robust properties, thus promising to impact a wide variety of applications.
Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to the immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging the CLIP backbone of our image encoder. The project webpage is available at: https://vicentevivan.github.io/GeoCLIP
We develop an approach to efficiently grow neural networks, within which parameterization and optimization strategies are designed by considering their effects on the training dynamics. Unlike existing growing methods, which follow simple replication heuristics or utilize auxiliary gradient-based local optimization, we craft a parameterization scheme which dynamically stabilizes weight, activation, and gradient scaling as the architecture evolves, and maintains the inference functionality of the network. To address the optimization difficulty resulting from imbalanced training effort distributed to subnetworks fading in at different growth phases, we propose a learning rate adaption mechanism that rebalances the gradient contribution of these separate subcomponents. Experiments show that our method achieves comparable or better accuracy than training large fixed-size models, while saving a substantial portion of the original training computation budget. We demonstrate that these gains translate into real wall-clock training speedups.
Length generalization, the ability to generalize from small training context sizes to larger ones, is a critical challenge in the development of Transformer-based language models. Positional encoding (PE) has been identified as a major factor influencing length generalization, but the exact impact of different PE schemes on extrapolation in downstream tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study comparing the length generalization performance of decoder-only Transformers with five different position encoding approaches including Absolute Position Embedding (APE), T5's Relative PE, ALiBi, and Rotary, in addition to Transformers without positional encoding (NoPE). Our evaluation encompasses a battery of reasoning and mathematical tasks. Our findings reveal that the most commonly used positional encoding methods, such as ALiBi, Rotary, and APE, are not well suited for length generalization in downstream tasks. More importantly, NoPE outperforms other explicit positional encoding methods while requiring no additional computation. We theoretically demonstrate that NoPE can represent both absolute and relative PEs, but when trained with SGD, it mostly resembles T5's relative PE attention patterns. Finally, we find that scratchpad is not always helpful to solve length generalization and its format highly impacts the model's performance. Overall, our work suggests that explicit position embeddings are not essential for decoder-only Transformers to generalize well to longer sequences.
tl;dr: Extending Gaussian differential privacy framework to general Riemannian manifolds.
We develop an advanced approach for extending Gaussian Differential Privacy (GDP) to general Riemannian manifolds. The concept of GDP stands out as a prominent privacy definition that strongly warrants extension to manifold settings, due to its central limit properties. By harnessing the power of the renowned Bishop-Gromov theorem in geometric analysis, we propose a Riemannian Gaussian distribution that integrates the Riemannian distance, allowing us to achieve GDP in Riemannian manifolds with bounded Ricci curvature. To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first instance of extending the GDP framework to accommodate general Riemannian manifolds, encompassing curved spaces, and circumventing the reliance on tangent space summaries. We provide a simple algorithm to evaluate the privacy budget $\mu$ on any one-dimensional manifold and introduce a versatile Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based algorithm to calculate $\mu$ on any Riemannian manifold with constant curvature. Through simulations on one of the most prevalent manifolds in statistics, the unit sphere $S^d$, we demonstrate the superior utility of our Riemannian Gaussian mechanism in comparison to the previously proposed Riemannian Laplace mechanism for implementing GDP.
We study multi-task representation learning for the problem of pure exploration in bilinear bandits. In bilinear bandits, an action takes the
form of a pair of arms from two different entity types and the reward is a bilinear function of the known feature vectors of the arms. In the \textit{multi-task bilinear bandit problem}, we aim to find optimal actions for multiple tasks that share a common low-dimensional linear representation. The objective is to leverage this characteristic to expedite the process of identifying the best pair of arms for all tasks. We propose the algorithm GOBLIN that uses an experimental design approach to optimize sample allocations for learning the global representation as well as minimize the number of samples needed to identify the optimal pair of arms in individual tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to give sample complexity analysis for pure exploration in bilinear bandits with shared representation. Our results demonstrate that by learning the shared representation across tasks, we achieve significantly improved sample complexity compared to the traditional approach of solving tasks independently.
tl;dr: We propose the first no-regret and incentive-compatible algorithms for a generalization of the experts problem (called the "m-experts" problem)
We study a generalization of the online binary prediction with expert advice framework where at each round, the learner is allowed to pick $m\geq 1$ experts from a pool of $K$ experts and the overall utility is a modular or submodular function of the chosen experts. We focus on the setting in which experts act strategically and aim to maximize their influence on the algorithm's predictions by potentially misreporting their beliefs about the events. Among others, this setting finds applications in forecasting competitions where the learner seeks not only to make predictions by aggregating different forecasters but also to rank them according to their relative performance. Our goal is to design algorithms that satisfy the following two requirements: 1) \emph{Incentive-compatible}: Incentivize the experts to report their beliefs truthfully, and 2) \emph{No-regret}: Achieve sublinear regret with respect to the true beliefs of the best fixed set of $m$ experts in hindsight. Prior works have studied this framework when $m=1$ and provided incentive-compatible no-regret algorithms for the problem. We first show that a simple reduction of our problem to the $m=1$ setting is neither efficient nor effective. Then, we provide algorithms that utilize the specific structure of the utility functions to achieve the two desired goals.
Combining the signed distance function (SDF) and differentiable volume rendering has emerged as a powerful paradigm for surface reconstruction from multi-view images without 3D supervision. However, current methods are impeded by requiring long-time per-scene optimizations and cannot generalize to new scenes. In this paper, we present GenS, an end-to-end generalizable neural surface reconstruction model, which performs well in both sparse and dense settings. Unlike coordinate-based methods that train a separate network for each scene, we construct a generalized multi-scale volume to directly encode all scenes. Compared with existing solutions, our representation is more powerful, which can recover high-frequency details while maintaining global smoothness. Meanwhile, we introduce a multi-scale feature-metric consistency to impose the multi-view consistency in a more discriminative multi-scale feature space, which is robust to the failures of the photometric consistency. And the learnable feature can be self-enhanced to continuously improve the matching accuracy and mitigate aggregation ambiguity. Furthermore, we design a view contrast loss to force the model to be robust to those regions covered by few viewpoints through distilling the geometric prior from dense input to sparse input. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that our model can generalize well to new scenes and outperform existing state-of-the-art methods even those employing ground-truth depth supervision. Code will be available at https://github.com/prstrive/GenS.
tl;dr: We propose an evaluation framework and conduct a large-scale study on Active Learning (AL), including semi-supervised and self-supervised training, to address literature inconsistencies and provide practical recommendations for AL adoption.
Active Learning (AL) aims to reduce the labeling burden by interactively selecting the most informative samples from a pool of unlabeled data. While there has been extensive research on improving AL query methods in recent years, some studies have questioned the effectiveness of AL compared to emerging paradigms such as semi-supervised (Semi-SL) and self-supervised learning (Self-SL), or a simple optimization of classifier configurations. Thus, today’s AL literature presents an inconsistent and contradictory landscape, leaving practitioners uncertain about whether and how to use AL in their tasks. In this work, we make the case that this inconsistency arises from a lack of systematic and realistic evaluation of AL methods. Specifically, we identify five key pitfalls in the current literature that reflect the delicate considerations required for AL evaluation. Further, we present an evaluation framework that overcomes these pitfalls and thus enables meaningful statements about the performance of AL methods. To demonstrate the relevance of our protocol, we present a large-scale empirical study and benchmark for image classification spanning various data sets, query methods, AL settings, and training paradigms. Our findings clarify the inconsistent picture in the literature and enable us to give hands-on recommendations for practitioners. The benchmark is hosted at https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/realistic-al.
tl;dr: Minimal application of ZOO in the most essential parts of VFL enjoys good convergence rate, communication efficiency, and an intrinsic differential privacy guarantee.
Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a collaborative machine learning paradigm that enables multiple participants to jointly train a model on their private data without sharing it.
To make VFL practical, privacy security and communication efficiency should both be satisfied. Recent research has shown that Zero-Order Optimization (ZOO) in VFL can effectively conceal the internal information of the model without adding costly privacy protective add-ons, making it a promising approach for privacy and efficiency.
However, there are still two key problems that have yet to be resolved. First, the convergence rate of ZOO-based VFL is significantly slower compared to gradient-based VFL, resulting in low efficiency in model training and more communication round, which hinders its application on large neural networks. Second, although ZOO-based VFL has demonstrated resistance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) attacks, its privacy guarantee lacks a theoretical explanation.
To address these challenges, we propose a novel cascaded hybrid optimization approach that employs a zeroth-order (ZO) gradient on the most critical output layer of the clients, with other parts utilizing the first-order (FO) gradient. This approach preserves the privacy protection of ZOO while significantly enhancing convergence.
Moreover, we theoretically prove that applying ZOO to the VFL is equivalent to adding Gaussian Mechanism to the gradient information, which offers an implicit differential privacy guarantee.
Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves similar utility as the Gaussian mechanism under the same privacy budget, while also having significantly lower communication costs compared with SOTA communication-efficient VFL frameworks.
tl;dr: New temporal graph network SOTA
Temporal graphs offer more accurate modeling of many real-world scenarios than static graphs. However, neighbor aggregation, a critical building block of graph networks, for temporal graphs, is currently straightforwardly extended from that of static graphs. It can be computationally expensive when involving all historical neighbors during such aggregation. In practice, typically only a subset of the most recent neighbors are involved. However, such subsampling leads to incomplete and biased neighbor information. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework for temporal neighbor aggregation that uses the recurrent neural network with node-wise hidden states to integrate information from all historical neighbors for each node to acquire the complete neighbor information. We demonstrate the superior theoretical expressiveness of the proposed framework as well as its state-of-the-art performance in real-world applications. Notably, it achieves a significant +9.4% improvement on averaged precision in a real-world Ecommerce dataset over existing methods on 2-layer models.
The Gaussianity assumption has been consistently criticized as a main limitation of the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) despite its efficiency in computational modeling. In this paper, we propose a new approach that expands the model capacity (i.e., expressive power of distributional family) without sacrificing the computational advantages of the VAE framework. Our VAE model's decoder is composed of an infinite mixture of asymmetric Laplace distribution, which possesses general distribution fitting capabilities for continuous variables. Our model is represented by a special form of a nonparametric M-estimator for estimating general quantile functions, and we theoretically establish the relevance between the proposed model and quantile estimation. We apply the proposed model to synthetic data generation, and particularly, our model demonstrates superiority in easily adjusting the level of data privacy.
Despite its practical importance across a wide range of modalities, recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have been primarily focused on a few well-curated domains, e.g., vision and language, often relying on their domain-specific knowledge. For example, Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) has become one of the popular architectures in these domains, but less has explored its potential in other modalities. In this paper, we develop MAE as a unified, modality-agnostic SSL framework. In turn, we argue meta-learning as a key to interpreting MAE as a modality-agnostic learner, and propose enhancements to MAE from the motivation to jointly improve its SSL across diverse modalities, coined MetaMAE as a result. Our key idea is to view the mask reconstruction of MAE as a meta-learning task: masked tokens are predicted by adapting the Transformer meta-learner through the amortization of unmasked tokens. Based on this novel interpretation, we propose to integrate two advanced meta-learning techniques. First, we adapt the amortized latent of the Transformer encoder using gradient-based meta-learning to enhance the reconstruction. Then, we maximize the alignment between amortized and adapted latents through task contrastive learning which guides the Transformer encoder to better encode the task-specific knowledge. Our experiment demonstrates the superiority of MetaMAE in the modality-agnostic SSL benchmark (called DABS), significantly outperforming prior baselines.
Federated learning has a significant advantage in protecting information privacy. Many scholars proposed various secure learning methods within the framework of federated learning but the study on secure federated unsupervised learning especially clustering is limited. We in this work propose a secure kernelized factorization method for federated spectral clustering on distributed dataset. The method is non-trivial because the kernel or similarity matrix for spectral clustering is computed by data pairs, which violates the principle of privacy protection. Our method implicitly constructs an approximation for the kernel matrix on distributed data such that we can perform spectral clustering under the constraint of privacy protection. We provide a convergence guarantee of the optimization algorithm, reconstruction error bounds of the Gaussian kernel matrix, and the sufficient condition of correct clustering of our method. We also present some results of differential privacy. Numerical results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and accurate in comparison to the baselines.
tl;dr: An extension of RDP to functional output, with application in differentially private generative models
Differential privacy (DP) has emerged as a rigorous notion to quantify data privacy. Subsequently, Renyi differential privacy (RDP) becomes an alternative to the ordinary DP notion in both theoretical and empirical studies, for its convenient compositional rules and flexibility. However, most mechanisms with DP (RDP) guarantees are essentially based on randomizing a fixed, finite-dimensional vector output. In this work, following Hall et al. (2013) we further extend RDP to functional outputs, where the output space can be infinite-dimensional, and develop all necessary tools, *e.g.*, (subsampled) Gaussian mechanism, composition, and post-processing rules, to facilitate its practical adoption. As an illustration, we apply functional RDP (f-RDP) to functions in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) to develop a differentially private generative model (DPGM), where training can be interpreted as iteratively releasing loss functions (in an RKHS) with DP (RDP) guarantees. Empirically, the new training paradigm achieves a significant improvement in privacy-utility trade-off compared to existing alternatives, especially when $\epsilon=0.2$. Our code is available at https://github.com/dihjiang/DP-kernel.
Though LLMs are capable of generating plausible programs, it’s challenging to interact with the LLMs further to revise the program, especially if the user’s specific requirements are different from the initial proposal. In this paper, we introduce ANPL, an interactive programming system that ensures users can always refine the generated code towards their specific programmatic intents via structured
decompositions. Borrowing the paradigm of sketching from program synthesis, an ANPL program consists of a set of input-outputs that it must satisfy, a “sketch” — control/data flow expressed in precise code (e.g. Python), and “holes” — sub-modules to be implemented by the LLM specified with natural language. The user revises an ANPL program by either modifying the sketch, changing the language used to describe the holes, or providing additional input-outputs to a particular hole, turning it into a sub-ANPL program that can be solved recursively. This workflow allows the users to offload programming burdens to the LLM as much as possible while retaining the ability to pinpoint and resolve bugs locally, without exposing the rest of the program to the LLM. We deploy ANPL on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a set of unique tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art AI systems, showing it outperforms baseline programming systems that (a) without the ability to decompose tasks interactively and (b) without the guarantee that the modules can be correctly composed together. Additional evaluations on APPS, HumanEval, and real-world programming tasks have validated that the ANPL framework is applicable to multiple programming domains. We release the ANPL solutions to the ARC tasks as a dataset, providing insights into how humans decompose novel tasks programmatically.
1540. Generative Modelling of Stochastic Actions with Arbitrary Constraints in Reinforcement Learning
tl;dr: The first work incorporating discrete flow in RL and learning in large categorical action space with state conditioned constraints.
Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security resources and emergency response units, etc. A challenge in this setting is that the underlying action space is categorical (discrete and unordered) and large, for which existing RL methods do not perform well. Moreover, these problems require validity of the realized action (allocation); this validity constraint is often difficult to express compactly in a closed mathematical form. The allocation nature of the problem also prefers stochastic optimal policies, if one exists. In this work, we address these challenges by (1) applying a (state) conditional normalizing flow to compactly represent the stochastic policy — the compactness arises due to the network only producing one sampled action and the corresponding log probability of the action, which is then used by an actor-critic method; and (2) employing an invalid action rejection method (via a valid action oracle) to update the base policy. The action rejection is enabled by a modified policy gradient that we derive. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the scalability of our approach compared to prior methods and the ability to enforce arbitrary state-conditional constraints on the support of the distribution of actions in any state.
tl;dr: We show that training even simple neural network architectures is more difficult than solving NP-complete problems.
We consider the algorithmic problem of finding the optimal weights and biases for a two-layer fully connected neural network to fit a given set of data points, also known as empirical risk minimization. We show that the problem is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete. This complexity class can be defined as the set of algorithmic problems that are polynomial-time equivalent to finding real roots of a multivariate polynomial with integer coefficients. Furthermore, we show that arbitrary algebraic numbers are required as weights to be able to train some instances to optimality, even if all data points are rational. Our result already applies to fully connected instances with two inputs, two outputs, and one hidden layer of ReLU neurons. Thereby, we strengthen a result by Abrahamsen, Kleist and Miltzow [NeurIPS 2021]. A consequence of this is that a combinatorial search algorithm like the one by Arora, Basu, Mianjy and Mukherjee [ICLR 2018] is impossible for networks with more than one output dimension, unless $\text{NP} = \exists\mathbb{R}$.
tl;dr: Propose a benchmark for the evaluation of misinformation of large language models on the topic of maternity and infant in Chinese
The recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), have led to a new trend of applying large language models (LLMs) to real-world scenarios. While the latest LLMs are astonishingly fluent when interacting with humans, they suffer from the misinformation problem by unintentionally generating factually false statements. This can lead to harmful consequences, especially when produced within sensitive contexts, such as healthcare. Yet few previous works have focused on evaluating misinformation in the long-form (LF) generation of LLMs, especially for knowledge-intensive topics. Moreover, although LLMs have been shown to perform well in different languages, misinformation evaluation has been mostly conducted in English. To this end, we present a benchmark, CARE-MI, for evaluating LLM misinformation in: 1) a sensitive topic, specifically the maternity and infant care domain; and 2) a language other than English, namely Chinese. Most importantly, we provide an innovative paradigm for building LF generation evaluation benchmarks that can be transferred to other knowledge-intensive domains and low-resourced languages. Our proposed benchmark fills the gap between the extensive usage of LLMs and the lack of datasets for assessing the misinformation generated by these models. It contains 1,612 expert-checked questions, accompanied with human-selected references. Using our benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments and found that current Chinese LLMs are far from perfect in the topic of maternity and infant care. In an effort to minimize the reliance on human resources for performance evaluation, we offer off-the-shelf judgment models for automatically assessing the LF output of LLMs given benchmark questions. Moreover, we compare potential solutions for LF generation evaluation and provide insights for building better automated metrics.
tl;dr: Characterizing the societal impact of ML requires considering all relevant ML models: we introduce ecosystem-level analysis, showcasing its ability to generate new insights for holistically characterizing the societal impact of machine learning.
Machine learning is traditionally studied at the model level: researchers measure and improve the accuracy, robustness, bias, efficiency, and other dimensions of specific models. In practice, however, the societal impact of any machine learning model is partially determined by the context into which it is deployed. To capture this, we introduce *ecosystem-level analysis:* rather than analyzing a single model, we consider the collection of models that are deployed in a given context. For example, ecosystem-level analysis in hiring recognizes that a job candidate’s outcomes are determined not only by a single hiring algorithm or firm but instead by the collective decisions of all the firms to which the candidate applied. Across three modalities (text, images, speech) and 11 datasets, we establish a clear trend: deployed machine learning is prone to systemic failure, meaning some users are exclusively misclassified by all models available. Even when individual models improve at the population level over time, we find these improvements rarely reduce the prevalence of systemic failure. Instead, the benefits of these improvements predominantly accrue to individuals who are already correctly classified by other models. In light of these trends, we analyze medical imaging for dermatology, a setting where the costs of systemic failure are especially high. While traditional analyses reveal that both models and humans exhibit racial performance disparities, ecosystem-level analysis reveals new forms of racial disparity in model predictions that do not present in human predictions. These examples demonstrate that ecosystem-level analysis has unique strengths in characterizing the societal impact of machine learning.
Whenever a binary classifier is used to provide decision support, it typically provides both a label prediction and a confidence value. Then, the decision maker is supposed to use the confidence value to calibrate how much to trust the prediction. In this context, it has been often argued that the confidence value should correspond to a well calibrated estimate of the probability that the predicted label matches the ground truth label. However, multiple lines of empirical evidence suggest that decision makers have difficulties at developing a good sense on when to trust a prediction using these confidence values. In this paper, our goal is first to understand why and then investigate how to construct more useful confidence values. We first argue that, for a broad class of utility functions, there exists data distributions for which a rational decision maker is, in general, unlikely to discover the optimal decision policy using the above confidence values—an optimal decision maker would need to sometimes place more (less) trust on predictions with lower (higher) confidence values. However, we then show that, if the confidence values satisfy a natural alignment property with respect to the decision maker’s confidence on her own predictions, there always exists an optimal decision policy under which the level of trust the decision maker would need to place on predictions is monotone on the confidence values, facilitating its discoverability. Further, we show that multicalibration with respect to the decision maker’s confidence on her own prediction is a sufficient condition for alignment. Experiments on a real AI-assisted decision making scenario where a classifier provides decision support to human decision makers validate our theoretical results and suggest that alignment may lead to better decisions.
tl;dr: We introduce MultiVENT: A dataset of multilingual, event-centric videos grounded in natural language text documents covering five target languages.
Everyday news coverage has shifted from traditional broadcasts towards a wide range of presentation formats such as first-hand, unedited video footage. Datasets that reflect the diverse array of multimodal, multilingual news sources available online could be used to teach models to benefit from this shift, but existing news video datasets focus on traditional news broadcasts produced for English-speaking audiences. We address this limitation by constructing MultiVENT, a dataset of multilingual, event-centric videos grounded in text documents across five target languages. MultiVENT includes both news broadcast videos and non-professional event footage, which we use to analyze the state of online news videos and how they can be leveraged to build robust, factually accurate models. Finally, we provide a model for complex, multilingual video retrieval to serve as a baseline for information retrieval using MultiVENT.
NetHack is known as the frontier of reinforcement learning research where learning-based methods still need to catch up to rule-based solutions. One of the promising directions for a breakthrough is using pre-collected datasets similar to recent developments in robotics, recommender systems, and more under the umbrella of offline reinforcement learning (ORL). Recently, a large-scale NetHack dataset was released; while it was a necessary step forward, it has yet to gain wide adoption in the ORL community. In this work, we argue that there are three major obstacles for adoption: tool-wise, implementation-wise, and benchmark-wise. To address them, we develop an open-source library that provides workflow fundamentals familiar to the ORL community: pre-defined D4RL-style tasks, uncluttered baseline implementations, and reliable evaluation tools with accompanying configs and logs synced to the cloud.
Many areas of machine learning and science involve large linear algebra problems, such as eigendecompositions, solving linear systems, computing matrix exponentials, and trace estimation. The matrices involved often have Kronecker, convolutional, block diagonal, sum, or product structure. In this paper, we propose a simple but general framework for large-scale linear algebra problems in machine learning, named CoLA (Compositional Linear Algebra). By combining a linear operator abstraction with compositional dispatch rules, CoLA automatically constructs memory and runtime efficient numerical algorithms. Moreover, CoLA provides memory efficient automatic differentiation, low precision computation, and GPU acceleration in both JAX and PyTorch, while also accommodating new objects, operations, and rules in downstream packages via multiple dispatch. CoLA can accelerate many algebraic operations, while making it easy to prototype matrix structures and algorithms, providing an appealing drop-in tool for virtually any computational effort that requires linear algebra. We showcase its efficacy across a broad range of applications, including partial differential equations, Gaussian processes, equivariant model construction, and unsupervised learning.
Hedonic Games (HGs) are a classical framework modeling coalition formation of strategic agents guided by their individual preferences.
According to these preferences, it is desirable that a coalition structure (i.e. a partition of agents into coalitions) satisfies some form of stability. The most well-known and natural of such notions is arguably core-stability. Informally, a partition is core-stable if no subset of agents would like to deviate by regrouping in a so-called core-blocking coalition. Unfortunately, core-stable partitions seldom exist and even when they do, it is often computationally intractable to find one. To circumvent these problems, we propose the notion of $\varepsilon$-fractional core-stability, where at most an $\varepsilon$-fraction of all possible coalitions is allowed to core-block. It turns out that such a relaxation may guarantee both existence and polynomial-time computation. Specifically, we design efficient algorithms returning an $\varepsilon$-fractional core-stable partition, with $\varepsilon$ exponentially decreasing in the number of agents, for two fundamental classes of HGs: Simple Fractional and Anonymous. From a probabilistic point of view, being the definition of $\varepsilon$-fractional core equivalent to requiring that uniformly sampled coalitions core-block with probability lower than $\varepsilon$, we further extend the definition to handle more complex sampling distributions. Along this line, when valuations have to be learned from samples in a PAC-learning fashion, we give positive and negative results on which distributions allow the efficient computation of outcomes that are $\varepsilon$-fractional core-stable with arbitrarily high confidence.
tl;dr: Trainable random sampling weights for adversarial defense under the constraint and achieve accuracies over 20% higher than baseline.
Deep neural networks have been found to be vulnerable in a variety of tasks. Adversarial attacks can manipulate network outputs, resulting in incorrect predictions. Adversarial defense methods aim to improve the adversarial robustness of networks by countering potential attacks. In addition to traditional defense approaches, randomized defense mechanisms have recently received increasing attention from researchers. These methods introduce different types of perturbations during the inference phase to destabilize adversarial attacks.
Although promising empirical results have been demonstrated by these approaches, the defense performance is quite sensitive to the randomness parameters, which are always manually tuned without further analysis. On the contrary, we propose incorporating random weights into the optimization to fully exploit the potential of randomized defense. To perform better optimization of randomness parameters, we conduct a theoretical analysis of the connections between randomness parameters and gradient similarity as well as natural performance. From these two aspects, we suggest imposing theoretically-guided constraints on random weights during optimizations, as these weights play a critical role in balancing natural performance and adversarial robustness. We derive both the upper and lower bounds of random weight parameters by considering prediction bias and gradient similarity. In this study, we introduce the Constrained Trainable Random Weight (CTRW), which adds random weight parameters to the optimization and includes a constraint guided by the upper and lower bounds to achieve better trade-offs between natural and robust accuracy. We evaluate the effectiveness of CTRW on several datasets and benchmark convolutional neural networks. Our results indicate that our model achieves a robust accuracy approximately 16% to 17% higher than the baseline model under PGD-20 and 22% to 25% higher on Auto Attack.
tl;dr: We combine the Decision-Estimation Coefficient (DEC) framework with a notion of "optimistic" estimation, allowing us to tackle model-free reinforcement learning in the DEC framework for the first time.
We consider the problem of interactive decision making, encompassing structured bandits and reinforcement
learning with general function approximation. Recently, Foster et al. (2021) introduced the
Decision-Estimation Coefficient, a measure of statistical complexity that lower bounds the optimal regret for interactive decision
making, as well as a meta-algorithm, Estimation-to-Decisions, which achieves upper
bounds in terms of the same quantity. Estimation-to-Decisions is a reduction, which lifts
algorithms for (supervised) online estimation into algorithms for
decision making. In this paper, we show that by combining Estimation-to-Decisions with
a specialized form of "optimistic" estimation introduced by
Zhang (2022), it is possible to obtain guarantees
that improve upon those of Foster et al. (2021) by
accommodating more lenient notions of estimation error. We use this approach to derive regret bounds for
model-free reinforcement learning with value function approximation, and give structural results showing when it can and cannot help more generally.
This paper concerns the structure of learned representations in text-guided generative models, focusing on score-based models. A key property of such models is that they can compose disparate concepts in a 'disentangled' manner.This suggests these models have internal representations that encode concepts in a 'disentangled' manner. Here, we focus on the idea that concepts are encoded as subspaces of some representation space. We formalize what this means, show there's a natural choice for the representation, and develop a simple method for identifying the part of the representation corresponding to a given concept. In particular, this allows us to manipulate the concepts expressed by the model through algebraic manipulation of the representation. We demonstrate the idea with examples using Stable Diffusion.
Conditional stochastic optimization has found applications in a wide range of machine learning tasks, such as invariant learning, AUPRC maximization, and meta-learning. As the demand for training models with large-scale distributed data grows in these applications, there is an increasing need for communication-efficient distributed optimization algorithms, such as federated learning algorithms. This paper considers the nonconvex conditional stochastic optimization in federated learning and proposes the first federated conditional stochastic optimization algorithm (FCSG) with a conditional stochastic gradient estimator and a momentum-based algorithm (\emph{i.e.}, FCSG-M). To match the lower bound complexity in the single-machine setting, we design an accelerated algorithm (Acc-FCSG-M) via the variance reduction to achieve the best sample and communication complexity. Compared with the existing optimization analysis for Meta-Learning in FL, federated conditional stochastic optimization considers the sample of tasks. Extensive experimental results on various tasks validate the efficiency of these algorithms.
tl;dr: A Pairwise Dataset for GUI Conversion and Retrieval between Android Phones and Tablets
In the current landscape of pervasive smartphones and tablets, apps frequently exist across both platforms.
Although apps share most graphic user interfaces (GUIs) and functionalities across phones and tablets, developers often rebuild from scratch for tablet versions, escalating costs and squandering existing design resources.
Researchers are attempting to collect data and employ deep learning in automated GUIs development to enhance developers' productivity.
There are currently several publicly accessible GUI page datasets for phones, but none for pairwise GUIs between phones and tablets.
This poses a significant barrier to the employment of deep learning in automated GUI development.
In this paper, we introduce the Papt dataset, a pioneering pairwise GUI dataset tailored for Android phones and tablets, encompassing 10,035 phone-tablet GUI page pairs sourced from 5,593 unique app pairs.
We propose novel pairwise GUI collection approaches for constructing this dataset and delineate its advantages over currently prevailing datasets in the field.
Through preliminary experiments on this dataset, we analyze the present challenges of utilizing deep learning in automated GUI development.
tl;dr: This paper aims to derive the convergence guarantee of Sequential Federated Learning and compare it with Parallel Federated Learning (FedAvg) theoretically.
There are two categories of methods in Federated Learning (FL) for joint training across multiple clients: i) parallel FL (PFL), where clients train models in a parallel manner; and ii) sequential FL (SFL), where clients train models in a sequential manner. In contrast to that of PFL, the convergence theory of SFL on heterogeneous data is still lacking. In this paper, we establish the convergence guarantees of SFL for strongly/general/non-convex objectives on heterogeneous data. The convergence guarantees of SFL are better than that of PFL on heterogeneous data with both full and partial client participation. Experimental results validate the counterintuitive analysis result that SFL outperforms PFL on extremely heterogeneous data in cross-device settings.
tl;dr: We propose a simple generalization of greedy decision tree learning algorithms which parameterizes the greediness in these algorithms by a parameter $k$, and validate the effectiveness of having this parameter, both theoretically and empirically.
We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they grow a decision tree by iteratively splitting on the best attribute. Our algorithm, Top-$k$, considers the $k$ best attributes as possible splits instead of just the single best attribute. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, the power of this simple generalization. We first prove a greediness hierarchy theorem showing that for every $k\in \mathbb{N}$, Top-$(k+1)$ can be dramatically more powerful than Top-$k$: there are data distributions for which the former achieves accuracy $1-\epsilon$, whereas the latter only achieves accuracy $\frac{1}{2}+\epsilon$. We then show, through extensive experiments, that Top-$k$ outperforms the two main approaches to decision tree learning: classic greedy algorithms and more recent ``optimal decision tree'' algorithms. On one hand, Top-$k$ consistently enjoys significant accuracy gains over greedy algorithms across a wide range of benchmarks. On the other hand, Top-$k$ is markedly more scalable than optimal decision tree algorithms and is able to handle dataset and feature set sizes that remain far beyond the reach of these algorithms. The code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/SullivanC19/pydl8.5-topk.
The key to OOD detection has two aspects: generalized feature representation and precise category description. Recently, vision-language models such as CLIP provide significant advances in both two issues, but constructing precise category descriptions is still in its infancy due to the absence of unseen categories. This work introduces two hierarchical contexts, namely perceptual context and spurious context, to carefully describe the precise category boundary through automatic prompt tuning. Specifically, perceptual contexts perceive the inter-category difference (e.g., cats vs apples) for current classification tasks, while spurious contexts further identify spurious (similar but exactly not) OOD samples for every single category (e.g., cats vs panthers, apples vs peaches). The two contexts hierarchically construct the precise description for a certain category, which is, first roughly classifying a sample to the predicted category and then delicately identifying whether it is truly an ID sample or actually OOD. Moreover, the precise descriptions for those categories within the vision-language framework present a novel application: CATegory-EXtensible OOD detection (CATEX). One can efficiently extend the set of recognizable categories by simply merging the hierarchical contexts learned under different sub-task settings. And extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate CATEX’s effectiveness, robustness, and category-extensibility. For instance, CATEX consistently surpasses the rivals by a large margin with several protocols on the challenging ImageNet-1K dataset. In addition, we offer new insights on how to efficiently scale up the prompt engineering in vision-language models to recognize thousands of object categories, as well as how to incorporate large language models (like GPT-3) to boost zero-shot applications.
1557. FeCAM: Exploiting the Heterogeneity of Class Distributions in Exemplar-Free Continual Learning
Exemplar-free class-incremental learning (CIL) poses several challenges since it prohibits the rehearsal of data from previous tasks and thus suffers from catastrophic forgetting. Recent approaches to incrementally learning the classifier by freezing the feature extractor after the first task have gained much attention. In this paper, we explore prototypical networks for CIL, which generate new class prototypes using the frozen feature extractor and classify the features based on the Euclidean distance to the prototypes. In an analysis of the feature distributions of classes, we show that classification based on Euclidean metrics is successful for jointly trained features. However, when learning from non-stationary data, we observe that the Euclidean metric is suboptimal and that feature distributions are heterogeneous. To address this challenge, we revisit the anisotropic Mahalanobis distance for CIL. In addition, we empirically show that modeling the feature covariance relations is better than previous attempts at sampling features from normal distributions and training a linear classifier. Unlike existing methods, our approach generalizes to both many- and few-shot CIL settings, as well as to domain-incremental settings. Interestingly, without updating the backbone network, our method obtains state-of-the-art results on several standard continual learning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/dipamgoswami/FeCAM.
tl;dr: We present a stable, expressive, and scalable method for graph generative model evaluation based on discrete curvature and topological data analysis.
Graph generative model evaluation necessitates understanding differences between graphs on the distributional level. This entails being able to harness salient attributes of graphs in an efficient manner. Curvature constitutes one such property of graphs, and has recently started to prove useful in characterising graphs. Its expressive properties, stability, and practical utility in model evaluation remain largely unexplored, however. We combine graph curvature descriptors with emerging methods from topological data analysis to obtain robust, expressive descriptors for evaluating graph generative models.
tl;dr: We propose a novel training objective that enforces the network to have consistent predictions.
Imperfect score-matching leads to a shift between the training and the sampling distribution of diffusion models. Due to the recursive nature of the generation process, errors in previous steps yield sampling iterates that drift away from the training distribution. However, the standard training objective via Denoising Score Matching (DSM) is only designed to optimize over non-drifted data. To train on drifted data, we propose to enforce a \emph{Consistency} property (CP) which states that predictions of the model on its own
generated data are consistent across time. Theoretically, we show that the differential equation that describes CP together with the one that describes a conservative vector field, have a unique solution given some initial condition. Consequently, if the score is learned well on non-drifted points via DSM (enforcing the true initial condition) then enforcing CP on drifted points propagates true score values. Empirically, we show that enforcing CP improves the generation quality for conditional and unconditional generation on CIFAR-10, and in AFHQ and FFHQ.
We open-source our code and models: https://github.com/giannisdaras/cdm.
tl;dr: We introduce the task of scene structure understanding with the newly proposed OpenLane-V2 dataset.
Accurately depicting the complex traffic scene is a vital component for autonomous vehicles to execute correct judgments. However, existing benchmarks tend to oversimplify the scene by solely focusing on lane perception tasks. Observing that human drivers rely on both lanes and traffic signals to operate their vehicles safely, we present OpenLane-V2, the first dataset on topology reasoning for traffic scene structure. The objective of the presented dataset is to advance research in understanding the structure of road scenes by examining the relationship between perceived entities, such as traffic elements and lanes. Leveraging existing datasets, OpenLane-V2 consists of 2,000 annotated road scenes that describe traffic elements and their correlation to the lanes. It comprises three primary sub-tasks, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane, accompanied by corresponding metrics to evaluate the model’s performance. We evaluate various state-of-the-art methods, and present their quantitative and qualitative results on OpenLane-V2 to indicate future avenues for investigating topology reasoning in traffic scenes.
tl;dr: This study conducts a large-scale analysis over 1,300 models to investigate when and how existing measures (e.g., margin, smoothness, flatness) are effective in estimating robust generalization.
Adversarial training has become the de-facto standard method for improving the robustness of models against adversarial examples. However, robust overfitting remains a significant challenge, leading to a large gap between the robustness on the training and test datasets. To understand and improve robust generalization, various measures have been developed, including margin, smoothness, and flatness-based measures. In this study, we present a large-scale analysis of robust generalization to empirically verify whether the relationship between these measures and robust generalization remains valid in diverse settings. We demonstrate when and how these measures effectively capture the robust generalization gap by comparing over 1,300 models trained on CIFAR-10 under the $L_\infty$ norm and further validate our findings through an evaluation of more than 100 models from RobustBench across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. We hope this work can help the community better understand adversarial robustness and motivate the development of more robust defense methods against adversarial attacks.
In this work we consider the problem of differentially private computation of
quantiles for the data, especially the highest quantiles such as maximum, but
with an unbounded range for the dataset. We show that this can be done
efficiently through a simple invocation of $\texttt{AboveThreshold}$, a
subroutine that is iteratively called in the fundamental Sparse Vector
Technique, even when there is no upper bound on the data. In particular, we
show that this procedure can give more accurate and robust estimates on the
highest quantiles with applications towards clipping that is essential for
differentially private sum and mean estimation. In addition, we show how two
invocations can handle the fully unbounded data setting. Within our study, we
show that an improved analysis of $\texttt{AboveThreshold}$ can improve the
privacy guarantees for the widely used Sparse Vector Technique that is of
independent interest. We give a more general characterization of privacy loss
for $\texttt{AboveThreshold}$ which we immediately apply to our method for
improved privacy guarantees. Our algorithm only requires one $O(n)$ pass
through the data, which can be unsorted, and each subsequent query takes $O(1)$
time. We empirically compare our unbounded algorithm with the state-of-the-art
algorithms in the bounded setting. For inner quantiles, we find that our method
often performs better on non-synthetic datasets. For the maximal quantiles,
which we apply to differentially private sum computation, we find that our
method performs significantly better.
tl;dr: We present DISCO-10M, a novel and extensive music dataset that surpasses the largest previously available music dataset.
Music datasets play a crucial role in advancing research in machine learning for music. However, existing music datasets suffer from limited size, accessibility, and lack of audio resources. To address these shortcomings, we present DISCO-10M, a novel and extensive music dataset that surpasses the largest previously available music dataset by an order of magnitude. To ensure high-quality data, we implement a multi-stage filtering process. This process incorporates similarities based on textual descriptions and audio embeddings. Moreover, we provide precomputed CLAP embeddings alongside DISCO-10M, facilitating direct application on various downstream tasks. These embeddings enable efficient exploration of machine learning applications on the provided data. With DISCO-10M, we aim to democratize and facilitate new research to help advance the development of novel machine learning models for music: https://huggingface.co/DISCOX
Practical tensor data is often along with time information. Most existing temporal decomposition approaches estimate a set of fixed factors for the objects in each tensor mode, and hence cannot capture the temporal evolution of the objects' representation. More important, we lack an effective approach to capture such evolution from streaming data, which is common in real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose Streaming Factor Trajectory Learning (SFTL) for temporal tensor decomposition. We use Gaussian processes (GPs) to model the trajectory of factors so as to flexibly estimate their temporal evolution. To address the computational challenges in handling streaming data, we convert the GPs into a state-space prior by constructing an equivalent stochastic differential equation (SDE). We develop an efficient online filtering algorithm to estimate a decoupled running posterior of the involved factor states upon receiving new data. The decoupled estimation enables us to conduct standard Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoothing to compute the full posterior of all the trajectories in parallel, without the need for revisiting any previous data. We have shown the advantage of SFTL in both synthetic tasks and real-world applications.
tl;dr: We provide analysis on convergence/divergence criterion for polynomial approximation of GMM entropy.
Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are fundamental to machine learning due to their flexibility as approximating densities. However, uncertainty quantification of GMMs remains a challenge as differential entropy lacks a closed form. This paper explores polynomial approximations, specifically Taylor and Legendre, to the GMM entropy from a theoretical and practical perspective. We provide new analysis of a widely used approach due to Huber et al.(2008) and show that the series diverges under simple conditions. Motivated by this divergence we provide a novel Taylor series that is provably convergent to the true entropy of any GMM. We demonstrate a method for selecting a center such that the series converges from below, providing a lower bound on GMM entropy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that orthogonal polynomial series result in more accurate polynomial approximations. Experimental validation supports our theoretical results while showing that our method is comparable in computation to Huber et al. We also show that in application, the use of these polynomial approximations, such as in Nonparametric Variational Inference by Gershamn et al. (2012), rely on the convergence of the methods in computing accurate approximations. This work contributes useful analysis to existing methods while introducing a novel approximation supported by firm theoretical guarantees.
Several problems have been extensively studied in the learning-augmented setting, where the algorithm has access to some, possibly incorrect, predictions. However, it is assumed in most works that the predictions are provided to the algorithm as input, with no constraint on their size. In this paper, we consider algorithms with access to a limited number of predictions, that they can request at any time during their execution. We study three classical problems in competitive analysis, the ski rental problem, the secretary problem, and the non-clairvoyant job scheduling. We address the question of when to query predictions and how to use them.
We consider the problem of Imitation Learning (IL) by actively querying noisy expert for feedback. While imitation learning has been empirically successful, much of prior work assumes access to noiseless expert feedback which is not practical in many applications. In fact, when one only has access to noisy expert feedback, algorithms that rely on purely offline data (non-interactive IL) can be shown to need a prohibitively large number of samples to be successful. In contrast, in this work, we provide an interactive algorithm for IL that uses selective sampling to actively query the noisy expert for feedback. Our contributions are twofold: First, we provide a new selective sampling algorithm that works with general function classes and multiple actions, and obtains the best-known bounds for the regret and the number of queries. Next, we extend this analysis to the problem of IL with noisy expert feedback and provide a new IL algorithm that makes limited queries.
Our algorithm for selective sampling leverages function approximation, and relies on an online regression oracle w.r.t.~the given model class to predict actions, and to decide whether to query the expert for its label. On the theoretical side, the regret bound of our algorithm is upper bounded by the regret of the online regression oracle, while the query complexity additionally depends on the eluder dimension of the model class. We complement this with a lower bound that demonstrates that our results are tight. We extend our selective sampling algorithm for IL with general function approximation and provide bounds on both the regret and the number of queries made to the noisy expert. A key novelty here is that our regret and query complexity bounds only depend on the number of times the optimal policy (and not the noisy expert, or the learner) go to states that have a small margin.
This paper focuses on improving the reconstruction of 2D floorplans from unstructured 3D point clouds. We identify opportunities for enhancement over the existing methods in three main areas: semantic quality, efficient representation, and local geometric details. To address these, we presents SLIBO-Net, an innovative approach to reconstructing 2D floorplans from unstructured 3D point clouds. We propose a novel transformer-based architecture that employs an efficient floorplan representation, providing improved room shape supervision and allowing for manageable token numbers. By incorporating geometric priors as a regularization mechanism and post-processing step, we enhance the capture of local geometric details. We also propose a scale-independent evaluation metric, correcting the discrepancy in error treatment between varying floorplan sizes. Our approach notably achieves a new state-of-the-art on the Structure3D dataset. The resultant floorplans exhibit enhanced semantic plausibility, substantially improving the overall quality and realism of the reconstructions. Our code and dataset are available online.
tl;dr: A theoretical framework for analyzing the data requirements of unsupervised machine translation, making minimal assumptions on the source language.
Neural networks are capable of translating between languages—in some cases even between two languages where there is little or no access to parallel translations, in what is known as Unsupervised Machine Translation (UMT). Given this progress, it is intriguing to ask whether machine learning tools can ultimately enable understanding animal communication, particularly that of highly intelligent
animals. We propose a theoretical framework for analyzing UMT when no parallel translations are available and when it cannot be assumed that the source and target corpora address related subject domains or posses similar linguistic structure. We
exemplify this theory with two stylized models of language, for which our framework provides bounds on necessary sample complexity; the bounds are formally proven and experimentally verified on synthetic data. These bounds show that the error rates are inversely related to the language complexity and amount of common ground. This suggests that unsupervised translation of animal communication may be feasible if the communication system is sufficiently complex.
We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given given access to a natural quantum generalization of a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension versus accuracy trade-off which is provably unachievable classically and we prove that one method is asymptotically optimal in low-dimensional settings. Additionally, we provide quantum algorithms for computing a critical point of a smooth non-convex function at rates not known to be achievable classically. To obtain these results we build upon the quantum multivariate mean estimation result of Cornelissen et al. and provide a general quantum variance reduction technique of independent interest.
1571. k-Median Clustering via Metric Embedding: Towards Better Initialization with Differential Privacy
In clustering algorithms, the choice of initial centers is crucial for the quality of the learned clusters. We propose a new initialization scheme for the $k$-median problem in the general metric space (e.g., discrete space induced by graphs), based on the construction of metric embedding tree structure of the data. We propose a novel and efficient search algorithm, for good initial centers that can be used subsequently for the local search algorithm. The so-called HST initialization method can produce initial centers achieving lower error than those from another popular method $k$-median++, also with higher efficiency when $k$ is not too small. Our HST initialization can also be easily extended to the setting of differential privacy (DP) to generate private initial centers. We show that the error of applying DP local search followed by our private HST initialization improves previous results on the approximation error, and approaches the lower bound within a small factor. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
tl;dr: We demonstrate that the optimization landscape of continuous state-space MDPs can be fractal, particularly when the underlying dynamics are chaotic.
Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control problems with known solutions. We propose a framework for understanding one inherent limitation of the policy gradient approach: the optimization landscape in the policy space can be extremely non-smooth or fractal for certain classes of MDPs, such that there does not exist gradient to be estimated in the first place. We draw on techniques from chaos theory and non-smooth analysis, and analyze the maximal Lyapunov exponents and H\"older exponents of the policy optimization objectives. Moreover, we develop a practical method that can estimate the local smoothness of objective function from samples to identify when the training process has encountered fractal landscapes. We show experiments to illustrate how some failure cases of policy optimization can be explained by such fractal landscapes.
tl;dr: First large-scale benchamrk dataset and a recovery method for visually damaged videos caused by corrupted bitstream in the real world.
The past decade has witnessed great strides in video recovery by specialist technologies, like video inpainting, completion, and error concealment. However, they typically simulate the missing content by manual-designed error masks, thus failing to fill in the realistic video loss in video communication (e.g., telepresence, live streaming, and internet video) and multimedia forensics. To address this, we introduce the bitstream-corrupted video (BSCV) benchmark, the first benchmark dataset with more than 28,000 video clips, which can be used for bitstream-corrupted video recovery in the real world. The BSCV is a collection of 1) a proposed three-parameter corruption model for video bitstream, 2) a large-scale dataset containing rich error patterns, multiple corruption levels, and flexible dataset branches, and 3) a new video recovery framework that serves as a benchmark. We evaluate state-of-the-art video inpainting methods on the BSCV dataset, demonstrating existing approaches' limitations and our framework's advantages in solving the bitstream-corrupted video recovery problem. The benchmark and dataset are released at https://github.com/LIUTIGHE/BSCV-Dataset.
Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and details information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point. Additionally, we design a Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (MFA) module with a Distortion-aware Block (DAB) to fuse distorted and semantic features of each viewport. We also devise Temporal Modeling Module (TMM) to learn the viewport transition in the temporal domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Assessor360 outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple OIQA datasets. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TianheWu/Assessor360.
1575. Reimagining Synthetic Tabular Data Generation through Data-Centric AI: A Comprehensive Benchmark
tl;dr: This paper proposes integrating data-centric AI into synthetic data generation, offering a new framework and practical recommendations based on an evaluation of state-of-the-art tabular data generation models.
Synthetic data serves as an alternative in training machine learning models, particularly when real-world data is limited or inaccessible. However, ensuring that synthetic data mirrors the complex nuances of real-world data is a challenging task. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the potential of integrating data-centric AI techniques which profile the data to guide the synthetic data generation process. Moreover, we shed light on the often ignored consequences of neglecting these data profiles during synthetic data generation --- despite seemingly high statistical fidelity. Subsequently, we propose a novel framework to evaluate the integration of data profiles to guide the creation of more representative synthetic data. In an empirical study, we evaluate the performance of five state-of-the-art models for tabular data generation on eleven distinct tabular datasets. The findings offer critical insights into the successes and limitations of current synthetic data generation techniques. Finally, we provide practical recommendations for integrating data-centric insights into the synthetic data generation process, with a specific focus on classification performance, model selection, and feature selection. This study aims to reevaluate conventional approaches to synthetic data generation and promote the application of data-centric AI techniques in improving the quality and effectiveness of synthetic data.
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is important for closing the gap between offline training and evaluation of reinforcement learning (RL), by estimating performance and/or rank of target (evaluation) policies using offline trajectories only. It can improve the safety and efficiency of data collection and policy testing procedures in situations where online deployments are expensive, such as healthcare. However, existing OPE methods fall short in estimating human feedback (HF) signals, as HF may be conditioned over multiple underlying factors and are only sparsely available; as opposed to the agent-defined environmental rewards (used in policy optimization), which are usually determined over parametric functions or distributions. Consequently, the nature of HF signals makes extrapolating accurate OPE estimations to be challenging. To resolve this, we introduce an OPE for HF (OPEHF) framework that revives existing OPE methods in order to accurately evaluate the HF signals. Specifically, we develop an immediate human reward (IHR) reconstruction approach, regularized by environmental knowledge distilled in a latent space that captures the underlying dynamics of state transitions as well as issuing HF signals. Our approach has been tested over *two real-world experiments*, adaptive *in-vivo* neurostimulation and intelligent tutoring, and a simulation environment (visual Q&A). Results show that our approach significantly improves the performance toward estimating HF signals accurately, compared to directly applying (variants of) existing OPE methods.
tl;dr: We address the speed-accuracy trade-off in simulating recurrent ALIF SNNs, achieving up to a 50x training speedup and enabling quick and accurate fitting of real neural recordings on sub-millisecond timescales.
The adaptive leaky integrate-and-fire (ALIF) model is fundamental within computational neuroscience and has been instrumental in studying our brains $\textit{in silico}$. Due to the sequential nature of simulating these neural models, a commonly faced issue is the speed-accuracy trade-off: either accurately simulate a neuron using a small discretisation time-step (DT), which is slow, or more quickly simulate a neuron using a larger DT and incur a loss in simulation accuracy. Here we provide a solution to this dilemma, by algorithmically reinterpreting the ALIF model, reducing the sequential simulation complexity and permitting a more efficient parallelisation on GPUs. We computationally validate our implementation to obtain over a $50\times$ training speedup using small DTs on synthetic benchmarks. We also obtained a comparable performance to the standard ALIF implementation on different supervised classification tasks - yet in a fraction of the training time. Lastly, we showcase how our model makes it possible to quickly and accurately fit real electrophysiological recordings of cortical neurons, where very fine sub-millisecond DTs are crucial for capturing exact spike timing.
tl;dr: A comprehensive benchmark for deepfake detection, with a unified data management module, standard evaluations, and a modular code base, a series of analysis tools and new insights.
A critical yet frequently overlooked challenge in the field of deepfake detection is the lack of a standardized, unified, comprehensive benchmark. This issue leads to unfair performance comparisons and potentially misleading results. Specifically, there is a lack of uniformity in data processing pipelines, resulting in inconsistent data inputs for detection models. Additionally, there are noticeable differences in experimental settings, and evaluation strategies and metrics lack standardization. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for deepfake detection, called \textit{DeepfakeBench}, which offers three key contributions: 1) a unified data management system to ensure consistent input across all detectors, 2) an integrated framework for state-of-the-art methods implementation, and 3) standardized evaluation metrics and protocols to promote transparency and reproducibility. Featuring an extensible, modular-based codebase, \textit{DeepfakeBench} contains 15 state-of-the-art detection methods, 9 deepfake datasets, a series of deepfake detection evaluation protocols and analysis tools, as well as comprehensive evaluations. Moreover, we provide new insights based on extensive analysis of these evaluations from various perspectives (\eg, data augmentations, backbones). We hope that our efforts could facilitate future research and foster innovation in this increasingly critical domain. All codes, evaluations, and analyses of our benchmark are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/SCLBD/DeepfakeBench}.
tl;dr: In this paper, we establish a connection between the parameterization of flow-based and energy-based models, and present a new flow-based modeling approach called energy-based normalizing flow (EBFlow).
In this paper, we establish a connection between the parameterization of flow-based and energy-based generative models, and present a new flow-based modeling approach called energy-based normalizing flow (EBFlow). We demonstrate that by optimizing EBFlow with score-matching objectives, the computation of Jacobian determinants for linear transformations can be entirely bypassed. This feature enables the use of arbitrary linear layers in the construction of flow-based models without increasing the computational time complexity of each training iteration from $\mathcal{O}(D^2L)$ to $\mathcal{O}(D^3L)$ for an $L$-layered model that accepts $D$-dimensional inputs. This makes the training of EBFlow more efficient than the commonly-adopted maximum likelihood training method. In addition to the reduction in runtime, we enhance the training stability and empirical performance of EBFlow through a number of techniques developed based on our analysis of the score-matching methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant speedup compared to maximum likelihood estimation while outperforming prior methods with a noticeable margin in terms of negative log-likelihood (NLL).
tl;dr: We present a framework that unifies GANs and score-based diffusion models, allowing us to train a diffusion model that integrates a generator, and a GAN without a generator.
Particle-based deep generative models, such as gradient flows and score-based diffusion models, have recently gained traction thanks to their striking performance. Their principle of displacing particle distributions using differential equations is conventionally seen as opposed to the previously widespread generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve training a pushforward generator network. In this paper we challenge this interpretation, and propose a novel framework that unifies particle and adversarial generative models by framing generator training as a generalization of particle models. This suggests that a generator is an optional addition to any such generative model. Consequently, integrating a generator into a score-based diffusion model and training a GAN without a generator naturally emerge from our framework. We empirically test the viability of these original models as proofs of concepts of potential applications of our framework.
tl;dr: We prove that resources to compute gradients of parameterized quantum models will not scale as efficiently as neural networks equipped with backpropagation, by reduction to a well-known problem in quantum information theory.
The success of modern deep learning hinges on the ability to train neural networks at scale. Through clever reuse of intermediate information, backpropagation facilitates training through gradient computation at a total cost roughly proportional to running the function, rather than incurring an additional factor proportional to the number of parameters -- which can now be in the trillions. Naively, one expects that quantum measurement collapse entirely rules out the reuse of quantum information as in backpropagation. But recent developments in shadow tomography, which assumes access to multiple copies of a quantum state, have challenged that notion. Here, we investigate whether parameterized quantum models can train as efficiently as classical neural networks. We show that achieving backpropagation scaling is impossible without access to multiple copies of a state. With this added ability, we introduce an algorithm with foundations in shadow tomography that matches backpropagation scaling in quantum resources while reducing classical auxiliary computational costs to open problems in shadow tomography. These results highlight the nuance of reusing quantum information for practical purposes and clarify the unique difficulties in training large quantum models, which could alter the course of quantum machine learning.
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging task, as agents must learn complex and diverse individual strategies from a shared team reward. However, existing methods struggle to distinguish and exploit important individual experiences, as they lack an effective way to decompose the team reward into individual rewards. To address this challenge, we propose DIFFER, a powerful theoretical framework for decomposing individual rewards to enable fair experience replay in MARL.
By enforcing the invariance of network gradients, we establish a partial differential equation whose solution yields the underlying individual reward function. The individual TD-error can then be computed from the solved closed-form individual rewards, indicating the importance of each piece of experience in the learning task and guiding the training process. Our method elegantly achieves an equivalence to the original learning framework when individual experiences are homogeneous, while also adapting to achieve more muscular efficiency and fairness when diversity is observed.
Our extensive experiments on popular benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our theory and method, demonstrating significant improvements in learning efficiency and fairness.
Code is available in supplement material.
Minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) and robot-assisted minimally invasive (RAMIS) surgery offer well-documented benefits to patients such as reduced post-operative pain and shorter hospital stays.
However, the automation of MIS and RAMIS through the use of AI has been slow due to difficulties in data acquisition and curation, partially caused by the ethical considerations of training, testing and deploying AI models in medical environments.
We introduce \texttt{SARAMIS}, the first large-scale dataset of anatomically derived 3D rendering assets of the human abdominal anatomy.
Using previously existing, open-source CT datasets of the human anatomy, we derive novel 3D meshes, tetrahedral volumes, textures and diffuse maps for over 104 different anatomical targets in the human body, representing the largest, open-source dataset of 3D rendering assets for synthetic simulation of vision tasks in MIS+RAMIS, increasing the availability of openly available 3D meshes in the literature by three orders of magnitude.
We supplement our dataset with a series of GPU-enabled rendering environments, which can be used to generate datasets for realistic MIS/RAMIS tasks.
Finally, we present an example of the use of \texttt{SARAMIS} assets for an autonomous navigation task in colonoscopy from CT abdomen-pelvis scans for the first time in the literature.
\texttt{SARAMIS} is publically made available at https://github.com/NMontanaBrown/saramis/, with assets released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
Multi-marginal Optimal Transport (mOT), a generalization of OT, aims at minimizing the integral of a cost function with respect to a distribution with some prescribed marginals. In this paper, we consider an entropic version of mOT
with a tree-structured quadratic cost, i.e., a function that can be written as
a sum of pairwise cost functions between the nodes of a tree. To address this
problem, we develop Tree-based Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge (TreeDSB), an
extension of the Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge (DSB) algorithm. TreeDSB
corresponds to a dynamic and continuous state-space counterpart of the
multimarginal Sinkhorn algorithm. A notable use case of our methodology is to
compute Wasserstein barycenters which can be recast as the solution of a mOT
problem on a star-shaped tree. We demonstrate that our methodology can be applied in high-dimensional settings such as image interpolation and
Bayesian fusion.
Learning representations on large-sized graphs is a long-standing challenge due to the inter-dependence nature involved in massive data points. Transformers, as an emerging class of foundation encoders for graph-structured data, have shown promising performance on small graphs due to its global attention capable of capturing all-pair influence beyond neighboring nodes. Even so, existing approaches tend to inherit the spirit of Transformers in language and vision tasks, and embrace complicated models by stacking deep multi-head attentions. In this paper, we critically demonstrate that even using a one-layer attention can bring up surprisingly competitive performance across node property prediction benchmarks where node numbers range from thousand-level to billion-level. This encourages us to rethink the design philosophy for Transformers on large graphs, where the global attention is a computation overhead hindering the scalability. We frame the proposed scheme as Simplified Graph Transformers (SGFormer), which is empowered by a simple attention model that can efficiently propagate information among arbitrary nodes in one layer. SGFormer requires none of positional encodings, feature/graph pre-processing or augmented loss. Empirically, SGFormer successfully scales to the web-scale graph ogbn-papers100M and yields up to 141x inference acceleration over SOTA Transformers on medium-sized graphs. Beyond current results, we believe the proposed methodology alone enlightens a new technical path of independent interest for building Transformers on large graphs.
In this work we revisit the most fundamental building block in deep learning, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and study the limits of its performance on vision tasks. Empirical insights into MLPs are important for multiple reasons. (1) Given the recent narrative "less inductive bias is better", popularized due to transformers eclipsing convolutional models, it is natural to explore the limits of this hypothesis. To that end, MLPs offer an ideal test bed, as they lack any vision-specific inductive bias. (2) MLPs have almost exclusively been the main protagonist in the deep learning theory literature due to their mathematical simplicity, serving as a proxy to explain empirical phenomena observed for more complex architectures. Surprisingly, experimental datapoints for MLPs are very difficult to find in the literature, especially when coupled with large pre-training protocols. This discrepancy between practice and theory is worrying: \textit{Do MLPs reflect the empirical advances exhibited by practical models?} Or do theorists need to rethink the role of MLPs as a proxy? We provide insights into both these aspects.
We show that the performance of MLPs drastically improves with scale (95% on CIFAR10, 82% on CIFAR100, 58% on ImageNet ReaL), highlighting that lack of inductive bias can indeed be compensated. We observe that MLPs mimic the behaviour of their modern counterparts faithfully, with some components in the learning setting however exhibiting stronger or unexpected behaviours. Due to their inherent computational efficiency, large pre-training experiments become more accessible for academic researchers. All of our experiments were run on a single GPU.
1587. Active Bipartite Ranking
tl;dr: In this paper, we develop an active learning framework for the bipartite ranking problem.
In this paper, we develop an active learning framework for the bipartite ranking problem.
Motivated by numerous applications, ranging from supervised anomaly detection to credit-scoring through the design of medical diagnosis support systems, and usually formulated as the problem of optimizing (a scalar summary of) the ROC curve, bipartite ranking has been the subject of much attention in the passive context. Various dedicated algorithms have been recently proposed and studied by the machine-learning community. In contrast, active bipartite ranking rule is poorly documented in the literature. Due to its global nature, a strategy for labeling sequentially data points that are difficult to rank w.r.t. to the others is required. This learning task is much more complex than binary classification, for which many active algorithms have been designed. It is the goal of this article to provide a rigorous formulation of such a selective sampling approach. We propose a dedicated algorithm, referred to as active-rank, which aims to minimise the distance between the ROC curve of the ranking function built and the optimal one, w.r.t. the sup norm. We show that, for a fixed confidence level $\epsilon$ and probability $\delta$, active-rank is PAC$(\epsilon,\delta)$. In addition, we provide a problem dependent upper bound on the expected sampling time of active-rank and also demonstrate a problem dependent lower bound on the expected sampling time of any PAC$(\epsilon,\delta)$ algorithm. Beyond the theoretical analysis carried out, numerical results are presented, providing strong empirical evidence of the performance of the algorithm proposed, which compares favorably with more naive approaches.
tl;dr: We bridge Neural ODEs and Deep Equilibrium Models via homotopy continuation and propose a new implicit model called HomoODE that inherits the property of high accuracy from DEQs and the property of stability from Neural ODEs.
Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) are two branches of implicit models that have achieved remarkable success owing to their superior performance and low memory consumption. While both are implicit models, DEQs and Neural ODEs are derived from different mathematical formulations. Inspired by homotopy continuation, we establish a connection between these two models and illustrate that they are actually two sides of the same coin. Homotopy continuation is a classical method of solving nonlinear equations based on a corresponding ODE. Given this connection, we proposed a new implicit model called HomoODE that inherits the property of high accuracy from DEQs and the property of stability from Neural ODEs. Unlike DEQs, which explicitly solve an equilibrium-point-finding problem via Newton's methods in the forward pass, HomoODE solves the equilibrium-point-finding problem implicitly using a modified Neural ODE via homotopy continuation. Further, we developed an acceleration method for HomoODE with a shared learnable initial point. It is worth noting that our model also provides a better understanding of why Augmented Neural ODEs work as long as the augmented part is regarded as the equilibrium point to find. Comprehensive experiments with several image classification tasks demonstrate that HomoODE surpasses existing implicit models in terms of both accuracy and memory consumption.
tl;dr: We present a new benchmark for privacy-preserving action recognition and demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel strategy.
Pre-training on massive video datasets has become essential to achieve high action recognition performance on smaller downstream datasets. However, most large-scale video datasets contain images of people and hence are accompanied with issues related to privacy, ethics, and data protection, often preventing them from being publicly shared for reproducible research. Existing work has attempted to alleviate these problems by blurring faces, downsampling videos, or training on synthetic data. On the other hand, analysis on the {\em transferability} of privacy-preserving pre-trained models to downstream tasks has been limited. In this work, we study this problem by first asking the question: can we pre-train models for human action recognition with data that does not include real humans? To this end, we present, for the first time, a benchmark that leverages real-world videos with {\em humans removed} and synthetic data containing virtual humans to pre-train a model. We then evaluate the transferability of the representation learned on this data to a diverse set of downstream action recognition benchmarks. Furthermore, we propose a novel pre-training strategy, called Privacy-Preserving MAE-Align, to effectively combine synthetic data and human-removed real data.
Our approach outperforms previous baselines by up to 5\% and closes the performance gap between human and no-human action recognition representations on downstream tasks, for both linear probing and fine-tuning. Our benchmark, code, and models are available at https://github.com/howardzh01/PPMA.
tl;dr: We show that object detectors and other vision models can be used for fine-grained evaluation of text-to-image models on complex generation tasks.
Recent breakthroughs in diffusion models, multimodal pretraining, and efficient finetuning have led to an explosion of text-to-image generative models.
Given human evaluation is expensive and difficult to scale, automated methods are critical for evaluating the increasingly large number of new models.
However, most current automated evaluation metrics like FID or CLIPScore only offer a distribution-level measure of image quality or image-text alignment, and are unsuited for fine-grained or instance-level analysis.
In this paper, we introduce GenEval, an object-focused framework to evaluate compositional image properties such as object co-occurrence, position, count, and color.
We show that current object detection models can be leveraged to evaluate text-to-image models on a variety of generation tasks with strong human agreement, and that other discriminative vision models can be linked to this pipeline to further verify properties like object color.
We then evaluate several open-source text-to-image models and analyze their relative reasoning capabilities on our benchmark.
We find that recent models demonstrate significant improvement on these tasks, though they are still lacking in complex capabilities such as spatial relations and attribute binding.
Finally, we demonstrate how GenEval might be used to help discover existing failure modes, in order to inform development of the next generation of text-to-image models.
Our code to run the GenEval framework will be made publicly available at https://github.com/djghosh13/geneval.
tl;dr: We revisit the heavy-tail phenomenon and report the overlooked power-law covariance structure of stochastic gradients.
Stochastic gradients closely relate to both optimization and generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs). Some works attempted to explain the success of stochastic optimization for deep learning by the arguably heavy-tail properties of gradient noise, while other works presented theoretical and empirical evidence against the heavy-tail hypothesis on gradient noise. Unfortunately, formal statistical tests for analyzing the structure and heavy tails of stochastic gradients in deep learning are still under-explored. In this paper, we mainly make two contributions. First, we conduct formal statistical tests on the distribution of stochastic gradients and gradient noise across both parameters and iterations. Our statistical tests reveal that dimension-wise gradients usually exhibit power-law heavy tails, while iteration-wise gradients and stochastic gradient noise caused by minibatch training usually do not exhibit power-law heavy tails. Second, we further discover that the covariance spectra of stochastic gradients have the power-law structures overlooked by previous studies and present its theoretical implications for training of DNNs. While previous studies believed that the anisotropic structure of stochastic gradients matters to deep learning, they did not expect the gradient covariance can have such an elegant mathematical structure. Our work challenges the existing belief and provides novel insights on the structure of stochastic gradients in deep learning.
tl;dr: We introduce ProteinGym - a large-scale set of benchmarks specifically designed for protein engineering and fitness prediction
Predicting the effects of mutations in proteins is critical to many applications, from understanding genetic disease to designing novel proteins to address our most pressing challenges in climate, agriculture and healthcare. Despite an increase in machine learning-based protein modeling methods, assessing their effectiveness is problematic due to the use of distinct, often contrived, experimental datasets and variable performance across different protein families. Addressing these challenges requires scale. To that end we introduce ProteinGym v1.0, a large-scale and holistic set of benchmarks specifically designed for protein fitness prediction and design. It encompasses both a broad collection of over 250 standardized deep mutational scanning assays, spanning millions of mutated sequences, as well as curated clinical datasets providing high-quality expert annotations about mutation effects. We devise a robust evaluation framework that combines metrics for both fitness prediction and design, factors in known limitations of the underlying experimental methods, and covers both zero-shot and supervised settings. We report the performance of a diverse set of over 40 high-performing models from various subfields (eg., mutation effects, inverse folding) into a unified benchmark. We open source the corresponding codebase, datasets, MSAs, structures, predictions and develop a user-friendly website that facilitates comparisons across all settings.
tl;dr: This paper introduces Auto-STPP, a novel paradigm that extends the AutoInt approach to 3D STPP, and showcases its significant advantages in recovering complex intensity functions from irregular spatiotemporal events.
Learning continuous-time point processes is essential to many discrete event forecasting tasks. However, integration poses a major challenge, particularly for spatiotemporal point processes (STPPs), as it involves calculating the likelihood through triple integrals over space and time. Existing methods for integrating STPP either assume a parametric form of the intensity function, which lacks flexibility; or approximating the intensity with Monte Carlo sampling, which introduces numerical errors. Recent work by Omi et al. proposes a dual network approach for efficient integration of flexible intensity function. However, their method only focuses on the 1D temporal point process. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm: `Auto-STPP` (Automatic Integration for Spatiotemporal Neural Point Processes) that extends the dual network approach to 3D STPP. While previous work provides a foundation, its direct extension overly restricts the intensity function and leads to computational challenges. In response, we introduce a decomposable parametrization for the integral network using ProdNet. This approach, leveraging the product of simplified univariate graphs, effectively sidesteps the computational complexities inherent in multivariate computational graphs. We prove the consistency of `Auto-STPP` and validate it on synthetic data and benchmark real-world datasets. `Auto-STPP` shows a significant advantage in recovering complex intensity functions from irregular spatiotemporal events, particularly when the intensity is sharply localized. Our code is open-source at https://github.com/Rose-STL-Lab/AutoSTPP.
Real-world optimization problems often require black-box optimization with observation failure, where we can obtain the objective function value if we succeed, otherwise, we can only obtain a fact of failure. Moreover, this failure region can be complex by several latent constraints, whose number is also unknown. For this problem, we propose a failure-aware Gaussian process upper confidence bound (F-GP-UCB), which only requires a mild assumption for the observation failure that an optimal solution lies on an interior of a feasible region. Furthermore, we show that the number of successful observations grows linearly, by which we provide the first regret upper bounds and the convergence of F-GP-UCB. We demonstrate the effectiveness of F-GP-UCB in several benchmark functions, including the simulation function motivated by material synthesis experiments.
Under Display Camera (UDC) is a novel imaging system that mounts a digital camera lens beneath a display panel with the panel covering the camera. However, the display panel causes severe degradation to captured images, such as low transmittance, blur, noise, and flare. The restoration of UDC-degraded images is challenging because of the unique luminance and diverse patterns of flares. Existing UDC dataset studies focus on unrealistic or synthetic UDC degradation rather than real-world UDC images. In this paper, we propose a real-world UDC dataset called UDC-SIT. To obtain the non-degraded and UDC-degraded images for the same scene, we propose an image-capturing system and an image alignment technique that exploits discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to align a pair of captured images. UDC-SIT also includes comprehensive annotations missing from other UDC datasets, such as light source, day/night, indoor/outdoor, and flare components (e.g., shimmers, streaks, and glares). We compare UDC-SIT with four existing representative UDC datasets and present the problems with existing UDC datasets. To show UDC-SIT's effectiveness, we compare UDC-SIT and a representative synthetic UDC dataset using four representative learnable image restoration models. The result indicates that the models trained with the synthetic UDC dataset are impractical because the synthetic UDC dataset does not reflect the actual characteristics of UDC-degraded images. UDC-SIT can enable further exploration in the UDC image restoration area and provide better insights into the problem. UDC-SIT is available at: https://github.com/mcrl/UDC-SIT.
tl;dr: We propose a multi-agent collaborative perception framework for autonomous driving scenarios to achieve a trade-off between perception performance and communication bandwidth.
Multi-agent collaborative perception has recently received widespread attention as an emerging application in driving scenarios. Despite the advancements in previous efforts, challenges remain due to various noises in the perception procedure, including communication redundancy, transmission delay, and collaboration heterogeneity. To tackle these issues, we propose \textit{How2comm}, a collaborative perception framework that seeks a trade-off between perception performance and communication bandwidth. Our novelties lie in three aspects. First, we devise a mutual information-aware communication mechanism to maximally sustain the informative features shared by collaborators. The spatial-channel filtering is adopted to perform effective feature sparsification for efficient communication. Second, we present a flow-guided delay compensation strategy to predict future characteristics from collaborators and eliminate feature misalignment due to temporal asynchrony. Ultimately, a pragmatic collaboration transformer is introduced to integrate holistic spatial semantics and temporal context clues among agents. Our framework is thoroughly evaluated on several LiDAR-based collaborative detection datasets in real-world and simulated scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of How2comm and the effectiveness of all its vital components. The code will be released at https://github.com/ydk122024/How2comm.
With growing concerns regarding privacy in machine learning models, regulations have committed to granting individuals the right to be forgotten while mandating companies to develop non-discriminatory machine learning systems, thereby fueling the study of the machine unlearning problem. Our attention is directed toward a practical unlearning scenario, i.e., recommendation unlearning. As the state-of-the-art framework, i.e., RecEraser, naturally achieves full unlearning completeness, our objective is to enhance it in terms of model utility and unlearning efficiency. In this paper, we rethink RecEraser from an ensemble-based perspective and focus on its three potential losses, i.e., redundancy, relevance, and combination. Under the theoretical guidance of the above three losses, we propose a new framework named UltraRE, which simplifies and powers RecEraser for recommendation tasks. Specifically, for redundancy loss, we incorporate transport weights in the clustering algorithm to optimize the equilibrium between collaboration and balance while enhancing efficiency; for relevance loss, we ensure that sub-models reach convergence on their respective group data; for combination loss, we simplify the combination estimator without compromising its efficacy. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UltraRE.
tl;dr: Integration of a unique individual into the diffusion model using just one facial photograph and only 1024 learnable parameters under 3 minutes
Exquisite demand exists for customizing the pretrained large text-to-image model, $e.g.$ Stable Diffusion, to generate innovative concepts, such as the users themselves. However, the newly-added concept from previous customization methods often shows weaker combination abilities than the original ones even given several images during training. We thus propose a new personalization method that allows for the seamless integration of a unique individual into the pre-trained diffusion model using just $one\ facial\ photograph$ and only $1024\ learnable\ parameters$ under $3\ minutes$. So we can effortlessly generate stunning images of this person in any pose or position, interacting with anyone and doing anything imaginable from text prompts. To achieve this, we first analyze and build a well-defined celeb basis from the embedding space of the pre-trained large text encoder. Then, given one facial photo as the target identity, we generate its own embedding by optimizing the weight of this basis and locking all other parameters. Empowered by the proposed celeb basis, the new identity in our customized model showcases a better concept combination ability than previous personalization methods. Besides, our model can also learn several new identities at once and interact with each other where the previous customization model fails to. Project page is at: http://celeb-basis.github.io. Code is at: https://github.com/ygtxr1997/CelebBasis.
1599. Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Super-Resolution with Second-Order Degradation and Reconstruction
tl;dr: we propose an efficient test-time adaptation method to alleviate the degradation shift issue for image super-resolution.
Image super-resolution (SR) aims to learn a mapping from low-resolution (LR) to high-resolution (HR) using paired HR-LR training images. Conventional SR methods typically gather the paired training data by synthesizing LR images from HR images using a predetermined degradation model, e.g., Bicubic down-sampling. However, the realistic degradation type of test images may mismatch with the training-time degradation type due to the dynamic changes of the real-world scenarios, resulting in inferior-quality SR images. To address this, existing methods attempt to estimate the degradation model and train an image-specific model, which, however, is quite time-consuming and impracticable to handle rapidly changing domain shifts. Moreover, these methods largely concentrate on the estimation of one degradation type (e.g., blur degradation), overlooking other degradation types like noise and JPEG in real-world test-time scenarios, thus limiting their practicality. To tackle these problems, we present an efficient test-time adaptation framework for SR, named SRTTA, which is able to quickly adapt SR models to test domains with different/unknown degradation types. Specifically, we design a second-order degradation scheme to construct paired data based on the degradation type of the test image, which is predicted by a pre-trained degradation classifier. Then, we adapt the SR model by implementing feature-level reconstruction learning from the initial test image to its second-order degraded counterparts, which helps the SR model generate plausible HR images. Extensive experiments are conducted on newly synthesized corrupted DIV2K datasets with 8 different degradations and several real-world datasets, demonstrating that our SRTTA framework achieves an impressive improvement over existing methods with satisfying speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/DengZeshuai/SRTTA.
The scarcity of data presents a critical obstacle to the efficacy of medical vision-language pre-training (VLP). A potential solution lies in the combination of datasets from various language communities.
Nevertheless, the main challenge stems from the complexity of integrating diverse syntax and semantics, language-specific medical terminology, and culture-specific implicit knowledge. Therefore, one crucial aspect to consider is the presence of community bias caused by different languages.
This paper presents a novel framework named Unifying Cross-Lingual Medical Vision-Language Pre-Training (\textbf{Med-UniC}), designed to integrate multi-modal medical data from the two most prevalent languages, English and Spanish.
Specifically, we propose \textbf{C}ross-lingual \textbf{T}ext Alignment \textbf{R}egularization (\textbf{CTR}) to explicitly unify cross-lingual semantic representations of medical reports originating from diverse language communities.
\textbf{CTR} is optimized through latent language disentanglement, rendering our optimization objective to not depend on negative samples, thereby significantly mitigating the bias from determining positive-negative sample pairs within analogous medical reports. Furthermore, it ensures that the cross-lingual representation is not biased toward any specific language community.
\textbf{Med-UniC} reaches superior performance across 5 medical image tasks and 10 datasets encompassing over 30 diseases, offering a versatile framework for unifying multi-modal medical data within diverse linguistic communities.
The experimental outcomes highlight the presence of community bias in cross-lingual VLP. Reducing this bias enhances the performance not only in vision-language tasks but also in uni-modal visual tasks.
Tensor decomposition is an important tool for multiway data analysis. In practice, the data is often sparse yet associated with rich temporal information. Existing methods, however, often under-use the time information and ignore the structural knowledge within the sparsely observed tensor entries. To overcome these limitations and to better capture the underlying temporal structure, we propose Dynamic EMbedIngs fOr dynamic Tensor dEcomposition (DEMOTE). We develop a neural diffusion-reaction process to estimate dynamic embeddings for the entities in each tensor mode. Specifically, based on the observed tensor entries, we build a multi-partite graph to encode the correlation between the entities. We construct a graph diffusion process to co-evolve the embedding trajectories of the correlated entities and use a neural network to construct a reaction process for each individual entity. In this way, our model can capture both the commonalities and personalities during the evolution of the embeddings for different entities. We then use a neural network to model the entry value as a nonlinear function of the embedding trajectories. For model estimation, we combine ODE solvers to develop a stochastic mini-batch learning algorithm. We propose a stratified sampling method to balance the cost of processing each mini-batch so as to improve the overall efficiency. We show the advantage of our approach in both simulation studies and real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/wzhut/Dynamic-Tensor-Decomposition-via-Neural-Diffusion-Reaction-Processes.
Transfer-based attacks are a practical method of black-box adversarial attacks, in which the attacker aims to craft adversarial examples from a source (surrogate) model that is transferable to the target model. A wide range of empirical works has tried to explain the transferability of adversarial examples from different angles. However, these works only provide ad hoc explanations without quantitative analyses. The theory behind transfer-based attacks remains a mystery.
This paper studies transfer-based attacks under a unified theoretical framework. We propose an explanatory model, called the manifold attack model, that formalizes popular beliefs and explains the existing empirical results. Our model explains why adversarial examples are transferable even when the source model is inaccurate. Moreover, our model implies that the existence of transferable adversarial examples depends on the “curvature” of the data manifold, which quantitatively explains why the success rates of transfer-based attacks are hard to improve. We also discuss the expressive power and the possible extensions of our model in general applications.
tl;dr: Replacing the classic “conv+ReLU” scheme by affine convolutions and sort pooling nonlinearities allows normalization-equivariance for the same performance, which is beneficial for increased generalization across noise levels in image denoising.¬
In many information processing systems, it may be desirable to ensure that any change of the input, whether by shifting or scaling, results in a corresponding change in the system response. While deep neural networks are gradually replacing all traditional automatic processing methods, they surprisingly do not guarantee such normalization-equivariance (scale + shift) property, which can be detrimental in many applications. To address this issue, we propose a methodology for adapting existing neural networks so that normalization-equivariance holds by design. Our main claim is that not only ordinary convolutional layers, but also all activation functions, including the ReLU (rectified linear unit), which are applied element-wise to the pre-activated neurons, should be completely removed from neural networks and replaced by better conditioned alternatives. To this end, we introduce affine-constrained convolutions and channel-wise sort pooling layers as surrogates and show that these two architectural modifications do preserve normalization-equivariance without loss of performance. Experimental results in image denoising show that normalization-equivariant neural networks, in addition to their better conditioning, also provide much better generalization across noise levels.
tl;dr: We show that S4 models enable fast and efficient long-horizon memory in RL
Structured state space sequence (S4) models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on long-range sequence modeling tasks. These models also have fast inference speeds and parallelisable training, making them potentially useful in many reinforcement learning settings. We propose a modification to a variant of S4 that enables us to initialise and reset the hidden state in parallel, allowing us to tackle reinforcement learning tasks. We show that our modified architecture runs asymptotically faster than Transformers in sequence length and performs better than RNN's on a simple memory-based task. We evaluate our modified architecture on a set of partially-observable environments and find that, in practice, our model outperforms RNN's while also running over five times faster. Then, by leveraging the model’s ability to handle long-range sequences, we achieve strong performance on a challenging meta-learning task in which the agent is given a randomly-sampled continuous control environment, combined with a randomly-sampled linear projection of the environment's observations and actions. Furthermore, we show the resulting model can adapt to out-of-distribution held-out tasks. Overall, the results presented in this paper show that structured state space models are fast and performant for in-context reinforcement learning tasks. We provide code at https://github.com/luchris429/s5rl.
tl;dr: We fit the parameters of a large recurrent spiking model to explain electrophysiological recordings. To capture the trial-to-trial variability in the data, a loss function based on optimal transport is defined.
Simultaneous behavioral and electrophysiological recordings call for new methods to reveal the interactions between neural activity and behavior. A milestone would be an interpretable model of the co-variability of spiking activity and behavior across trials. Here, we model a mouse cortical sensory-motor pathway in a tactile detection task reported by licking with a large recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN), fitted to the recordings via gradient-based optimization. We focus specifically on the difficulty to match the trial-to-trial variability in the data. Our solution relies on optimal transport to define a distance between the distributions of generated and recorded trials. The technique is applied to artificial data and neural recordings covering six cortical areas. We find that the resulting RSNN can generate realistic cortical activity and predict jaw movements across the main modes of trial-to-trial variability. Our analysis also identifies an unexpected mode of variability in the data corresponding to task-irrelevant movements of the mouse.
Linear contextual bandits represent a fundamental class of models with numerous real-world applications, and it is critical to develop algorithms that can effectively manage noise with unknown variance, ensuring provable guarantees for both worst-case constant-variance noise and deterministic reward scenarios. In this paper, we study linear contextual bandits with heteroscedastic noise and propose the first noise-adaptive Thompson sampling-style algorithm that achieves a variance-dependent regret upper bound of $\widetilde O\Big(d^{3/2} + d^{3/2} \sqrt{\sum_{t=1}^T \sigma_t^2}\Big)$, where $d$ is the dimension of the context vectors and $\sigma_t^2$ is the variance of the reward in round $t$. This recovers the existing $\widetilde O(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ regret guarantee in the constant-variance regime and further improves to $\widetilde O(d^{3/2})$ in the deterministic regime, thus achieving a smooth interpolation in between. Our approach utilizes a stratified sampling procedure to overcome the too-conservative optimism in the linear Thompson sampling algorithm for linear contextual bandits.
tl;dr: We propose to utilize large-scale pre-trained models to guide downstream model training with sample difficulty-aware entropy regularization to improve accuracy and uncertainty calibration
Large-scale pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in many applications, but how to leverage them to improve the prediction reliability of downstream models is undesirably under-explored. Moreover, modern neural networks have been found to be poorly calibrated and make overconfident predictions regardless of inherent sample difficulty and data uncertainty. To address this issue, we propose to utilize large-scale pre-trained models to guide downstream model training with sample difficulty-aware entropy regularization. Pre-trained models that have been exposed to large-scale datasets and do not overfit the downstream training classes enable us to measure each training sample’s difficulty via feature-space Gaussian modeling and relative Mahalanobis distance computation. Importantly, by adaptively penalizing overconfident prediction based on the sample difficulty, we simultaneously improve accuracy and uncertainty calibration across challenging benchmarks (e.g., +0.55% ACC and −3.7% ECE on ImageNet1k using ResNet34), consistently surpassing competitive baselines for reliable prediction. The improved uncertainty estimate further improves selective classification (abstaining from erroneous predictions) and out-of-distribution detection.
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is crucial for ensuring the safe deployment of machine learning models in real-world applications. However, existing OOD detection approaches primarily rely on the feature maps or the full gradient space information to derive OOD scores neglecting the role of \textbf{most important parameters} of the pre-trained network over In-Distribution data. In this study, we propose a novel approach called GradOrth to facilitate OOD detection based on one intriguing observation that the important features to identify OOD data lie in the lower-rank subspace of in-distribution (ID) data.
In particular, we identify OOD data by computing the norm of gradient projection on \textit{the subspaces considered \textbf{important} for the in-distribution data}. A large orthogonal projection value (i.e. a small projection value) indicates the sample as OOD as it captures a weak correlation of the in-distribution (ID) data. This simple yet effective method exhibits outstanding performance, showcasing a notable reduction in the average false positive rate at a 95\% true positive rate (FPR95) of up to 8\% when compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: We discover global fields in interacting systems, inferring them from the dynamics alone, using neural fields.
Systems of interacting objects often evolve under the influence of underlying field effects that govern their dynamics, yet previous works have abstracted away from such effects, and assume that systems evolve in a vacuum. In this work, we focus on discovering these fields, and infer them from the observed dynamics alone, without directly observing them. We theorize the presence of latent force fields, and propose neural fields to learn them. Since the observed dynamics constitute the net effect of local object interactions and global field effects, recently popularized equivariant networks are inapplicable, as they fail to capture global information. To address this, we propose to disentangle local object interactions --which are SE(3) equivariant and depend on relative states-- from external global field effects --which depend on absolute states. We model the interactions with equivariant graph networks, and combine them with neural fields in a novel graph network that integrates field forces. Our experiments show that we can accurately discover the underlying fields in charged particles settings, traffic scenes, and gravitational n-body problems, and effectively use them to learn the system and forecast future trajectories.
tl;dr: In RLHF, Elastic Reset iteratively sets your model to its EMA and resets your EMA during training to achieve better reward for reduced alignment tax
Finetuning language models with reinforcement learning (RL), e.g. from human feedback (HF), is a prominent method for alignment. But optimizing against a reward model can improve on reward while degrading performance in other areas, a phenomenon known as reward hacking, alignment tax, or language drift. First, we argue that commonly-used test metrics are insufficient and instead measure how different algorithms tradeoff between reward and drift. The standard method modified the reward with a Kullback-Lieber (KL) penalty between the online and initial model. We propose Elastic Reset, a new algorithm that achieves higher reward with less drift without explicitly modifying the training objective. We periodically reset the online model to an exponentially moving average (EMA) of itself, then reset the EMA model to the initial model. Through the use of an EMA, our model recovers quickly after resets and achieves higher reward with less drift in the same number of steps. We demonstrate that fine-tuning language models with Elastic Reset leads to state-of-the-art performance on a small scale pivot-translation benchmark, outperforms all baselines in a medium-scale RLHF-like IMDB mock sentiment task and leads to a more performant and more aligned technical QA chatbot with LLaMA-7B. Code available https://github.com/mnoukhov/elastic-reset
tl;dr: Leverage target domain inherent distribution to remove spurious correlation in UDA.
Domain Adaptation (DA) is always challenged by the spurious correlation between the domain-invariant features (e.g., class identity) and the domain-specific ones (e.g., environment) that does not generalize to the target domain. Unfortunately, even enriched with additional unsupervised target domains, existing Unsupervised DA (UDA) methods still suffer from it. This is because the source domain supervision only considers the target domain samples as auxiliary data (e.g., by pseudo-labeling), yet the inherent distribution in the target domain---where the valuable de-correlation clues hide---is disregarded. We propose to make the U in UDA matter by giving equal status to the two domains. Specifically, we learn an invariant classifier whose prediction is simultaneously consistent with the labels in the source domain and clusters in the target domain, hence the spurious correlation inconsistent in the target domain is removed. We dub our approach "Invariant CONsistency learning" (ICON). Extensive experiments show that ICON achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the classic UDA benchmarks: Office-Home and VisDA-2017, and outperforms all the conventional methods on the challenging WILDS 2.0 benchmark. Codes are in https://github.com/yue-zhongqi/ICON.
tl;dr: We propose a new method for Operator Learning that can handle general geometry with free-form data.
Machine learning approaches for solving partial differential equations require learning mappings between function spaces. While convolutional or graph neural networks are constrained to discretized functions, neural operators present a promising milestone toward mapping functions directly. Despite impressive results they still face challenges with respect to the domain geometry and typically rely on some form of discretization. In order to alleviate such limitations, we present CORAL, a new method that leverages coordinate-based networks for solving PDEs on general geometries. CORAL is designed to remove constraints on the input mesh, making it applicable to any spatial sampling and geometry. Its ability extends to diverse problem domains, including PDE solving, spatio-temporal forecasting, and inverse problems like geometric design. CORAL demonstrates robust performance across multiple resolutions and performs well in both convex and non-convex domains, surpassing or performing on par with state-of-the-art models.
We consider a novel dynamic pricing and learning setting where in addition to setting prices of products in sequential rounds, the seller also ex-ante commits to ‘advertising schemes’. That is, in the beginning of each round the seller can decide what kind of signal they will provide to the buyer about the product’s quality upon realization. Using the popular Bayesian persuasion framework to model the effect of these signals on the buyers’ valuation and purchase responses, we formulate the problem of finding an optimal design of the advertising scheme along with a pricing scheme that maximizes the seller’s expected revenue. Without any apriori knowledge of the buyers’ demand function, our goal is to design an online algorithm that can use past purchase responses to adaptively learn the optimal pricing and advertising strategy. We study the regret of the algorithm when compared to the optimal clairvoyant price and advertising
scheme.
Our main result is a computationally efficient online algorithm that achieves an $O(T^{2/3}(m \log T )^{1/3})$ regret bound when the valuation function is linear in the product quality. Here $m$ is the cardinality of the discrete product quality domain and $T$ is the time horizon. This result requires some natural monotonicity and Lipschitz assumptions on the valuation function, but no Lipschitz or smoothness assumption on the buyers’ demand function. For constant $m$, our result matches the regret lower bound for dynamic pricing within logarithmic factors, which is a special case of our problem. We also obtain several improved results for the widely considered special case of additive valuations, including an $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret bound independent of $m$ when $m\le T^{1/3}$.
1614. AI for Interpretable Chemistry: Predicting Radical Mechanistic Pathways via Contrastive Learning
Deep learning-based reaction predictors have undergone significant architectural evolution. However, their reliance on reactions from the US Patent Office results in a lack of interpretable predictions and limited generalizability to other chemistry domains, such as radical and atmospheric chemistry. To address these challenges, we introduce a new reaction predictor system, RMechRP, that leverages contrastive learning in conjunction with mechanistic pathways, the most interpretable representation of chemical reactions. Specifically designed for radical reactions, RMechRP provides different levels of interpretation of chemical reactions. We develop and train multiple deep-learning models using RMechDB, a public database of radical reactions, to establish the first benchmark for predicting radical reactions. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of RMechRP in providing accurate and interpretable predictions of radical reactions, and its potential for various applications in atmospheric chemistry.
tl;dr: Making meta reinforcement learning more robust by learning to over-sample high-risk tasks throughout meta training.
A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods optimize the average return over tasks, but often suffer from poor results in tasks of high risk or difficulty. This limits system reliability since test tasks are not known in advance. In this work, we define a robust MRL objective with a controlled robustness level. Optimization of analogous robust objectives in RL is known to lead to both **biased gradients** and **data inefficiency**. We prove that the gradient bias disappears in our proposed MRL framework. The data inefficiency is addressed via the novel Robust Meta RL algorithm (RoML). RoML is a meta-algorithm that generates a robust version of any given MRL algorithm, by identifying and over-sampling harder tasks throughout training. We demonstrate that RoML achieves robust returns on multiple navigation and continuous control benchmarks.
tl;dr: Variational Weighting for Kernel Density Ratios
Kernel density estimation (KDE) is integral to a range of generative and discriminative tasks in machine learning. Drawing upon tools from the multidimensional calculus of variations, we derive an optimal weight function that reduces bias in standard kernel density estimates for density ratios, leading to improved estimates of prediction posteriors and information-theoretic measures. In the process, we shed light on some fundamental aspects of density estimation, particularly from the perspective of algorithms that employ KDEs as their main building blocks.
tl;dr: Quantizing an autoencoder's latent space with discrete scalar codebooks comprises a strong inductive bias towards disentanglement.
In disentangled representation learning, a model is asked to tease apart a dataset's underlying sources of variation and represent them independently of one another. Since the model is provided with no ground truth information about these sources, inductive biases take a paramount role in enabling disentanglement. In this work, we construct an inductive bias towards encoding to and decoding from an organized latent space. Concretely, we do this by (i) quantizing the latent space into discrete code vectors with a separate learnable scalar codebook per dimension and (ii) applying strong model regularization via an unusually high weight decay. Intuitively, the latent space design forces the encoder to combinatorially construct codes from a small number of distinct scalar values, which in turn enables the decoder to assign a consistent meaning to each value. Regularization then serves to drive the model towards this parsimonious strategy. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by adding it to both basic data-reconstructing (vanilla autoencoder) and latent-reconstructing (InfoGAN) generative models. For reliable evaluation, we also propose InfoMEC, a new set of metrics for disentanglement that is cohesively grounded in information theory and fixes well-established shortcomings in previous metrics. Together with regularization, latent quantization dramatically improves the modularity and explicitness of learned representations on a representative suite of benchmark datasets. In particular, our quantized-latent autoencoder (QLAE) consistently outperforms strong methods from prior work in these key disentanglement properties without compromising data reconstruction.
tl;dr: A simple yet novel method for estimating causal errors for causal model evaluation, under conditionally randomized experiments.
The gold standard for causal model evaluation involves comparing model predictions with true effects estimated from randomized controlled trials (RCT). However, RCTs are not always feasible or ethical to perform. In contrast, conditionally randomized experiments based on inverse probability weighting (IPW) offer a more realistic approach but may suffer from high estimation variance. To tackle this challenge and enhance causal model evaluation in real-world conditional randomization settings, we introduce a novel low-variance estimator for causal error, dubbed as the pairs estimator. By applying the same IPW estimator to both the model and true experimental effects, our estimator effectively cancels out the variance due to IPW and achieves a smaller asymptotic variance. Empirical studies demonstrate the improved of our estimator, highlighting its potential on achieving near-RCT performance. Our method offers a simple yet powerful solution to evaluate causal inference models in conditional randomization settings without complicated modification of the IPW estimator itself, paving the way for more robust and reliable model assessments.
tl;dr: This study uses physics symmetry as an effective inductive bias to learn interpretable representations from time-series data in a self-supervised fashion.
We have recently seen great progress in learning interpretable music representations, ranging from basic factors, such as pitch and timbre, to high-level concepts, such as chord and texture. However, most methods rely heavily on music domain knowledge. It remains an open question what general computational principles *give rise to* interpretable representations, especially low-dim factors that agree with human perception. In this study, we take inspiration from modern physics and use *physical symmetry* as a self-consistency constraint for the latent space. Specifically, it requires the prior model that characterises the dynamics of the latent states to be *equivariant* with respect to certain group transformations. We show that physical symmetry leads the model to learn a *linear* pitch factor from unlabelled monophonic music audio in a self-supervised fashion. In addition, the same methodology can be applied to computer vision, learning a 3D Cartesian space from videos of a simple moving object without labels. Furthermore, physical symmetry naturally leads to *representation augmentation*, a new technique which improves sample efficiency.
tl;dr: Analyzing and improving diffusion models via a multi-task learning perspective
Diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in various domains. It trains a shared model on denoising tasks that encompass different noise levels simultaneously, representing a form of multi-task learning (MTL). However, analyzing and improving diffusion models from an MTL perspective remains under-explored. In particular, MTL can sometimes lead to the well-known phenomenon of \textit{negative transfer}, which results in the performance degradation of certain tasks due to conflicts between tasks. In this paper, we first aim to analyze diffusion training from an MTL standpoint, presenting two key observations: \textbf{(O1)} the task affinity between denoising tasks diminishes as the gap between noise levels widens, and \textbf{(O2)} negative transfer can arise even in diffusion training. Building upon these observations, we aim to enhance diffusion training by mitigating negative transfer. To achieve this, we propose leveraging existing MTL methods, but the presence of a huge number of denoising tasks makes this computationally expensive to calculate the necessary per-task loss or gradient. To address this challenge, we propose clustering the denoising tasks into small task clusters and applying MTL methods to them. Specifically, based on \textbf{(O2)}, we employ interval clustering to enforce temporal proximity among denoising tasks within clusters. We show that interval clustering can be solved using dynamic programming, utilizing signal-to-noise ratio, timestep, and task affinity for clustering objectives. Through this, our approach addresses the issue of negative transfer in diffusion models by allowing for efficient computation of MTL methods. We validate the proposed clustering and its integration with MTL methods through various experiments, demonstrating improved sample quality of diffusion models. Our project page is available at https://gohyojun15.github.io/ANT_diffusion.
We study the problem of regret minimization in Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits (MAMABs) where the rewards are defined through a factor graph. We derive an instance-specific regret lower bound and characterize the minimal expected number of times each global action should be explored. Unfortunately, this bound and the corresponding optimal exploration process are obtained by solving a combinatorial optimization problem with a set of variables and constraints exponentially growing with the number of agents. We approximate the regret lower bound problem via Mean Field techniques to reduce the number of variables and constraints. By tuning the latter, we explore the trade-off between achievable regret and complexity. We devise Efficient Sampling for MAMAB (ESM), an algorithm whose regret asymptotically matches the corresponding approximated lower bound. We assess the regret and computational complexity of ESM numerically, using both synthetic and real-world experiments in radio communications networks.
1622. Change point detection and inference in multivariate non-parametric models under mixing conditions
This paper addresses the problem of localizing and inferring multiple change points, in non-parametric multivariate time series settings. Specifically, we consider a multivariate time series with potentially short-range dependence, whose underlying distributions have Hölder smooth densities and can change over time in a piecewise-constant manner. The change points, which correspond to the times when the distribution changes, are unknown.
We present the limiting distributions of the change point estimators under the scenarios where the minimal jump size vanishes or remains constant. Such results have not been revealed in the literature in non-parametric change point settings. As byproducts, we develop a sharp estimator that can accurately localize the change points in multivariate non-parametric time series, and a consistent block-type long-run variance estimator. Numerical studies are provided to complement our theoretical findings.
tl;dr: We propose a contrastive learning-based PbRL algorithm which can directly learn from preference information without the need for reward modeling.
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a two-step procedure: they first learn a reward model based on given preference data and then employ off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms using the learned reward model. However, obtaining an accurate reward model solely from preference information, especially when the preference is from human teachers, can be difficult. Instead, we propose a PbRL algorithm that directly learns from preference without requiring any reward modeling. To achieve this, we adopt a contrastive learning framework to design a novel policy scoring metric that assigns a high score to policies that align with the given preferences. We apply our algorithm to offline RL tasks with actual human preference labels and show that our algorithm outperforms or is on par with the existing PbRL methods. Notably, on high-dimensional control tasks, our algorithm surpasses offline RL methods that learn with ground-truth reward information. Finally, we show that our algorithm can be successfully applied to fine-tune large language models.
tl;dr: We propose Graph Segment Training (GST), which is able to train on large graphs with constant (GPU) memory footprint.
Learning to predict properties of large graphs is challenging because each prediction requires the knowledge of an entire graph, while the amount of memory available during training is bounded. Here we propose Graph Segment Training (GST), a general framework that utilizes a divide-and-conquer approach to allow learning large graph property prediction with a constant memory footprint. GST first divides a large graph into segments and then backpropagates through only a few segments sampled per training iteration. We refine the GST paradigm by introducing a historical embedding table to efficiently obtain embeddings for segments not sampled for backpropagation. To mitigate the staleness of historical embeddings, we design two novel techniques. First, we finetune the prediction head to fix the input distribution shift. Second, we introduce Stale Embedding Dropout to drop some stale embeddings during training to reduce bias. We evaluate our complete method GST-EFD (with all the techniques together) on two large graph property prediction benchmarks: MalNet and TpuGraphs. Our experiments show that GST-EFD is both memory-efficient and fast, while offering a slight boost on test accuracy over a typical full graph training regime.
tl;dr: Investigating transitory regimes in methods that break the curse of dimensionality thanks to smoothness priors
A core principle in statistical learning is that smoothness of target functions allows to break the curse of dimensionality. However, learning a smooth function seems to require enough samples close to one another to get meaningful estimate of high-order derivatives, which would be hard in machine learning problems where the ratio between number of data and input dimension is relatively small. By deriving new lower bounds on the generalization error, this paper formalizes such an intuition, before investigating the role of constants and transitory regimes which are usually not depicted beyond classical learning theory statements while they play a dominant role in practice.
tl;dr: We enhance the generalization capability of meta-reinforcement learning on tasks with non-parametric variability by decomposing the tasks into elementary subtasks and conducting virtual training.
Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) techniques have demonstrated remarkable success in generalizing deep reinforcement learning across a range of tasks. Nevertheless, these methods often struggle to generalize beyond tasks with parametric variations. To overcome this challenge, we propose Subtask Decomposition and Virtual Training (SDVT), a novel meta-RL approach that decomposes each non-parametric task into a collection of elementary subtasks and parameterizes the task based on its decomposition. We employ a Gaussian mixture VAE to meta-learn the decomposition process, enabling the agent to reuse policies acquired from common subtasks. Additionally, we propose a virtual training procedure, specifically designed for non-parametric task variability, which generates hypothetical subtask compositions, thereby enhancing generalization to previously unseen subtask compositions. Our method significantly improves performance on the Meta-World ML-10 and ML-45 benchmarks, surpassing current state-of-the-art techniques.
tl;dr: We propose to use cyclic walks between perceptual features and object entities for learning unsupervised object-centric representations
Learning object-centric representations from complex natural environments enables both humans and machines with reasoning abilities from low-level perceptual features. To capture compositional entities of the scene, we proposed cyclic walks between perceptual features extracted from vision transformers and object entities. First, a slot-attention module interfaces with these perceptual features and produces a finite set of slot representations. These slots can bind to any object entities in the scene via inter-slot competitions for attention. Next, we establish entity-feature correspondence with cyclic walks along high transition probability based on the pairwise similarity between perceptual features (aka "parts") and slot-binded object representations (aka "whole"). The whole is greater than its parts and the parts constitute the whole. The part-whole interactions form cycle consistencies, as supervisory signals, to train the slot-attention module. Our rigorous experiments on \textit{seven} image datasets in \textit{three} \textit{unsupervised} tasks demonstrate that the networks trained with our cyclic walks can disentangle foregrounds and backgrounds, discover objects, and segment semantic objects in complex scenes. In contrast to object-centric models attached with a decoder for the pixel-level or feature-level reconstructions, our cyclic walks provide strong learning signals, avoiding computation overheads and enhancing memory efficiency. Our source code and data are available at: \href{https://github.com/ZhangLab-DeepNeuroCogLab/Parts-Whole-Object-Centric-Learning/}{link}.
tl;dr: A language-grounded quantization method that enables in-context few-shot multimodal generation with frozen LLMs.
In this work, we introduce Semantic Pyramid AutoEncoder (SPAE) for enabling frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-linguistic modalities such as images or videos. SPAE converts between raw pixels and interpretable lexical tokens (or words) extracted from the LLM's vocabulary. The resulting tokens capture both the rich semantic meaning and the fine-grained details needed for visual reconstruction, effectively translating the visual content into a language comprehensible to the LLM, and empowering it to perform a wide array of multimodal tasks. Our approach is validated through in-context learning experiments with frozen PaLM 2 and GPT 3.5 on a diverse set of image understanding and generation tasks.
Our method marks the first successful attempt to enable a frozen LLM to generate image content while surpassing state-of-the-art performance in image understanding tasks, under the same setting, by over 25%.
tl;dr: A novel algorithm for empirical risk minimization that significantly surpasses generic solvers and also outperforms specialized solvers including LIBLINEAR, hqreg, and Lightning.
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is a crucial framework that offers a general approach to handling a broad range of machine learning tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, called ReHLine, for minimizing a set of regularized ERMs with convex piecewise linear-quadratic loss functions and optional linear constraints. The proposed algorithm can effectively handle diverse combinations of loss functions, regularization, and constraints, making it particularly well-suited for complex domain-specific problems. Examples of such problems include FairSVM, elastic net regularized quantile regression, Huber minimization, etc. In addition, ReHLine enjoys a provable linear convergence rate and exhibits a per-iteration computational complexity that scales linearly with the sample size. The algorithm is implemented with both Python and R interfaces, and its performance is benchmarked on various tasks and datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that ReHLine significantly surpasses generic optimization solvers in terms of computational efficiency on large-scale datasets. Moreover, it also outperforms specialized solvers such as Liblinear in SVMs, hqreg in Huber minimization, and Lightning (SAGA, SAG, SDCA, SVRG) in smoothed SVMs, exhibiting exceptional flexibility and efficiency. The source code, project page, accompanying software, and the Python/R interface can be accessed through the link: https://github.com/softmin/ReHLine.
In this paper, we derive norm-based generalization bounds for sparse ReLU neural networks, including convolutional neural networks. These bounds differ from previous ones because they consider the sparse structure of the neural network architecture and the norms of the convolutional filters, rather than the norms of the (Toeplitz) matrices associated with the convolutional layers. Theoretically, we demonstrate that these bounds are significantly tighter than standard norm-based generalization bounds. Empirically, they offer relatively tight estimations of generalization for various simple classification problems. Collectively, these findings suggest that the sparsity of the underlying target function and the model's architecture plays a crucial role in the success of deep learning.
tl;dr: Neural Functional Transformers (NFTs) are deep permutation-equivariant weight-space models based on attention mechanisms, enabling greater expressivity and improved performance in tasks such as learning latent representation of weights.
The recent success of neural networks as implicit representation of data has driven growing interest in neural functionals: models that can process other neural networks as input by operating directly over their weight spaces. Nevertheless, constructing expressive and efficient neural functional architectures that can handle high-dimensional weight-space objects remains challenging. This paper uses the attention mechanism to define a novel set of permutation equivariant weight-space layers and composes them into deep equivariant models called neural functional Transformers (NFTs). NFTs respect weight-space permutation symmetries while incorporating the advantages of attention, which have exhibited remarkable success across multiple domains. In experiments processing the weights of feedforward MLPs and CNNs, we find that NFTs match or exceed the performance of prior weight-space methods. We also leverage NFTs to develop Inr2Array, a novel method for computing permutation invariant latent representations from the weights of implicit neural representations (INRs). Our proposed method improves INR classification accuracy by up to $+17\\%$ over existing methods. We provide an implementation of our layers at https://github.com/AllanYangZhou/nfn.
tl;dr: Proposed a method to accelerate online agent learning in sparse reward environments by using only a small number of imperfect demonstrations.
Exploration is one of the main challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments with sparse rewards. Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) is a promising approach to solving this problem by leveraging expert demonstrations. However, expert demonstrations of high quality are usually costly or even impossible to collect in real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel RL algorithm called HYbrid Policy Optimization (HYPO), which uses a small number of imperfect demonstrations to accelerate an agent's online learning process. The key idea is to train an offline guider policy using imitation learning in order to instruct an online agent policy to explore efficiently. Through mutual update of the guider policy and the agent policy, the agent can leverage suboptimal demonstrations for efficient exploration while avoiding the conservative policy caused by imperfect demonstrations. Empirical results show that HYPO significantly outperforms several baselines in various challenging tasks, such as MuJoCo with sparse rewards, Google Research Football, and the AirSim drone simulation.
1633. 3D-IntPhys: Towards More Generalized 3D-grounded Visual Intuitive Physics under Challenging Scenes
Given a visual scene, humans have strong intuitions about how a scene can evolve over time under given actions. The intuition, often termed visual intuitive physics, is a critical ability that allows us to make effective plans to manipulate the scene to achieve desired outcomes without relying on extensive trial and error. In this paper, we present a framework capable of learning 3D-grounded visual intuitive physics models from videos of complex scenes with fluids. Our method is composed of a conditional Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-style visual frontend and a 3D point-based dynamics prediction backend, using which we can impose strong relational and structural inductive bias to capture the structure of the underlying environment. Unlike existing intuitive point-based dynamics works that rely on the supervision of dense point trajectory from simulators, we relax the requirements and only assume access to multi-view RGB images and (imperfect) instance masks acquired using color prior. This enables the proposed model to handle scenarios where accurate point estimation and tracking are hard or impossible. We generate datasets including three challenging scenarios involving fluid, granular materials, and rigid objects in the simulation. The datasets do not include any dense particle information so most previous 3D-based intuitive physics pipelines can barely deal with that. We show our model can make long-horizon future predictions by learning from raw images and significantly outperforms models that do not employ an explicit 3D representation space. We also show that once trained, our model can achieve strong generalization in complex scenarios under extrapolate settings.
Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors for geometric data, such as weighted graphs, which are interpretable, stable to perturbations, and invariant under, e.g., relabeling. Most applications of PH focus on the one-parameter case---where the descriptors summarize the changes in topology of data as it is filtered by a single quantity of interest---and there is now a wide array of methods enabling the use of one-parameter PH descriptors in data science, which rely on the stable vectorization of these descriptors as elements of a Hilbert space. Although the multiparameter PH (MPH) of data that is filtered by several quantities of interest encodes much richer information than its one-parameter counterpart, the scarceness of stability results for MPH descriptors has so far limited the available options for the stable vectorization of MPH. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds by showing how the interpretation of signed barcodes---a recent family of MPH descriptors---as signed Radon measures leads to natural extensions of vectorization strategies from one parameter to multiple parameters. The resulting feature vectors are easy to define and to compute, and provably stable. While, as a proof of concept, we focus on simple choices of signed barcodes and vectorizations, we already see notable performance improvements when comparing our feature vectors to state-of-the-art topology-based methods on various types of data.
tl;dr: Unsupervised pretraining works for transformers on motor BCI cortical spiking activity.
The neural population spiking activity recorded by intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) contain rich structure. Current models of such spiking activity are largely prepared for individual experimental contexts, restricting data volume to that collectable within a single session and limiting the effectiveness of deep neural networks (DNNs). The purported challenge in aggregating neural spiking data is the pervasiveness of context-dependent shifts in the neural data distributions. However, large scale unsupervised pretraining by nature spans heterogeneous data, and has proven to be a fundamental recipe for successful representation learning across deep learning. We thus develop Neural Data Transformer 2 (NDT2), a spatiotemporal Transformer for neural spiking activity, and demonstrate that pretraining can leverage motor BCI datasets that span sessions, subjects, and experimental tasks. NDT2 enables rapid adaptation to novel contexts in downstream decoding tasks and opens the path to deployment of pretrained DNNs for iBCI control. Code: https://github.com/joel99/context_general_bci
tl;dr: We first raise and tackle a ``time synchronization'' issue in non-stationary reinforcement learning. To solve this, we propose a Proactively Synchronizing Tempo (ProST) framework that computes an optimal agent tempo.
We first raise and tackle a ``time synchronization'' issue between the agent and the environment in non-stationary reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial factor hindering its real-world applications. In reality, environmental changes occur over wall-clock time ($t$) rather than episode progress ($k$), where wall-clock time signifies the actual elapsed time within the fixed duration $t \in [0, T]$. In existing works, at episode $k$, the agent rolls a trajectory and trains a policy before transitioning to episode $k+1$. In the context of the time-desynchronized environment, however, the agent at time $t_{k}$ allocates $\Delta t$ for trajectory generation and training, subsequently moves to the next episode at $t_{k+1}=t_{k}+\Delta t$. Despite a fixed total number of episodes ($K$), the agent accumulates different trajectories influenced by the choice of interaction times ($t_1,t_2,...,t_K$), significantly impacting the suboptimality gap of the policy. We propose a Proactively Synchronizing Tempo ($\texttt{ProST}$) framework that computes a suboptimal sequence {$t_1,t_2,...,t_K$} (= { $t_{1:K}$}) by minimizing an upper bound on its performance measure, i.e., the dynamic regret. Our main contribution is that we show that a suboptimal {$t_{1:K}$} trades-off between the policy training time (agent tempo) and how fast the environment changes (environment tempo). Theoretically, this work develops a suboptimal {$t_{1:K}$} as a function of the degree of the environment's non-stationarity while also achieving a sublinear dynamic regret. Our experimental evaluation on various high-dimensional non-stationary environments shows that the $\texttt{ProST}$ framework achieves a higher online return at suboptimal {$t_{1:K}$} than the existing methods.
tl;dr: We offer time-independent information-theoretic generalization bounds for stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) by focusing on the time evolution of the mutual information.
We provide novel information-theoretic generalization bounds for stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) under the assumptions of smoothness and dissipativity, which are widely used in sampling and non-convex optimization studies.
Our bounds are time-independent and decay to zero as the sample size increases, regardless of the number of iterations and whether the step size is fixed.
Unlike previous studies, we derive the generalization error bounds by focusing on the time evolution of the Kullback--Leibler divergence, which is related to the stability of datasets and is the upper bound of the mutual information between output parameters and an input dataset.
Additionally, we establish the first information-theoretic generalization bound when the training and test loss are the same by showing that a loss function of SGLD is sub-exponential.
This bound is also time-independent and removes the problematic step size dependence in existing work, leading to an improved excess risk bound by combining our analysis with the existing non-convex optimization error bounds.
tl;dr: Maximizing performance of patch-based inference with minimal SRAM memory usage for TinyML models on MCUs
With the emerging Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) inference applications, there is a growing interest when deploying TinyML models on the low-power Microcontroller Unit (MCU). However, deploying TinyML models on MCUs reveals several challenges due to the MCU’s resource constraints, such as small flash memory, tight SRAM memory budget, and slow CPU performance. Unlike typical layer-wise inference, patch-based inference reduces the peak usage of SRAM memory on MCUs by saving small patches rather than the entire tensor in the SRAM memory. However, the processing of patch-based inference tremendously increases the amount of MACs against the layer-wise method. Thus, this notoriously computational overhead makes patch-based inference undesirable on MCUs. This work designs StreamNet that employs the stream buffer to eliminate the redundant computation of patch-based inference. StreamNet uses 1D and 2D streaming processing and provides an parameter selection algorithm that automatically improve the performance of patch-based inference with minimal requirements on the MCU’s SRAM memory space. In 10 TinyML models, StreamNet-2D achieves a geometric mean of 7.3X speedup and saves 81\% of MACs over the state-of-the-art patch-based inference.
tl;dr: We propose HopCPT, a novel uncertainty estimation approach designed for time serie which is based on conformal prediction and uses continuous Modern Hopfield Networks for similarity-based sample reweighting.
To quantify uncertainty, conformal prediction methods are gaining continuously more interest and have already been successfully applied to various domains. However, they are difficult to apply to time series as the autocorrelative structure of time series violates basic assumptions required by conformal prediction. We propose HopCPT, a novel conformal prediction approach for time series that not only copes with temporal structures but leverages them. We show that our approach is theoretically well justified for time series where temporal dependencies are present. In experiments, we demonstrate that our new approach outperforms state-of-the-art conformal prediction methods on multiple real-world time series datasets from four different domains.
tl;dr: We propose the Double Power Law to predict the unique trade-off behavior in Multilingual NMT.
In this work, we study how the performance of a given direction changes with its sampling ratio in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). By training over 200 multilingual models with various model sizes, data sizes, and language directions, we find it interesting that the performance of certain translation direction does not always improve with the increase of its weight in the multi-task optimization objective. Accordingly, scalarization method leads to a multitask trade-off front that deviates from the traditional Pareto front when there exists data imbalance in the training corpus, which poses a great challenge to improve the overall performance of all directions. Based on our observations, we propose the Double Power Law to predict the unique performance trade-off front in MNMT, which is robust across various languages, data adequacy, and the number of tasks. Finally, we formulate the sample ratio selection problem in MNMT as an optimization problem based on the Double Power Law. Extensive experiments show that it achieves better performance than temperature searching and gradient manipulation methods with only 1/5 to 1/2 of the total training budget. We release the code at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/ParetoMNMT for reproduction.
1641. Fairness Continual Learning Approach to Semantic Scene Understanding in Open-World Environments
Continual semantic segmentation aims to learn new classes while maintaining the information from the previous classes. Although prior studies have shown impressive progress in recent years, the fairness concern in the continual semantic segmentation needs to be better addressed. Meanwhile, fairness is one of the most vital factors in deploying the deep learning model, especially in human-related or safety applications. In this paper, we present a novel Fairness Continual Learning approach to the semantic segmentation problem.
In particular, under the fairness objective, a new fairness continual learning framework is proposed based on class distributions.
Then, a novel Prototypical Contrastive Clustering loss is proposed to address the significant challenges in continual learning, i.e., catastrophic forgetting and background shift. Our proposed loss has also been proven as a novel, generalized learning paradigm of knowledge distillation commonly used in continual learning. Moreover, the proposed Conditional Structural Consistency loss further regularized the structural constraint of the predicted segmentation. Our proposed approach has achieved State-of-the-Art performance on three standard scene understanding benchmarks, i.e., ADE20K, Cityscapes, and Pascal VOC, and promoted the fairness of the segmentation model.
tl;dr: We formulate rank-free tensor decomposition via energy-based modeling of interactions between tensor modes. We analyze the relationship between our model and existing low-rank approximation models using tensor networks.
We present an alternative approach to decompose non-negative tensors, called many-body approximation. Traditional decomposition methods assume low-rankness in the representation, resulting in difficulties in global optimization and target rank selection. We avoid these problems by energy-based modeling of tensors, where a tensor and its mode correspond to a probability distribution and a random variable, respectively. Our model can be globally optimized in terms of the KL divergence minimization by taking the interaction between variables (that is, modes), into account that can be tuned more intuitively than ranks. Furthermore, we visualize interactions between modes as tensor networks and reveal a nontrivial relationship between many-body approximation and low-rank approximation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in tensor completion and approximation.
tl;dr: MosaicBERT is a BERT-style encoder architecture and training recipe optimized for fast pretraining
Although BERT-style encoder models are heavily used in NLP research, many researchers do not pretrain their own BERTs from scratch due to the high cost of training. In the past half-decade since BERT first rose to prominence, many advances have been made with other transformer architectures and training configurations that have yet to be systematically incorporated into BERT. Here, we introduce MosaicBERT, a BERT-style encoder architecture and training recipe that is empirically optimized for fast pretraining. This efficient architecture incorporates FlashAttention, Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi), Gated Linear Units (GLU), a module to dynamically remove padded tokens, and low precision LayerNorm into the classic transformer encoder block. The training recipe includes a 30% masking ratio for the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective, bfloat16 precision, and vocabulary size optimized for GPU throughput, in addition to best-practices from RoBERTa and other encoder models. When pretrained from scratch on the C4 dataset, this base model achieves a downstream average GLUE score of 79.6 in 1.13 hours on 8 A100 80 GB GPUs at a cost of roughly $20. We plot extensive accuracy vs. pretraining speed Pareto curves and show that MosaicBERT base and large are consistently Pareto optimal when compared to a competitive BERT base and large. This empirical speed up in pretraining enables researchers and engineers to pretrain custom BERT-style models at low cost instead of finetune on existing generic models. We open source our model weights and code.
tl;dr: We present a no-regret algorithm that learns weights for a logarithmic pool of expert forecasts, under the condition that the forecasts are calibrated.
For each of $T$ time steps, $m$ experts report probability distributions over $n$ outcomes; we wish to learn to aggregate these forecasts in a way that attains a no-regret guarantee. We focus on the fundamental and practical aggregation method known as *logarithmic pooling* -- a weighted average of log odds -- which is in a certain sense the optimal choice of pooling method if one is interested in minimizing log loss (as we take to be our loss function). We consider the problem of learning the best set of parameters (i.e. expert weights) in an online adversarial setting. We assume (by necessity) that the adversarial choices of outcomes and forecasts are consistent, in the sense that experts report calibrated forecasts. Imposing this constraint creates a (to our knowledge) novel semi-adversarial setting in which the adversary retains a large amount of flexibility. In this setting, we present an algorithm based on online mirror descent that learns expert weights in a way that attains $O(\sqrt{T} \log T)$ expected regret as compared with the best weights in hindsight.
Temporal graphs are widely used to model dynamic systems with time-varying interactions. In real-world scenarios, the underlying mechanisms of generating future interactions in dynamic systems are typically governed by a set of recurring substructures within the graph, known as temporal motifs. Despite the success and prevalence of current temporal graph neural networks (TGNN), it remains uncertain which temporal motifs are recognized as the significant indications that trigger a certain prediction from the model, which is a critical challenge for advancing the explainability and trustworthiness of current TGNNs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, called **Temp**oral **M**otifs **E**xplainer (**TempME**), which uncovers the most pivotal temporal motifs guiding the prediction of TGNNs. Derived from the information bottleneck principle, TempME extracts the most interaction-related motifs while minimizing the amount of contained information to preserve the sparsity and succinctness of the explanation. Events in the explanations generated by TempME are verified to be more spatiotemporally correlated than those of existing approaches, providing more understandable insights. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of TempME, with up to 8.21% increase in terms of explanation accuracy across six real-world datasets and up to 22.96% increase in boosting the prediction Average Precision of current TGNNs.
tl;dr: Joint objective for training the actor and critic resulting in a theoretically-principled actor-critic algorithm with general function approximation
Actor-critic (AC) methods are widely used in reinforcement learning (RL), and benefit from the flexibility of using any policy gradient method as the actor and value-based method as the critic. The critic is usually trained by minimizing the TD error, an objective that is potentially decorrelated with the true goal of achieving a high reward with the actor. We address this mismatch by designing a joint objective for training the actor and critic in a decision-aware fashion. We use the proposed objective to design a generic, AC algorithm that can easily handle any function approximation. We explicitly characterize the conditions under which the resulting algorithm guarantees monotonic policy improvement, regardless of the choice of the policy and critic parameterization. Instantiating the generic algorithm results in an actor that involves maximizing a sequence of surrogate functions (similar to TRPO, PPO), and a critic that involves minimizing a closely connected objective. Using simple bandit examples, we provably establish the benefit of the proposed critic objective over the standard squared error. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the benefit of our decision-aware actor-critic framework on simple RL problems.
tl;dr: We introduce $h$-GPI, a multi-step extension of generalized policy improvement that interpolates between standard model-free GPI and fully model-based planning as a function of a parameter, $h$, regulating the amount of time the agent has to reason.
We introduce a principled method for performing zero-shot transfer in reinforcement learning (RL) by exploiting approximate models of the environment. Zero-shot transfer in RL has been investigated by leveraging methods rooted in generalized policy improvement (GPI) and successor features (SFs). Although computationally efficient, these methods are model-free: they analyze a library of policies---each solving a particular task---and identify which action the agent should take. We investigate the more general setting where, in addition to a library of policies, the agent has access to an approximate environment model. Even though model-based RL algorithms can identify near-optimal policies, they are typically computationally intensive. We introduce $h$-GPI, a multi-step extension of GPI that interpolates between these extremes---standard model-free GPI and fully model-based planning---as a function of a parameter, $h$, regulating the amount of time the agent has to reason. We prove that $h$-GPI's performance lower bound is strictly better than GPI's, and show that $h$-GPI generally outperforms GPI as $h$ increases. Furthermore, we prove that as $h$ increases, $h$-GPI's performance becomes arbitrarily less susceptible to sub-optimality in the agent's policy library. Finally, we introduce novel bounds characterizing the gains achievable by $h$-GPI as a function of approximation errors in both the agent's policy library and its (possibly learned) model. These bounds strictly generalize those known in the literature. We evaluate $h$-GPI on challenging tabular and continuous-state problems under value function approximation and show that it consistently outperforms GPI and state-of-the-art competing methods under various levels of approximation errors.
tl;dr: We propose a novel approach to show high probability generalization bounds of stochastic mirror descent for quadratically bounded losses
In this work, we revisit the generalization error of stochastic mirror descent for quadratically bounded losses studied in Telgarsky (2022). Quadratically bounded losses is a broad class of loss functions, capturing both Lipschitz and smooth functions, for both regression and classification problems. We study the high probability generalization for this class of losses on linear predictors in both realizable and non-realizable cases when the data are sampled IID or from a Markov chain. The prior work relies on an intricate coupling argument between the iterates of the original problem and those projected onto a bounded domain. This approach enables blackbox application of concentration inequalities, but also leads to suboptimal guarantees due in part to the use of a union bound across all iterations. In this work, we depart significantly from the prior work of Telgarsky (2022), and introduce a novel approach for establishing high probability generalization guarantees. In contrast to the prior work, our work directly analyzes the moment generating function of a novel supermartingale sequence and leverages the structure of stochastic mirror descent. As a result, we obtain improved bounds in all aforementioned settings. Specifically, in the realizable case and non-realizable case with light-tailed sub-Gaussian data, we improve the bounds by a $\log T$ factor, matching the correct rates of $1/T$ and $1/\sqrt{T}$, respectively. In the more challenging case of heavy-tailed polynomial data, we improve the existing bound by a $\mathrm{poly}\ T$ factor.
Large language models are trained in two stages: (1) unsupervised pretraining from raw text, to learn general-purpose representations, and (2) large scale instruction tuning and reinforcement learning, to better align to end tasks and user preferences.
We measure the relative importance of these two stages by training LIMA, a 65B parameter LLaMa language model fine-tuned with the standard supervised loss on only 1,000 carefully curated prompts and responses, without any reinforcement learning or human preference modeling.
LIMA demonstrates remarkably strong performance, learning to follow specific response formats from only a handful of examples in the training data, including complex queries that range from planning trip itineraries to speculating about alternate history.
Moreover, the model tends to generalize well to unseen tasks that did not appear in the training data.
In a controlled human study, responses from LIMA are either equivalent or strictly preferred to GPT-4 in 43\% of cases; this statistic is as high as 58\% when compared to Bard and 65\% versus DaVinci003, which was trained with human feedback.
Taken together, these results strongly suggest that almost all knowledge in large language models is learned during pretraining, and only limited instruction tuning data is necessary to teach models to produce high quality output.
1650. DropCompute: simple and more robust distributed synchronous training via compute variance reduction
tl;dr: A new method for improving the robustness and scalability of synchronous training
Background: Distributed training is essential for large scale training of deep neural networks (DNNs). The dominant methods for large scale DNN training are synchronous (e.g. All-Reduce), but these require waiting for all workers in each step. Thus, these methods are limited by the delays caused by straggling workers.
Results: We study a typical scenario in which workers are straggling due to variability in compute time. We find an analytical relation between compute time properties and scalability limitations, caused by such straggling workers. With these findings, we propose a simple yet effective decentralized method to reduce the variation among workers and thus improve the robustness of synchronous training. This method can be integrated with the widely used All-Reduce. Our findings are validated on large-scale training tasks using 200 Gaudi Accelerators.
tl;dr: We point out that the vanilla KD method is underestimated in small-scale dataest, and it is able to achieve comparable performance with SOTA methods in large-scale dataset.
The tremendous success of large models trained on extensive datasets demonstrates that scale is a key ingredient in achieving superior results. Therefore, the reflection on the rationality of designing knowledge distillation (KD) approaches for limited-capacity architectures solely based on small-scale datasets is now deemed imperative. In this paper, we identify the small data pitfall that presents in previous KD methods, which results in the underestimation of the power of vanilla KD framework on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Specifically, we show that employing stronger data augmentation techniques and using larger datasets can directly decrease the gap between vanilla KD and other meticulously designed KD variants. This highlights the necessity of designing and evaluating KD approaches in the context of practical scenarios, casting off the limitations of small-scale datasets. Our investigation of the vanilla KD and its variants in more complex schemes, including stronger training strategies and different model capacities, demonstrates that vanilla KD is elegantly simple but astonishingly effective in large-scale scenarios. Without bells and whistles, we obtain state-of-the-art ResNet-50, ViT-S, and ConvNeXtV2-T models for ImageNet, which achieve 83.1%, 84.3%, and 85.0% top-1 accuracy, respectively. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/Hao840/vanillaKD.
tl;dr: A biologically plausible recurrent neural circuit model is proposed that equivariantly represents temporal sequences and explicitly represent temporsal scaling operators.
Time perception is critical in our daily life. An important feature of time perception is temporal scaling (TS): the ability to generate temporal sequences (e.g., motor actions) at different speeds. However, it is largely unknown about the math principle underlying temporal scaling in recurrent circuits in the brain. To shed insight, the present study investigates the temporal scaling from the Lie group point of view.
We propose a canonical nonlinear recurrent circuit dynamics, modeled as a continuous attractor network, whose neuronal population responses embed a temporal sequence that is TS equivariant. Furthermore, we found the TS group operators can be explicitly represented by a control input fed into the recurrent circuit, where the input gain determines the temporal scaling factor (group parameter), and the spatial offset between the control input and network state emerges the generator. The neuronal responses in the recurrent circuit are also consistent with experimental findings. We illustrated that the recurrent circuit can drive a feedforward circuit to generate complex temporal sequences with different time scales, even in the case of negative time scaling (''time reversal''). Our work for the first time analytically links the abstract temporal scaling group and concrete neural circuit dynamics.
Joint speech-language training is challenging due to the large demand for training data and GPU consumption, as well as the modality gap between speech and language. We present ComSL, a speech-language model built atop a composite architecture of public pre-trained speech-only and language-only models and optimized data-efficiently for spoken language tasks. Particularly, we propose to incorporate cross-modality learning into transfer learning and conduct them simultaneously for downstream tasks in a multi-task learning manner. Our approach has demonstrated effectiveness in end-to-end speech-to-text translation tasks, achieving a new state-of-the-art average BLEU score of 31.5 on the multilingual speech to English text translation task for 21 languages, as measured on the public CoVoST2 evaluation set.
tl;dr: We propose a drop-in alternative to RNNs for model-free recurrent RL
Nearly all real world tasks are inherently partially observable, necessitating the use of memory in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Most model-free approaches summarize the trajectory into a latent Markov state using memory models borrowed from Supervised Learning (SL), even though RL tends to exhibit different training and efficiency characteristics. Addressing this discrepancy, we introduce Fast and Forgetful Memory, an algorithm-agnostic memory model designed specifically for RL. Our approach constrains the model search space via strong structural priors inspired by computational psychology. It is a drop-in replacement for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in recurrent RL algorithms, achieving greater reward than RNNs across various recurrent benchmarks and algorithms _without changing any hyperparameters_. Moreover, Fast and Forgetful Memory exhibits training speeds two orders of magnitude faster than RNNs, attributed to its logarithmic time and linear space complexity. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/proroklab/ffm.
tl;dr: We propose to decompose the value function into two components and learning them at different timescales in continual reinforcement learning.
Temporal difference (TD) learning is often used to update the estimate of the value function which is used by RL agents to extract useful policies. In this paper, we focus on value function estimation in continual reinforcement learning. We propose to decompose the value function into two components which update at different timescales: a _permanent_ value function, which holds general knowledge that persists over time, and a _transient_ value function, which allows quick adaptation to new situations. We establish theoretical results showing that our approach is well suited for continual learning and draw connections to the complementary learning systems (CLS) theory from neuroscience. Empirically, this approach improves performance significantly on both prediction and control problems.
1656. Reward-Directed Conditional Diffusion: Provable Distribution Estimation and Reward Improvement
We explore the methodology and theory of reward-directed generation via conditional diffusion models. Directed generation aims to generate samples with desired properties as measured by a reward function, which has broad applications in generative AI, reinforcement learning, and computational biology. We consider the common learning scenario where the dataset consists of majorly unlabeled data and a small set of data with noisy reward labels. Our approach leverages a learned reward function on the smaller data set as a pseudolabeler to label the unlabelled data. After pseudo-labelling, a conditional diffusion model (CDM) is trained on the data and samples are generated by setting a target value $a$ as the condition in CDM. From a theoretical standpoint, we show that this directed generator can effectively learn and sample from the reward-conditioned data distribution: 1. our model is capable of recovering the data's latent subspace representation. 2. the model generates samples moving closer to the user-specified target. The improvement in rewards of samples is influenced by a interplay between the strength of the reward signal, the distribution shift, and the cost of off-support extrapolation.
We provide empirical results to validate our theory and highlight the relationship between the strength of extrapolation and the quality of generated samples.
tl;dr: A DNN with biologically plausible features (eye movements, two-streamed CNNs, retinal transformation) explains both ventral / dorsal visual stream in human brains.
The human visual system uses two parallel pathways for spatial processing and object recognition. In contrast, computer vision systems tend to use a single feedforward pathway, rendering them less robust, adaptive, or efficient than human vision. To bridge this gap, we developed a dual-stream vision model inspired by the human eyes and brain. At the input level, the model samples two complementary visual patterns to mimic how the human eyes use magnocellular and parvocellular retinal ganglion cells to separate retinal inputs to the brain. At the backend, the model processes the separate input patterns through two branches of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to mimic how the human brain uses the dorsal and ventral cortical pathways for parallel visual processing. The first branch (WhereCNN) samples a global view to learn spatial attention and control eye movements. The second branch (WhatCNN) samples a local view to represent the object around the fixation. Over time, the two branches interact recurrently to build a scene representation from moving fixations. We compared this model with the human brains processing the same movie and evaluated their functional alignment by linear transformation. The WhereCNN and WhatCNN branches were found to differentially match the dorsal and ventral pathways of the visual cortex, respectively, primarily due to their different learning objectives, rather than their distinctions in retinal sampling or sensitivity to attention-driven eye movements. These model-based results lead us to speculate that the distinct responses and representations of the ventral and dorsal streams are more influenced by their distinct goals in visual attention and object recognition than by their specific bias or selectivity in retinal inputs. This dual-stream model takes a further step in brain-inspired computer vision, enabling parallel neural networks to actively explore and understand the visual surroundings.
tl;dr: A non-autoregressive two-pass speech-to-speech translation model with comparable performance to translatotron 2 and faster decoding speed.
Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) translates speech from one language into another using a single model. However, due to the presence of linguistic and acoustic diversity, the target speech follows a complex multimodal distribution, posing challenges to achieving both high-quality translations and fast decoding speeds for S2ST models. In this paper, we propose DASpeech, a non-autoregressive direct S2ST model which realizes both fast and high-quality S2ST. To better capture the complex distribution of the target speech, DASpeech adopts the two-pass architecture to decompose the generation process into two steps, where a linguistic decoder first generates the target text, and an acoustic decoder then generates the target speech based on the hidden states of the linguistic decoder. Specifically, we use the decoder of DA-Transformer as the linguistic decoder, and use FastSpeech 2 as the acoustic decoder. DA-Transformer models translations with a directed acyclic graph (DAG). To consider all potential paths in the DAG during training, we calculate the expected hidden states for each target token via dynamic programming, and feed them into the acoustic decoder to predict the target mel-spectrogram. During inference, we select the most probable path and take hidden states on that path as input to the acoustic decoder. Experiments on the CVSS Fr$\rightarrow$En benchmark demonstrate that DASpeech can achieve comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art S2ST model Translatotron 2, while preserving up to 18.53$\times$ speedup compared to the autoregressive baseline. Compared with the previous non-autoregressive S2ST model, DASpeech does not rely on knowledge distillation and iterative decoding, achieving significant improvements in both translation quality and decoding speed. Furthermore, DASpeech shows the ability to preserve the speaker's voice of the source speech during translation.
tl;dr: Phased release via Bayesian Batched Bandit
Phased releases are a common strategy in the technology industry for gradually releasing new products or updates through a sequence of A/B tests in which the number of treated units gradually grows until full deployment or deprecation. Performing phased releases in a principled way requires selecting the proportion of units assigned to the new release in a way that balances the risk of an adverse effect with the need to iterate and learn from the experiment rapidly. In this paper, we formalize this problem and propose an algorithm that automatically determines the release percentage at each stage in the schedule, balancing the need to control risk while maximizing ramp-up speed. Our framework models the challenge as a constrained batched bandit problem that ensures that our pre-specified experimental budget is not depleted with high probability. Our proposed algorithm leverages an adaptive Bayesian approach in which the maximal number of units assigned to the treatment is determined by the posterior distribution, ensuring that the probability of depleting the remaining budget is low. Notably, our approach analytically solves the ramp sizes by inverting probability bounds, eliminating the need for challenging rare-event Monte Carlo simulation. It only requires computing means and variances of outcome subsets, making it highly efficient and parallelizable.
tl;dr: This paper provides an information-theoretic analysis of the VICReg method in self-supervised learning, introduces a family of improved SSL techniques based on these principles, and sets the stage for enhanced transfer learning research.
Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization (VICReg) is a self-supervised learning (SSL) method that has shown promising results on a variety of tasks. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying VICReg remain unexplored. In this paper, we present an information-theoretic perspective on the VICReg objective. We begin by deriving information-theoretic quantities for deterministic networks as an alternative to unrealistic stochastic network assumptions. We then relate the optimization of the VICReg objective to mutual information optimization, highlighting underlying assumptions and facilitating a constructive comparison with other SSL algorithms and derive a generalization bound for VICReg, revealing its inherent advantages for downstream tasks. Building on these results, we introduce a family of SSL methods derived from information-theoretic principles that outperform existing SSL techniques.
In offline imitation learning (IL), an agent aims to learn an optimal expert behavior policy without additional online environment interactions. However, in many real-world scenarios, such as robotics manipulation, the offline dataset is collected from suboptimal behaviors without rewards. Due to the scarce expert data, the agents usually suffer from simply memorizing poor trajectories and are vulnerable to the variations in the environments, lacking the capability of generalizing to new environments.To automatically generate high-quality expert data and improve the generalization ability of the agent, we propose a framework named \underline{O}ffline \underline{I}mitation \underline{L}earning with \underline{C}ounterfactual data \underline{A}ugmentation (OILCA) by doing counterfactual inference. In particular, we leverage identifiable variational autoencoder to generate \textit{counterfactual} samples for expert data augmentation. We theoretically analyze the influence of the generated expert data and the improvement of generalization. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms various baselines on both \textsc{DeepMind Control Suite} benchmark for in-distribution performance and \textsc{CausalWorld} benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization.
tl;dr: Novel differentiable phylogenetic inference approach with continuous topological distributions
Phylogenetic inference, grounded in molecular evolution models, is essential for understanding the evolutionary relationships in biological data. Accounting for the uncertainty of phylogenetic tree variables, which include tree topologies and evolutionary distances on branches, is crucial for accurately inferring species relationships from molecular data and tasks requiring variable marginalization. Variational Bayesian methods are key to developing scalable, practical models; however, it remains challenging to conduct phylogenetic inference without restricting the combinatorially vast number of possible tree topologies. In this work, we introduce a novel, fully differentiable formulation of phylogenetic inference that leverages a unique representation of topological distributions in continuous geometric spaces. Through practical considerations on design spaces and control variates for gradient estimations, our approach, GeoPhy, enables variational inference without limiting the topological candidates. In experiments using real benchmark datasets, GeoPhy significantly outperformed other approximate Bayesian methods that considered whole topologies.
tl;dr: Laplace approximation for metric learning
We propose a Bayesian encoder for metric learning. Rather than relying on neural amortization as done in prior works, we learn a distribution over the network weights with the Laplace Approximation. We first prove that the contrastive loss is a negative log-likelihood on the spherical space. We propose three methods that ensure a positive definite covariance matrix. Lastly, we present a novel decomposition of the Generalized Gauss-Newton approximation. Empirically, we show that our Laplacian Metric Learner (LAM) yields well-calibrated uncertainties, reliably detects out-of-distribution examples, and has state-of-the-art predictive performance.
Lipschitz bandit is a variant of stochastic bandits that deals with a continuous arm set defined on a metric space, where the reward function is subject to a Lipschitz constraint. In this paper, we introduce a new problem of Lipschitz bandits in the presence of adversarial corruptions where an adaptive adversary corrupts the stochastic rewards up to a total budget $C$. The budget is measured by the sum of corruption levels across the time horizon $T$. We consider both weak and strong adversaries, where the weak adversary is unaware of the current action before the attack, while the strong one can observe it. Our work presents the first line of robust Lipschitz bandit algorithms that can achieve sub-linear regret under both types of adversary, even when the total budget of corruption $C$ is unrevealed to the agent. We provide a lower bound under each type of adversary, and show that our algorithm is optimal under the strong case. Finally, we conduct experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithms against two classic kinds of attacks.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient meta neural heuristic for multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems
Recently, neural heuristics based on deep reinforcement learning have exhibited promise in solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs). However, they are still struggling to achieve high learning efficiency and solution quality. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient meta neural heuristic (EMNH), in which a meta-model is first trained and then fine-tuned with a few steps to solve corresponding single-objective subproblems. Specifically, for the training process, a (partial) architecture-shared multi-task model is leveraged to achieve parallel learning for the meta-model, so as to speed up the training; meanwhile, a scaled symmetric sampling method with respect to the weight vectors is designed to stabilize the training. For the fine-tuning process, an efficient hierarchical method is proposed to systematically tackle all the subproblems. Experimental results on the multi-objective traveling salesman problem (MOTSP), multi-objective capacitated vehicle routing problem (MOCVRP), and multi-objective knapsack problem (MOKP) show that, EMNH is able to outperform the state-of-the-art neural heuristics in terms of solution quality and learning efficiency, and yield competitive solutions to the strong traditional heuristics while consuming much shorter time.
tl;dr: We present VeriX (Verified Explainability), a system for producing optimal robust explanations and generating counterfactuals along decision boundaries of machine learning models.
We present **VeriX** (**Veri**fied e**X**plainability), a system for producing *optimal robust explanations* and generating *counterfactuals* along decision boundaries of machine learning models. We build such explanations and counterfactuals iteratively using constraint solving techniques and a heuristic based on feature-level sensitivity ranking. We evaluate our method on image recognition benchmarks and a real-world scenario of autonomous aircraft taxiing.
tl;dr: Robustified ANNs reliably discover image perturbations in the "human-presumed-stable" pixel budget regime that can strongly disrupt human behavior, or can precisely drive human perceptual state transitions to prescribed target states.
The visual object category reports of artificial neural networks (ANNs) are notoriously sensitive to tiny, adversarial image perturbations. Because human category reports (aka human percepts) are thought to be insensitive to those same small-norm perturbations -- and locally stable in general -- this argues that ANNs are incomplete scientific models of human visual perception. Consistent with this, we show that when small-norm image perturbations are generated by standard ANN models, human object category percepts are indeed highly stable. However, in this very same "human-presumed-stable" regime, we find that robustified ANNs reliably discover low-norm image perturbations that strongly disrupt human percepts. These previously undetectable human perceptual disruptions are massive in amplitude, approaching the same level of sensitivity seen in robustified ANNs. Further, we show that robustified ANNs support precise perceptual state interventions: they guide the construction of low-norm image perturbations that strongly alter human category percepts toward specific prescribed percepts. In sum, these contemporary models of biological visual processing are now accurate enough to guide strong and precise interventions on human perception.
tl;dr: We ask and answer some fundamental questions related to injectivity and bijectivity in operator learning.
Recently there has been great interest in operator learning, where networks learn operators between function spaces from an essentially infinite-dimensional perspective. In this work we present results for when the operators learned by these networks are injective and surjective. As a warmup, we combine prior work in both the finite-dimensional ReLU and operator learning setting by giving sharp conditions under which ReLU layers with linear neural operators are injective. We then consider the case when the activation function is pointwise bijective and obtain sufficient conditions for the layer to be injective. We remark that this question, while trivial in the finite-rank setting, is subtler in the infinite-rank setting and is proven using tools from Fredholm theory. Next, we prove that our supplied injective neural operators are universal approximators and that their implementation, with finite-rank neural networks, are still injective. This ensures that injectivity is not 'lost' in the transcription from analytical operators to their finite-rank implementation with networks. Finally, we conclude with an increase in abstraction and consider general conditions when subnetworks, which may have many layers, are injective and surjective and provide an exact inversion from a 'linearization.’ This section uses general arguments from Fredholm theory and Leray-Schauder degree theory for non-linear integral equations to analyze the mapping properties of neural operators in function spaces. These results apply to subnetworks formed from the layers considered in this work, under natural conditions. We believe that our work has applications in Bayesian uncertainty quantification where injectivity enables likelihood estimation and in inverse problems where surjectivity and injectivity corresponds to existence and uniqueness of the solutions, respectively.
tl;dr: Two-stage framework for a probabilistic approach to statistical downscaling with unpaired data, using optimal transport for debiasing and probabilistic diffusion models for super-resolution.
We introduce a two-stage probabilistic framework for statistical downscaling using unpaired data. Statistical downscaling seeks a probabilistic map to transform low-resolution data from a biased coarse-grained numerical scheme to high-resolution data that is consistent with a high-fidelity scheme. Our framework tackles the problem by
composing two transformations: (i) a debiasing step via an optimal transport map, and (ii) an upsampling step achieved by a probabilistic diffusion model with a posteriori conditional sampling. This approach characterizes a conditional distribution without needing paired data, and faithfully recovers relevant physical statistics from biased samples. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach on one- and two-dimensional fluid flow problems, which are representative of the core difficulties present in numerical simulations of weather and climate. Our method produces realistic high-resolution outputs from low-resolution inputs, by upsampling resolutions of $8\times$ and $16\times$. Moreover, our procedure correctly matches the statistics of physical quantities, even when the low-frequency content of the inputs and outputs do not match, a crucial but difficult-to-satisfy assumption needed by current state-of-the-art alternatives. Code for this work is available at: https://github.com/google-research/swirl-dynamics/tree/main/swirl_dynamics/projects/probabilistic_diffusion.
tl;dr: We derive a closed form update for Gaussian variational family by projecting onto the exact score matching equations.
Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in
Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to be close to the target posterior, optimizing an appropriate objective such as the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this work, we present a new approach to VI. Our method is based on the principle of score matching---namely, that if two distributions are equal then their score functions (i.e., gradients of the log density) are equal at every point on their support. With this principle, we develop score-matching VI, an iterative algorithm that seeks to match the scores between the variational approximation and the exact posterior. At each iteration, score-matching VI solves an inner optimization, one that minimally adjusts the current variational estimate to match the scores at a newly sampled value of the latent variables. We show that when the variational family is a Gaussian, this inner optimization enjoys a closed-form solution, which we call Gaussian score matching VI (GSM-VI). GSM-VI is a ``black box'' variational algorithm in that it only requires a differentiable joint distribution, and as such it can be applied to a wide class of models. We compare GSM-VI to black box variational inference (BBVI), which has similar requirements but instead optimizes the ELBO.
We first study how GSM-VI behaves as a function of the problem dimensionality, the condition number of the target covariance matrix (when the target is Gaussian), and the degree of mismatch between the approximating and exact posterior distribution. We then study GSM-VI on a collection of real-world Bayesian inference problems from the posteriorDB database of datasets and models. We find that GSM-VI is faster than BBVI and equally or more accurate. Specifically, over a wide range of target posteriors, GSM-VI requires 10-100x fewer gradient evaluations than BBVI to obtain a comparable quality of approximation.
tl;dr: We study the last-iterate convergence of several learning algorithms in time-varying zero-sum games.
Last-iterate convergence has received extensive study in two player zero-sum games starting from bilinear, convex-concave up to settings that satisfy the MVI condition. Typical methods that exhibit last-iterate convergence for the aforementioned games include extra-gradient (EG) and optimistic gradient descent ascent (OGDA). However, all the established last-iterate convergence results hold for the restrictive setting where the underlying repeated game does not change over time.
Recently, a line of research has focused on regret analysis of OGDA in time-varying games, i.e., games where payoffs evolve with time; the last-iterate behavior of OGDA and EG in time-varying environments remains unclear though. In this paper, we study the last-iterate behavior of various algorithms in two types of unconstrained, time-varying, bilinear zero-sum games: periodic and convergent perturbed games. These models expand upon the usual repeated game formulation and incorporate external environmental factors, such as the seasonal effects on species competition and vanishing external noise. In periodic games, we prove that EG will converge while OGDA and momentum method will diverge. This is quite surprising, as to the best of our knowledge, it is the first result that indicates EG and OGDA have qualitatively different last-iterate behaviors and do not exhibit similar behavior. In convergent perturbed games, we prove all these algorithms converge as long as the game itself stabilizes with a faster rate than $1/t$.
tl;dr: We show that a randomly selected fraction of neurons from a pre-trained representation achieve similar performance as the full representation.
Representations learned by pre-training a neural network on a large dataset are increasingly used successfully to perform a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we take a closer look at how features are encoded in such pre-trained representations. We find that learned representations in a given layer exhibit a degree of diffuse redundancy, ie, any randomly chosen subset of neurons in the layer that is larger than a threshold size shares a large degree of similarity with the full layer and is able to perform similarly as the whole layer on a variety of downstream tasks. For example, a linear probe trained on $20\%$ of randomly picked neurons from the penultimate layer of a ResNet50 pre-trained on ImageNet1k achieves an accuracy within $5\%$ of a linear probe trained on the full layer of neurons for downstream CIFAR10 classification. We conduct experiments on different neural architectures (including CNNs and Transformers) pre-trained on both ImageNet1k and ImageNet21k and evaluate a variety of downstream tasks taken from the VTAB benchmark. We find that the loss \& dataset used during pre-training largely govern the degree of diffuse redundancy and the "critical mass" of neurons needed often depends on the downstream task, suggesting that there is a task-inherent redundancy-performance Pareto frontier. Our findings shed light on the nature of representations learned by pre-trained deep neural networks and suggest that entire layers might not be necessary to perform many downstream tasks. We investigate the potential for exploiting this redundancy to achieve efficient generalization for downstream tasks and also draw caution to certain possible unintended consequences. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/nvedant07/diffused-redundancy}.
tl;dr: Emergent in-context learning in transformers is often a transient effect.
Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL), despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g., through the lens of mechanistic interpretability, Bayesian inference, or by examining the distributional properties of training data. However, in each of these cases, ICL is treated largely as a persistent phenomenon; namely, once ICL emerges, it is assumed to persist asymptotically. Here, we show that the emergence of ICL during transformer training is, in fact, often transient. We train transformers on synthetic data designed so that both ICL or in-weights learning (IWL) strategies can lead to correct predictions. We find that ICL first emerges, then disappears and gives way to IWL,
all while the training loss decreases, indicating an asymptotic preference for IWL. The transient nature of ICL is observed in transformers across a range of model sizes and datasets, raising the question of how much to “overtrain” transformers when seeking compact, cheaper-to-run models. We find that L2 regularization may offer a path to more persistent ICL that removes the need for early stopping based on ICL-style validation tasks.
tl;dr: Energy guided diffusion provides a flexible framework to study coding properties of the visual system via most exciting images, most exciting natural images, reconstructions etc.
In recent years, most exciting inputs (MEIs) synthesized from encoding models of neuronal activity have become an established method for studying tuning properties of biological and artificial visual systems.
However, as we move up the visual hierarchy, the complexity of neuronal computations increases.
Consequently, it becomes more challenging to model neuronal activity, requiring more complex models.
In this study, we introduce a novel readout architecture inspired by the mechanism of visual attention. This new architecture, which we call attention readout, together with a data-driven convolutional core outperforms previous task-driven models in predicting the activity of neurons in macaque area V4.
However, as our predictive network becomes deeper and more complex, synthesizing MEIs via straightforward gradient ascent (GA) can struggle to produce qualitatively good results and overfit to idiosyncrasies of a more complex model, potentially decreasing the MEI's model-to-brain transferability.
To solve this problem, we propose a diffusion-based method for generating MEIs via Energy Guidance (EGG).
We show that for models of macaque V4, EGG generates single neuron MEIs that generalize better across varying model architectures than the state-of-the-art GA, while at the same time reducing computational costs by a factor of 4.7x, facilitating experimentally challenging closed-loop experiments.
Furthermore, EGG diffusion can be used to generate other neurally exciting images, like most exciting naturalistic images that are on par with a selection of highly activating natural images, or image reconstructions that generalize better across architectures.
Finally, EGG is simple to implement, requires no retraining of the diffusion model, and can easily be generalized to provide other characterizations of the visual system, such as invariances.
Thus, EGG provides a general and flexible framework to study the coding properties of the visual system in the context of natural images.
Distributional robustness is a promising framework for training deep learning models that are less vulnerable to adversarial examples and data distribution shifts. Previous works have mainly focused on exploiting distributional robustness in the data space. In this work, we explore an optimal transport-based distributional robustness framework in model spaces. Specifically, we examine a model distribution within a Wasserstein ball centered on a given model distribution that maximizes the loss. We have developed theories that enable us to learn the optimal robust center model distribution. Interestingly, our developed theories allow us to flexibly incorporate the concept of sharpness awareness into training, whether it's a single model, ensemble models, or Bayesian Neural Networks, by considering specific forms of the center model distribution. These forms include a Dirac delta distribution over a single model, a uniform distribution over several models, and a general Bayesian Neural Network. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a specific case of our framework when using a Dirac delta distribution over a single model, while our framework can be seen as a probabilistic extension of SAM. To validate the effectiveness of our framework in the aforementioned settings, we conducted extensive experiments, and the results reveal remarkable improvements compared to the baselines.
tl;dr: We provide new results on the convergence of no-regret learning algorithms in time-varying games.
Most of the literature on learning in games has focused on the restrictive setting where the underlying repeated game does not change over time. Much less is known about the convergence of no-regret learning algorithms in dynamic multiagent settings. In this paper, we characterize the convergence of optimistic gradient descent (OGD) in time-varying games. Our framework yields sharp convergence bounds for the equilibrium gap of OGD in zero-sum games parameterized on natural variation measures of the sequence of games, subsuming known results for static games. Furthermore, we establish improved second-order variation bounds under strong convexity-concavity, as long as each game is repeated multiple times. Our results also apply to time-varying general-sum multi-player games via a bilinear formulation of correlated equilibria, which has novel implications for meta-learning and for obtaining refined variation-dependent regret bounds, addressing questions left open in prior papers. Finally, we leverage our framework to also provide new insights on dynamic regret guarantees in static games.
tl;dr: We give a unified discretization method that has been desired in the differential equation approach with rate-revealing Lyapunov functionals for convex optimization.
The differential equation (DE) approach for convex optimization, which relates optimization methods to specific continuous DEs with rate-revealing Lyapunov functionals, has gained increasing interest since the seminal paper by Su--Boyd--Candès (2014).
However, the approach still lacks a crucial component to make it truly useful: there is no general, consistent way to transition back to discrete optimization methods. Consequently, even if we derive insights from continuous DEs, we still need to perform individualized and tedious calculations for the analysis of each method.
This paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing a new concept called ``weak discrete gradient'' (wDG), which consolidates the conditions required for discrete versions of gradients in the DE approach arguments.
We then define abstract optimization methods using wDG and provide abstract convergence theories that parallel those in continuous DEs.
We demonstrate that many typical optimization methods and their convergence rates can be derived as special cases of this abstract theory.
The proposed unified discretization framework for the differential equation approach to convex optimization provides an easy environment for developing new optimization methods and achieving competitive convergence rates with state-of-the-art methods, such as Nesterov's accelerated gradient.
Intelligent systems possess a crucial characteristic of breaking complicated problems into smaller reusable components or parts and adjusting to new tasks using these part representations. However, current part-learners encounter difficulties in dealing with incidental correlations resulting from the limited observations of objects that may appear only in specific arrangements or with specific backgrounds. These incidental correlations may have a detrimental impact on the generalization and interpretability of learned part representations. This study asserts that part-based representations could be more interpretable and generalize better with limited data, employing two innovative regularization methods. The first regularization separates foreground and background information's generative process via a unique mixture-of-parts formulation. Structural constraints are imposed on the parts using a weakly-supervised loss, guaranteeing that the mixture-of-parts for foreground and background entails soft, object-agnostic masks. The second regularization assumes the form of a distillation loss, ensuring the invariance of the learned parts to the incidental background correlations. Furthermore, we incorporate sparse and orthogonal constraints to facilitate learning high-quality part representations.
By reducing the impact of incidental background correlations on the learned parts, we exhibit state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on few-shot learning tasks on benchmark datasets, including MiniImagenet, TieredImageNet, and FC100. We also demonstrate that the part-based representations acquired through our approach generalize better than existing techniques, even under domain shifts of the background and common data corruption on the ImageNet-9 dataset.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient fully transformer tracking framework MixFormerV2 and present a distillation-based model reduction paradigm for MixFormerV2.
Transformer-based trackers have achieved strong accuracy on the standard benchmarks. However, their efficiency remains an obstacle to practical deployment on both GPU and CPU platforms. In this paper, to overcome this issue, we propose a fully transformer tracking framework, coined as \emph{MixFormerV2}, without any dense convolutional operation and complex score prediction module. Our key design is to introduce four special prediction tokens and concatenate them with the tokens from target template and search areas. Then, we apply the unified transformer backbone on these mixed token sequence. These prediction tokens are able to capture the complex correlation between target template and search area via mixed attentions. Based on them, we can easily predict the tracking box and estimate its confidence score through simple MLP heads. To further improve the efficiency of MixFormerV2, we present a new distillation-based model reduction paradigm, including dense-to-sparse distillation and deep-to-shallow distillation. The former one aims to transfer knowledge from the dense-head based MixViT to our fully transformer tracker, while the latter one is used to prune some layers of the backbone. We instantiate two types of MixForemrV2, where the MixFormerV2-B achieves an AUC of 70.6\% on LaSOT and AUC of 56.7\% on TNL2k with a high GPU speed of 165 FPS, and the MixFormerV2-S surpasses FEAR-L by 2.7\% AUC on LaSOT with a real-time CPU speed.
This paper studies tabular reinforcement learning (RL) in the hybrid setting, which assumes access to both an offline dataset and online interactions with the unknown environment. A central question boils down to how to efficiently utilize online data to strengthen and complement the offline dataset and enable effective policy fine-tuning. Leveraging recent advances in reward-agnostic exploration and offline RL, we design a three-stage hybrid RL algorithm that beats the best of both worlds --- pure offline RL and pure online RL --- in terms of sample complexities. The proposed algorithm does not require any reward information during data collection. Our theory is developed based on a new notion called **single-policy partial concentrability**, which captures the trade-off between distribution mismatch and miscoverage and guides the interplay between offline and online data.
Pushing the boundaries of machine learning often requires exploring different hardware and software combinations. However, this ability to experiment with different systems can be at odds with the drive for efficiency, which has produced increasingly specialized AI hardware and incentivized consolidation around a narrow set of ML frameworks. Exploratory research can be further restricted if software and hardware are co-evolving, making it even harder to stray away from a given tooling stack. While this friction increasingly impacts the rate of innovation in machine learning, to our knowledge the lack of portability in tooling has not been quantified. In this work we ask: How portable are popular ML software frameworks? We conduct a large scale study of the portability of mainstream ML frameworks across different hardware types. Our findings paint an uncomfortable picture -- frameworks can lose more than 40% of their key functions when ported to other hardware. Worse, even when functions are portable, the slowdown in their performance can be extreme. Collectively, our results reveal how costly straying from a narrow set of hardware-software combinations can be - and thus how specialization incurs an exploration cost that can impede innovation in machine learning research.
We consider the problem of designing contextual bandit algorithms in the ``cross-learning'' setting of Balseiro et al., where the learner observes the loss for the action they play in all possible contexts, not just the context of the current round. We specifically consider the setting where losses are chosen adversarially and contexts are sampled i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. In this setting, we resolve an open problem of Balseiro et al. by providing an efficient algorithm with a nearly tight (up to logarithmic factors) regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{TK})$, independent of the number of contexts. As a consequence, we obtain the first nearly tight regret bounds for the problems of learning to bid in first-price auctions (under unknown value distributions) and sleeping bandits with a stochastic action set.
At the core of our algorithm is a novel technique for coordinating the execution of a learning algorithm over multiple epochs in such a way to remove correlations between estimation of the unknown distribution and the actions played by the algorithm. This technique may be of independent interest for other learning problems involving estimation of an unknown context distribution.
1683. Bayes beats Cross Validation: Efficient and Accurate Ridge Regression via Expectation Maximization
tl;dr: We propose a novel EM algorithm for optimizing the ridge regression hyper-parameter that outperforms leave-one-out cross validation in terms of computational complexity and statistical robustness
We present a novel method for tuning the regularization hyper-parameter, $\lambda$, of a ridge regression that is faster to compute than leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) while yielding estimates of the regression parameters of equal, or particularly in the setting of sparse covariates, superior quality to those obtained by minimising the LOOCV risk. The LOOCV risk can suffer from multiple and bad local minima for finite $n$ and thus requires the specification of a set of candidate $\lambda$, which can fail to provide good solutions. In contrast, we show that the proposed method is guaranteed to find a unique optimal solution for large enough $n$, under relatively mild conditions, without requiring the specification of any difficult to determine hyper-parameters. This is based on a Bayesian formulation of ridge regression that we prove to have a unimodal posterior for large enough $n$, allowing for both the optimal $\lambda$ and the regression coefficients to be jointly learned within an iterative expectation maximization (EM) procedure. Importantly, we show that by utilizing an appropriate preprocessing step, a single iteration of the main EM loop can be implemented in $O(\min(n, p))$ operations, for input data with $n$ rows and $p$ columns. In contrast, evaluating a single value of $\lambda$ using fast LOOCV costs $O(n \min(n, p))$ operations when using the same preprocessing. This advantage amounts to an asymptotic improvement of a factor of $l$ for $l$ candidate values for $\lambda$ (in the regime $q, p \in O(\sqrt{n})$ where $q$ is the number of regression targets).
tl;dr: Competition between model-providers can alter the behavior of scaling laws: increasing scale can decrease the equilibrium social welfare for users, even when the Bayes risk of a single model-provider improves
As the scale of machine learning models increases, trends such as scaling laws anticipate consistent downstream improvements in predictive accuracy. However, these trends take the perspective of a single model-provider in isolation, while in reality providers often compete with each other for users. In this work, we demonstrate that competition can fundamentally alter the behavior of these scaling trends, even causing overall predictive accuracy across users to be non-monotonic or decreasing with scale. We define a model of competition for classification tasks, and use data representations as a lens for studying the impact of increases in scale. We find many settings where improving data representation quality (as measured by Bayes risk) decreases the overall predictive accuracy across users (i.e., social welfare) for a marketplace of competing model-providers. Our examples range from closed-form formulas in simple settings to simulations with pretrained representations on CIFAR-10. At a conceptual level, our work suggests that favorable scaling trends for individual model-providers need not translate to downstream improvements in social welfare in marketplaces with multiple model providers.
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are a popular approach for safe control of nonlinear systems. In CBF-based control, the desired safety properties of the system are mapped to nonnegativity of a CBF, and the control input is chosen to ensure that the CBF remains nonnegative for all time. Recently, machine learning methods that represent CBFs as neural networks (neural control barrier functions, or NCBFs) have shown great promise due to the universal representability of neural networks. However, verifying that a learned CBF guarantees safety remains a challenging research problem. This paper presents novel exact conditions and algorithms for verifying safety of feedforward NCBFs with ReLU activation functions. The key challenge in doing so is that, due to the piecewise linearity of the ReLU function, the NCBF will be nondifferentiable at certain points, thus invalidating traditional safety verification methods that assume a smooth barrier function. We resolve this issue by leveraging a generalization of Nagumo's theorem for proving invariance of sets with nonsmooth boundaries to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for safety. Based on this condition, we propose an algorithm for safety verification of NCBFs that first decomposes the NCBF into piecewise linear segments and then solves a nonlinear program to verify safety of each segment as well as the intersections of the linear segments. We mitigate the complexity by only considering the boundary of the safe region and by pruning the segments with Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) and linear relaxation. We evaluate our approach through numerical studies with comparison to state-of-the-art SMT-based methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HongchaoZhang-HZ/exactverif-reluncbf-nips23.
tl;dr: We introduce RPG a policy gradient method that solves rectangular robust Markov decision processes with similar time complexity as non-robust policy-gradient.
Policy gradient methods have become a standard for training reinforcement learning agents in a scalable and efficient manner. However, they do not account for transition uncertainty, whereas learning robust policies can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we introduce robust policy gradient (RPG), a policy-based method that efficiently solves rectangular robust Markov decision processes (MDPs). We provide a closed-form expression for the worst occupation measure. Incidentally, we find that the worst kernel is a rank-one perturbation of the nominal. Combining the worst occupation measure with a robust Q-value estimation yields an explicit form of the robust gradient. Our resulting RPG can be estimated from data with the same time complexity as its non-robust equivalent. Hence, it relieves the computational burden of convex optimization problems required for training robust policies by current policy gradient approaches.
1687. Find What You Want: Learning Demand-conditioned Object Attribute Space for Demand-driven Navigation
tl;dr: We propose a demand-driven navigation task, which requires an agent to find objects that satisfy human demands, and propose a novel method to solve this task.
The task of Visual Object Navigation (VON) involves an agent's ability to locate a particular object within a given scene. To successfully accomplish the VON task, two essential conditions must be fulfiled: 1) the user knows the name of the desired object; and 2) the user-specified object actually is present within the scene. To meet these conditions, a simulator can incorporate predefined object names and positions into the metadata of the scene. However, in real-world scenarios, it is often challenging to ensure that these conditions are always met. Humans in an unfamiliar environment may not know which objects are present in the scene, or they may mistakenly specify an object that is not actually present. Nevertheless, despite these challenges, humans may still have a demand for an object, which could potentially be fulfilled by other objects present within the scene in an equivalent manner. Hence, this paper proposes Demand-driven Navigation (DDN), which leverages the user's demand as the task instruction and prompts the agent to find an object which matches the specified demand. DDN aims to relax the stringent conditions of VON by focusing on fulfilling the user's demand rather than relying solely on specified object names. This paper proposes a method of acquiring textual attribute features of objects by extracting common sense knowledge from a large language model (LLM). These textual attribute features are subsequently aligned with visual attribute features using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). Incorporating the visual attribute features as prior knowledge, enhances the navigation process. Experiments on AI2Thor with the ProcThor dataset demonstrate that the visual attribute features improve the agent's navigation performance and outperform the baseline methods commonly used in the VON and VLN task and methods with LLMs. The codes and demonstrations can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/view/demand-driven-navigation.
We present a novel methodology aimed at optimizing the application of frozen large language models (LLMs) for resource-intensive vision-language (VL) pre-training. The current paradigm uses visual features as prompts to guide language models, with a focus on determining the most relevant visual features for corresponding text. Our approach diverges by concentrating on the language component, specifically identifying the optimal prompts to align with visual features. We introduce the Prompt-Transformer (P-Former), a model that predicts these ideal prompts, which is trained exclusively on linguistic data, bypassing the need for image-text pairings. This strategy subtly bifurcates the end-to-end VL training process into an additional, separate stage. Our experiments reveal that our framework significantly enhances the performance of a robust image-to-text baseline (BLIP-2), and effectively narrows the performance gap between models trained with either 4M or 129M image-text pairs. Importantly, our framework is modality-agnostic and flexible in terms of architectural design, as validated by its successful application in a video learning task using varied base modules. The code will be made available at https://github.com/yiren-jian/BLIText.
tl;dr: Towards Efficient Image Compression Without Autoregressive Models
Recently, learned image compression (LIC) has garnered increasing interest with its rapidly improving performance surpassing conventional codecs. A key ingredient of LIC is a hyperprior-based entropy model, where the underlying joint probability of the latent image features is modeled as a product of Gaussian distributions from each latent element. Since latents from the actual images are not spatially independent, autoregressive (AR) context based entropy models were proposed to handle the discrepancy between the assumed distribution and the actual distribution. Though the AR-based models have proven effective, the computational complexity is significantly increased due to the inherent sequential nature of the algorithm.
In this paper, we present a novel alternative to the AR-based approach that can provide a significantly better trade-off between performance and complexity. To minimize the discrepancy, we introduce a correlation loss that forces the latents to be spatially decorrelated and better fitted to the independent probability model. Our correlation loss is proved to act as a general plug-in for the hyperprior (HP) based learned image compression methods. The performance gain from our correlation loss is ‘free’ in terms of computation complexity for both inference time and decoding time. To our knowledge, our method gives the best trade-off between the complexity and performance: combined with the Checkerboard-CM, it attains **90%** and when combined with ChARM-CM, it attains **98%** of the AR-based BD-Rate gains yet is around **50 times** and **30 times** faster than AR-based methods respectively
Sparse deep learning has become a popular technique for improving the performance of deep neural networks in areas such as uncertainty quantification, variable selection, and large-scale network compression. However, most existing research has focused on problems where the observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and there has been little work on the problems where the observations are dependent, such as time series data and sequential data in natural language processing. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the theory for sparse deep learning with dependent data. We show that sparse recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can be consistently estimated, and their predictions are asymptotically normally distributed under appropriate assumptions, enabling the prediction uncertainty to be correctly quantified. Our numerical results show that sparse deep learning outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as conformal predictions, in prediction uncertainty quantification for time series data. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed method can consistently identify the autoregressive order for time series data and outperform existing methods in large-scale model compression. Our proposed method has important practical implications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where both accurate point estimates and prediction uncertainty quantification are of concern.
tl;dr: We provide theoretical connections between different sets of assumptions and generalize the analysis of biased SGD
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on biased estimators are rare. Nevertheless, there has been an increased interest in this topic in recent years. However, existing literature on SGD with biased estimators lacks coherence since each new paper relies on a different set of assumptions, without any clear understanding of how they are connected, which may lead to confusion. We address this gap by establishing connections among the existing assumptions, and presenting a comprehensive map of the underlying relationships. Additionally, we introduce a new set of assumptions that is provably weaker than all previous assumptions, and use it to present a thorough analysis of BiasedSGD in both convex and non-convex settings, offering advantages over previous results. We also provide examples where biased estimators outperform their unbiased counterparts or where unbiased versions are simply not available. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through experimental results that validate our theoretical findings.
Intersection over Union (IoU) losses are surrogates that directly optimize the Jaccard index. Leveraging IoU losses as part of the loss function have demonstrated superior performance in semantic segmentation tasks compared to optimizing pixel-wise losses such as the cross-entropy loss alone. However, we identify a lack of flexibility in these losses to support vital training techniques like label smoothing, knowledge distillation, and semi-supervised learning, mainly due to their inability to process soft labels. To address this, we introduce Jaccard Metric Losses (JMLs), which are identical to the soft Jaccard loss in standard settings with hard labels but are fully compatible with soft labels. We apply JMLs to three prominent use cases of soft labels: label smoothing, knowledge distillation and semi-supervised learning, and demonstrate their potential to enhance model accuracy and calibration. Our experiments show consistent improvements over the cross-entropy loss across 4 semantic segmentation datasets (Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC, ADE20K, DeepGlobe Land) and 13 architectures, including classic CNNs and recent vision transformers. Remarkably, our straightforward approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge distillation and semi-supervised learning methods. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}.
tl;dr: An efficient potential-based exploration method for reward shaping in reinforcement learning
Reward shaping is an effective technique for integrating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). However, traditional approaches like potential-based reward shaping totally rely on manually designing shaping reward functions, which significantly restricts exploration efficiency and introduces human cognitive biases.
While a number of RL methods have been proposed to boost exploration by designing an intrinsic reward signal as exploration bonus. Nevertheless, these methods heavily rely on the count-based episodic term in their exploration bonus which falls short in scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a general end-to-end potential-based exploration bonus for deep RL via potentials of state discrepancy, which motivates the agent to discover novel states and provides them with denser rewards without manual intervention. Specifically, we measure the novelty of adjacent states by calculating their distance using the bisimulation metric-based potential function, which enhances agent's exploration and ensures policy invariance. In addition, we offer a theoretical guarantee on our inverse dynamic bisimulation metric, bounding the value difference and ensuring that the agent explores states with higher TD error, thus significantly improving training efficiency. The proposed approach is named \textbf{LIBERTY} (exp\textbf{L}oration v\textbf{I}a \textbf{B}isimulation m\textbf{E}t\textbf{R}ic-based s\textbf{T}ate discrepanc\textbf{Y}) which is comprehensively evaluated on the MuJoCo and the Arcade Learning Environments. Extensive experiments have verified the superiority and scalability of our algorithm compared with other competitive methods.
tl;dr: We developed four stochastic approximation approaches for Group DRO.
This paper investigates group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO), with the purpose to learn a model that performs well over $m$ different distributions. First, we formulate GDRO as a stochastic convex-concave saddle-point problem, and demonstrate that stochastic mirror descent (SMD), using $m$ samples in each iteration, achieves an $O(m (\log m)/\epsilon^2)$ sample complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-optimal solution, which matches the $\Omega(m/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. Then, we make use of techniques from online learning to reduce the number of samples required in each round from $m$ to $1$, keeping the same sample complexity. Specifically, we cast GDRO as a two-players game where one player simply performs SMD and the other executes an online algorithm for non-oblivious multi-armed bandits. Next, we consider a more practical scenario where the number of samples that can be drawn from each distribution is different, and propose a novel formulation of weighted GDRO, which allows us to derive distribution-dependent convergence rates. Denote by $n_i$ the sample budget for the $i$-th distribution, and assume $n_1 \geq n_2 \geq \cdots \geq n_m$. In the first approach, we incorporate non-uniform sampling into SMD such that the sample budget is satisfied in expectation, and prove that the excess risk of the $i$-th distribution decreases at an $O(\sqrt{n_1 \log m}/n_i)$ rate. In the second approach, we use mini-batches to meet the budget exactly and also reduce the variance in stochastic gradients, and then leverage stochastic mirror-prox algorithm, which can exploit small variances, to optimize a carefully designed weighted GDRO problem. Under appropriate conditions, it attains an $O((\log m)/\sqrt{n_i})$ convergence rate, which almost matches the optimal $O(\sqrt{1/n_i})$ rate of only learning from the $i$-th distribution with $n_i$ samples.
tl;dr: We study the effect of ordering the examples in fixed-design online learning and present novel approximation algorithms and hardness results.
We study fixed-design online learning where the learner is allowed to choose the order of the datapoints in order to minimize their regret (aka self-directed online learning). We focus on the fundamental task of online linear regression: the learner is given a dataset $X$ with $n$ examples in $d$ dimensions and at step $t$ they select a point $x_t \in X$, predict a value $\widetilde y_t$, and suffer loss $(\widetilde y_t - w^\ast \cdot x_t)^2$. The goal is to design algorithms that order the examples and achieve better
regret than random- or worst-order online algorithms.
For an arbitrary dataset $X$, we show that, under the Exponential Time Hypothesis, no efficient algorithm can approximate the optimal (best-order) regret within a factor of $d^{1/\poly(\log \log d)}$.
We then show that, for structured datasets, we can bypass the above hardness result and achieve nearly optimal regret. When the examples of $X$ are drawn i.i.d.\ from the uniform distribution on the sphere, we present an algorithm based on the greedy heuristic of selecting ``easiest'' examples first that achieves a $\log d$-approximation of the optimal regret.
tl;dr: We present textual outliers in diverse forms and demonstrate their effectiveness in visual out-of-distribution (OoD) detection tasks
Successful detection of Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data is becoming increasingly important to ensure safe deployment of neural networks. One of the main challenges in OoD detection is that neural networks output overconfident predictions on OoD data, make it difficult to determine OoD-ness of data solely based on their predictions. Outlier exposure addresses this issue by introducing an additional loss that encourages low-confidence predictions on OoD data during training. While outlier exposure has shown promising potential in improving OoD detection performance, all previous studies on outlier exposure have been limited to utilizing visual outliers. Drawing inspiration from the recent advancements in vision-language pre-training, this paper venture out to the uncharted territory of textual outlier exposure. First, we uncover the benefits of using textual outliers by replacing real or virtual outliers in the image-domain with textual equivalents. Then, we propose various ways of generating preferable textual outliers. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that generated textual outliers achieve competitive performance on large-scale OoD and hard OoD benchmarks. Furthermore, we conduct empirical analyses of textual outliers to provide primary criteria for designing advantageous textual outliers: near-distribution, descriptiveness, and inclusion of visual semantics.
Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a common name for an emerging family of approaches that infer the model parameters when the likelihood is intractable. Existing SBI methods either approximate the likelihood, such as Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) or directly model the posterior, such as Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (SNPE). While ABC is efficient on low-dimensional problems, on higher-dimensional tasks, it is generally outperformed by SNPE, which leverages function approximation. In this paper, we propose Pseudo-Likelihood Inference (PLI), a new method that brings neural approximation into ABC, making it competitive on challenging Bayesian system identification tasks. By utilizing integral probability metrics, we introduce a smooth likelihood kernel with an adaptive bandwidth that is updated based on information-theoretic trust regions. Thanks to this formulation, our method (i) allows for optimizing neural posteriors via gradient descent, (ii) does not rely on summary statistics, and (iii) enables multiple observations as input. In comparison to SNPE, it leads to improved performance when more data is available. The effectiveness of PLI is evaluated on four classical SBI benchmark tasks and on a highly dynamic physical system, showing particular advantages on stochastic simulations and multi-modal posterior landscapes.
tl;dr: We introduce Gaussian process probes (GPP), a unified and simple framework for probing and measuring uncertainty about concepts represented by models.
Understanding which concepts models can and cannot represent has been fundamental to many tasks: from effective and responsible use of models to detecting out of distribution data. We introduce Gaussian process probes (GPP), a unified and simple framework for probing and measuring uncertainty about concepts represented by models. As a Bayesian extension of linear probing methods, GPP asks what kind of distribution over classifiers (of concepts) is induced by the model. This distribution can be used to measure both what the model represents and how confident the probe is about what the model represents. GPP can be applied to any pre-trained model with vector representations of inputs (e.g., activations). It does not require access to training data, gradients, or the architecture. We validate GPP on datasets containing both synthetic and real images. Our experiments show it can (1) probe a model's representations of concepts even with a very small number of examples, (2) accurately measure both epistemic uncertainty (how confident the probe is) and aleatory uncertainty (how fuzzy the concepts are to the model), and (3) detect out of distribution data using those uncertainty measures as well as classic methods do. By using Gaussian processes to expand what probing can offer, GPP provides a data-efficient, versatile and uncertainty-aware tool for understanding and evaluating the capabilities of machine learning models.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel uncertainty estimation framework via high-dimensional testing
Uncertainty estimation aims to evaluate the confidence of a trained deep neural network. However, existing uncertainty estimation approaches rely on low-dimensional distributional assumptions and thus suffer from the high dimensionality of latent features. Existing approaches tend to focus on uncertainty on discrete classification probabilities, which leads to poor generalizability to uncertainty estimation for other tasks. Moreover, most of the literature requires seeing the out-of-distribution (OOD) data in the training for better estimation of uncertainty, which limits the uncertainty estimation performance in practice because the OOD data are typically unseen. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new framework using data-adaptive high-dimensional hypothesis testing for uncertainty estimation, which leverages the statistical properties of the feature representations. Our method directly operates on latent representations and thus does not require retraining the feature encoder under a modified objective. The test statistic relaxes the feature distribution assumptions to high dimensionality, and it is more discriminative to uncertainties in the latent representations. We demonstrate that encoding features with Bayesian neural networks can enhance testing performance and lead to more accurate uncertainty estimation. We further introduce a family-wise testing procedure to determine the optimal threshold of OOD detection, which minimizes the false discovery rate (FDR). Extensive experiments validate the satisfactory performance of our framework on uncertainty estimation and task-specific prediction over a variety of competitors. The experiments on the OOD detection task also show satisfactory performance of our method when the OOD data are unseen in the training. Codes are available at https://github.com/HKU-MedAI/bnn_uncertainty.
Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in generative tasks. Sampling from diffusion models is equivalent to solving the reverse diffusion stochastic differential equations (SDEs) or the corresponding probability flow ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In comparison, SDE-based solvers can generate samples of higher quality and are suited for image translation tasks like stroke-based synthesis. During inference, however, existing SDE-based solvers are severely constrained by the efficiency-effectiveness dilemma. Our investigation suggests that this is because the Gaussian assumption in the reverse transition kernel is frequently violated (even in the case of simple mixture data) given a limited number of discretization steps. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel class of SDE-based solvers called \emph{Gaussian Mixture Solvers (GMS)} for diffusion models. Our solver estimates the first three-order moments and optimizes the parameters of a Gaussian mixture transition kernel using generalized methods of moments in each step during sampling. Empirically, our solver outperforms numerous SDE-based solvers in terms of sample quality in image generation and stroke-based synthesis in various diffusion models, which validates the motivation and effectiveness of GMS. Our code is available at https://github.com/Guohanzhong/GMS.
tl;dr: We propose a novel computational and memory efficient second order method for deep neural network training which while maintaining computational efficiency.
Second-order methods hold significant promise for enhancing the convergence of deep neural network training; however, their large memory and computational demands have limited their practicality. Thus there is a need for scalable second-order methods that can efficiently train large models. In this paper, we introduce the Sparsified Online Newton~(SONew) method, a memory-efficient second-order algorithm that yields a sparsified yet effective preconditioner. The algorithm emerges from a novel use of the LogDet matrix divergence measure; we combine it with sparsity constraints to minimize regret in the online convex optimization framework. Empirically, we test our method on large scale benchmarks of up to 1B parameters. We achieve up to $30\\%$ faster convergence, $3.4\\%$ relative improvement in validation performance, and $80\\%$ relative improvement in training loss, in comparison to memory efficient optimizers including first order methods. Powering the method is a surprising fact -- imposing structured sparsity patterns, like tridiagonal and banded structure, requires little to no overhead, making it as efficient and parallelizable as first-order methods. In wall-clock time, tridiagonal SONew is only about $3\\%$ slower per step than first-order methods but gives overall gains due to much faster convergence. In contrast, one of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) memory-intensive second-order methods, Shampoo, is unable to scale to large benchmarks. Additionally, while Shampoo necessitates significant engineering efforts to scale to large benchmarks, SONew offers a more straightforward implementation, increasing its practical appeal. SONew code is available at: https://github.com/devvrit/SONew
tl;dr: Proposed a novel mean-shift inspired feature-level self-supervised learning method that significantly improved the transferability on object detection and segmentation tasks.
Current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods (e.g., SimCLR, DINO, VICReg, MOCOv3) target primarily on representations at instance level and do not generalize well to dense prediction tasks, such as object detection and segmentation. Towards aligning SSL with dense predictions, this paper demonstrates for the first time the underlying mean-shift clustering process of Vision Transformers (ViT), which aligns well with natural image semantics (e.g., a world of objects and stuffs). By employing transformer for joint embedding and clustering, we propose a bi-level feature clustering SSL method, coined Feature-Level Self-supervised Learning (FLSL). We present the formal definition of the FLSL problem and construct the objectives from the mean-shift and k-means perspectives. We show that FLSL promotes remarkable semantic cluster representations and learns an embedding scheme amenable to intra-view and inter-view feature clustering. Experiments show that FLSL yields significant improvements in dense prediction tasks, achieving 44.9 (+2.8)% AP and 46.5% AP in object detection, as well as 40.8 (+2.3)% AP and 42.1% AP in instance segmentation on MS-COCO, using Mask R-CNN with ViT-S/16 and ViT-S/8 as backbone, respectively. FLSL consistently outperforms existing SSL methods across additional benchmarks, including UAV object detection on UAVDT, and video instance segmentation on DAVIS 2017. We conclude by presenting visualization and various ablation studies to better understand the success of FLSL. The source code is available at https://github.com/ISL-CV/FLSL.
tl;dr: The paper studies the multi-objective minimum weight base problem and analyzes the run-time of MOEA/D in finding an approximation.
We study the multi-objective minimum weight base problem, an abstraction of classical NP-hard combinatorial problems such as the multi-objective minimum spanning tree problem. We prove some important properties of the convex hull of the non-dominated front, such as its approximation quality and an upper bound on the number of extreme points. Using these properties, we give the first run-time analysis of the MOEA/D algorithm for this problem, an evolutionary algorithm that effectively optimizes by decomposing the objectives into single-objective components. We show that the MOEA/D, given an appropriate decomposition setting, finds all extreme points within expected fixed-parameter polynomial time, in the oracle model. Experiments are conducted on random bi-objective minimum spanning tree instances, and the results agree with our theoretical findings. Furthermore, compared with a previously studied evolutionary algorithm for the problem GSEMO, MOEA/D finds all extreme points much faster across all instances.
Contrastive vision-language representation learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot classification, by learning from millions of image-caption pairs crawled from the internet. However, the massive data that powers large multimodal models such as CLIP, makes them extremely vulnerable to various types of targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks. Despite this vulnerability, robust contrastive vision-language pre-training against such attacks has remained unaddressed. In this work, we propose RoCLIP, the first effective method for robust pre-training multimodal vision-language models against targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks. RoCLIP effectively breaks the association between poisoned image-caption pairs by considering a relatively large and varying pool of random captions, and matching every image with the text that is most similar to it in the pool instead of its own caption, every few epochs.It also leverages image and text augmentations to further strengthen the defense and improve the performance of the model. Our extensive experiments show that RoCLIP renders state-of-the-art targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks ineffective during pre-training CLIP models. In particular, RoCLIP decreases the success rate for targeted data poisoning attacks from 93.75% to 12.5% and that of backdoor attacks down to 0%, while improving the model's linear probe performance by 10% and maintains a similar zero shot performance compared to CLIP. By increasing the frequency of matching, RoCLIP is able to defend strong attacks, which add up to 1% poisoned examples to the data, and successfully maintain a low attack success rate of 12.5%, while trading off the performance on some tasks.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have undergone continuous development and extensive study for decades, leading to increased biological plausibility and optimal energy efficiency. However, traditional training methods for deep SNNs have some limitations, as they rely on strategies such as pre-training and fine-tuning, indirect coding and reconstruction, and approximate gradients. These strategies lack a complete training model and require gradient approximation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel learning method named Joint Excitatory Inhibitory Cycle Iteration learning for Deep Spiking Neural Networks (EICIL) that integrates both excitatory and inhibitory behaviors inspired by the signal transmission of biological neurons.By organically embedding these two behavior patterns into one framework, the proposed EICIL significantly improves the bio-mimicry and adaptability of spiking neuron models, as well as expands the representation space of spiking neurons. Extensive experiments based on EICIL and traditional learning methods demonstrate that EICIL outperforms traditional methods on various datasets, such as CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, revealing the crucial role of the learning approach that integrates both behaviors during training.
Riemannian diffusion models draw inspiration from standard Euclidean space diffusion models to learn distributions on general manifolds. Unfortunately, the additional geometric complexity renders the diffusion transition term inexpressible in closed form, so prior methods resort to imprecise approximations of the score matching training objective that degrade performance and preclude applications in high dimensions. In this work, we reexamine these approximations and propose several practical improvements. Our key observation is that most relevant manifolds are symmetric spaces, which are much more amenable to computation. By leveraging and combining various ans\"{a}tze, we can quickly compute relevant quantities to high precision. On low dimensional datasets, our correction produces a noticeable improvement and is competitive with other techniques. Additionally, we show that our method enables us to scale to high dimensional tasks on nontrivial manifolds, including $SU(n)$ lattices in the context of lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Finally, we apply our models to contrastively learned hyperspherical embeddings, curbing the representation collapse problem in the projection head and closing the gap between theory and practice.
Visual model-based RL methods typically encode image observations into low-dimensional representations in a manner that does not eliminate redundant information. This leaves them susceptible to spurious variations -- changes in task-irrelevant components such as background distractors or lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a visual model-based RL method that learns a latent representation resilient to such spurious variations. Our training objective encourages the representation to be maximally predictive of dynamics and reward, while constraining the information flow from the observation to the latent representation. We demonstrate that this objective significantly bolsters the resilience of visual model-based RL methods to visual distractors, allowing them to operate in dynamic environments. We then show that while the learned encoder is able to operate in dynamic environments, it is not invariant under significant distribution shift. To address this, we propose a simple reward-free alignment procedure that enables test time adaptation of the encoder. This allows for quick adaptation to widely differing environments without having to relearn the dynamics and policy. Our effort is a step towards making model-based RL a practical and useful tool for dynamic, diverse domains and we show its effectiveness in simulation tasks with significant spurious variations.
tl;dr: Supervised matrix factorization, a multi-objective non-convex problem, is lifted to a low-rank matrix estimation problem and is solved by using projected low-rank gradient descent algorithms. Exponential convergence to global optima is established.
Supervised matrix factorization (SMF) is a classical machine learning method that simultaneously seeks feature extraction and classification tasks, which are not necessarily a priori aligned objectives. Our goal is to use SMF to learn low-rank latent factors that offer interpretable, data-reconstructive, and class-discriminative features, addressing challenges posed by high-dimensional data. Training SMF model involves solving a nonconvex and possibly constrained optimization with at least three blocks of parameters. Known algorithms are either heuristic or provide weak convergence guarantees for special cases. In this paper, we provide a novel framework that `lifts' SMF as a low-rank matrix estimation problem in a combined factor space and propose an efficient algorithm that provably converges exponentially fast to a global minimizer of the objective with arbitrary initialization under mild assumptions. Our framework applies to a wide range of SMF-type problems for multi-class classification with auxiliary features. To showcase an application, we demonstrate that our algorithm successfully identified well-known cancer-associated gene groups for various cancers.
Subgame solving is an essential technique in addressing large imperfect information games, with various approaches developed to enhance the performance of refined strategies in the abstraction of the target subgame. However, directly applying existing subgame solving techniques may be difficult, due to the intricate nature and substantial size of many real-world games. To overcome this issue, recent subgame solving methods allow for subgame solving on limited knowledge order subgames, increasing their applicability in large games; yet this may still face obstacles due to extensive information set sizes. To address this challenge, we propose a generative subgame solving (GS2) framework, which utilizes a generation function to identify a subset of the earliest-reached nodes, reducing the size of the subgame. Our method is supported by a theoretical analysis and employs a diversity-based generation function to enhance safety. Experiments conducted on medium-sized games as well as the challenging large game of GuanDan demonstrate a significant improvement over the blueprint.
Agents capable of carrying out general tasks on a computer can improve efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and assisting in complex problem-solving. Ideally, such agents should be able to solve new computer tasks presented to them through natural language commands. However, previous approaches to this problem require large amounts of expert demonstrations and task-specific reward functions, both of which are impractical for new tasks. In this work, we show that a pre-trained large language model (LLM) agent can execute computer tasks guided by natural language using a simple prompting scheme where the agent \textbf{R}ecursively \textbf{C}riticizes and \textbf{I}mproves its output (RCI). The RCI approach significantly outperforms existing LLM methods for automating computer tasks and surpasses supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches on the MiniWoB++ benchmark.
We compare multiple LLMs and find that RCI with the InstructGPT-3+RLHF LLM is state-of-the-art on MiniWoB++, using only a handful of demonstrations per task rather than tens of thousands, and without a task-specific reward function. Furthermore, we demonstrate RCI prompting's effectiveness in enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities on a suite of natural language reasoning tasks, outperforming chain of thought (CoT) prompting with external feedback. We find that RCI combined with CoT performs better than either separately. Our code can be found here: https://github.com/posgnu/rci-agent.
The aim of this paper is to make clear and precise the relationship between the Rubin causal model (RCM) and structural causal model (SCM) frameworks for causal inference. Adopting a neutral logical perspective, and drawing on previous work, we show what is required for an RCM to be representable by an SCM. A key result then shows that every RCM---including those that violate algebraic principles implied by the SCM framework---emerges as an abstraction of some representable RCM. Finally, we illustrate the power of this ameliorative perspective by pinpointing an important role for SCM principles in classic applications of RCMs; conversely, we offer a characterization of the algebraic constraints implied by a graph, helping to substantiate further comparisons between the two frameworks.
tl;dr: We present improved sample complexity bounds for the conditional stochastic optimization problem and its finite counterpart through a new bias reduction idea
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient of the CSO objective is biased due to its nested structure, and therefore requires a high sample complexity for convergence. We introduce a general stochastic extrapolation technique that effectively reduces the bias. We show that for nonconvex smooth objectives, combining this extrapolation with variance reduction techniques can achieve a significantly better sample complexity than the existing bounds. Additionally, we develop new algorithms for the finite-sum variant of the CSO problem that also significantly improve upon existing results. Finally, we believe that our debiasing technique has the potential to be a useful tool for addressing similar challenges in other stochastic optimization problems.
tl;dr: The paper proposes a novel algorithm for training mixture of experts models for versatile skill learning.
Imitation learning uses data for training policies to solve complex tasks. However,
when the training data is collected from human demonstrators, it often leads
to multimodal distributions because of the variability in human actions. Most
imitation learning methods rely on a maximum likelihood (ML) objective to learn
a parameterized policy, but this can result in suboptimal or unsafe behavior due
to the mode-averaging property of the ML objective. In this work, we propose
Information Maximizing Curriculum, a curriculum-based approach that assigns
a weight to each data point and encourages the model to specialize in the data it
can represent, effectively mitigating the mode-averaging problem by allowing the
model to ignore data from modes it cannot represent. To cover all modes and thus,
enable versatile behavior, we extend our approach to a mixture of experts (MoE)
policy, where each mixture component selects its own subset of the training data
for learning. A novel, maximum entropy-based objective is proposed to achieve
full coverage of the dataset, thereby enabling the policy to encompass all modes
within the data distribution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on
complex simulated control tasks using versatile human demonstrations, achieving
superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: We show that when learning single-index models with neural networks using gradient-based training, additional structure in the covariance matrix can improve the sample complexity.
Recent works have demonstrated that the sample complexity of gradient-based learning of single index models, i.e. functions that depend on a 1-dimensional projection of the input data, is governed by their information exponent. However, these results are only concerned with isotropic data, while in practice the input often contains additional structure which can implicitly guide the algorithm. In this work, we investigate the effect of a spiked covariance structure and reveal several interesting phenomena. First, we show that in the anisotropic setting, the commonly used spherical gradient dynamics may fail to recover the true direction, even when the spike is perfectly aligned with the target direction. Next,
we show that appropriate weight normalization that is reminiscent of batch normalization can alleviate this issue. Further, by exploiting the alignment between the (spiked) input covariance and the target, we obtain improved sample complexity compared to the isotropic case. In particular, under the spiked model with a suitably large spike, the sample complexity of gradient-based training can be made independent of the information exponent while also outperforming lower bounds for
rotationally invariant kernel methods.
tl;dr: We propose a principled domain incremental learning framework that unifies multiple existing methods and achieves the tightest generalization bound.
Domain incremental learning aims to adapt to a sequence of domains with access to only a small subset of data (i.e., memory) from previous domains. Various methods have been proposed for this problem, but it is still unclear how they are related and when practitioners should choose one method over another. In response, we propose a unified framework, dubbed Unified Domain Incremental Learning (UDIL), for domain incremental learning with memory. Our UDIL **unifies** various existing methods, and our theoretical analysis shows that UDIL always achieves a tighter generalization error bound compared to these methods. The key insight is that different existing methods correspond to our bound with different **fixed** coefficients; based on insights from this unification, our UDIL allows **adaptive** coefficients during training, thereby always achieving the tightest bound. Empirical results show that our UDIL outperforms the state-of-the-art domain incremental learning methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/unified-continual-learning.
tl;dr: We investigate list and certificate complexities in the context of replicable learning algorithms.
We investigate replicable learning algorithms. Informally a learning algorithm is replicable if the algorithm outputs the same canonical hypothesis over multiple runs with high probability, even when different runs observe a different set of samples from the unknown data distribution. In general, such a strong notion of replicability is not achievable.
Thus we consider two feasible notions of replicability called {\em list replicability} and {\em certificate replicability}.
Intuitively, these notions capture the degree of (non) replicability. The goal is to design learning algorithms with optimal list and certificate complexities while minimizing the sample complexity. Our contributions are the following.
1. We first study the learning task of estimating the biases of $d$ coins, up to an additive error of $\varepsilon$, by observing samples. For this task, we design a $(d+1)$-list replicable algorithm. To complement this result, we establish that the list complexity is optimal, i.e there are no learning algorithms with a list size smaller than $d+1$ for this task. We also design learning algorithms with certificate complexity $\tilde{O}(\log d)$. The sample complexity of both these algorithms is $\tilde{O}(\frac{d^2}{\varepsilon^2})$ where $\varepsilon$ is the approximation error parameter (for a constant error probability).
2. In the PAC model, we show that any hypothesis class that is learnable with $d$-nonadaptive statistical queries can be learned via a $(d+1)$-list replicable algorithm and also via a $\tilde{O}(\log d)$-certificate replicable algorithm. The sample complexity of both these algorithms is $\tilde{O}(\frac{d^2}{\nu^2})$ where $\nu$ is the approximation error of the statistical query. We also show that for the concept class \dtep, the list complexity is exactly $d+1$ with respect to the uniform distribution.
To establish our upper bound results we use rounding schemes induced by geometric partitions with certain properties. We use Sperner/KKM Lemma to establish the lower bound results.
tl;dr: Every learner in stochastic convex optimization must carry dimension dependent bits of information over the data set
We examine the relationship between the mutual information between the output model and the empirical sample and the algorithm's generalization in the context of stochastic convex optimization. Despite increasing interest in information-theoretic generalization bounds, it is uncertain if these bounds can provide insight into the exceptional performance of various learning algorithms. Our study of stochastic convex optimization reveals that, for true risk minimization, dimension-dependent mutual information is necessary. This indicates that existing information-theoretic generalization bounds fall short in capturing the generalization capabilities of algorithms like SGD and regularized ERM, which have dimension-independent sample complexity.
Recently, unsupervised adversarial training (AT) has been highlighted as a means of achieving robustness in models without any label information. Previous studies in unsupervised AT have mostly focused on implementing self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks, which maximize the instance-wise classification loss to generate adversarial examples. However, we observe that simply maximizing the self-supervised training loss with an untargeted adversarial attack often results in generating ineffective adversaries that may not help improve the robustness of the trained model, especially for non-contrastive SSL frameworks without negative examples. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel positive mining for targeted adversarial attack to generate effective adversaries for adversarial SSL frameworks. Specifically, we introduce an algorithm that selects the most confusing yet similar target example for a given instance based on entropy and similarity, and subsequently perturbs the given instance towards the selected target. Our method demonstrates significant enhancements in robustness when applied to non-contrastive SSL frameworks, and less but consistent robustness improvements with contrastive SSL frameworks, on the benchmark datasets.
tl;dr: Dictionary learning is globally identifiable by minimizing the volume of the dictionary subject to $\ell_1$ constraints.
We propose a novel formulation for dictionary learning that minimizes the determinant of the dictionary matrix, also known as its volume, subject to the constraint that each row of the sparse coefficient matrix has unit $\ell_1$ norm. The main motivation for the proposed formulation is that it provides global identifiability guarantee of the groundtruth dictionary and sparse coefficient matrices, up to the inherent and inconsequential permutation and scaling ambiguity, if a set of vectors obtained from the coefficient matrix lies inside the $\ell_\infty$ norm ball but contains the $\ell_2$ norm ball in their convex hull. Unlike existing work on identifiability of dictionary learning, our result is global, meaning that a globally optimal solution to our proposed formulation has to be a permuted and rescaled version of the groundtruth factors. Another major improvement in our result is that there is no additional assumption on the dictionary matrix other than it is nonsingular, unlike most other work that require the atoms of the dictionary to be mutually incoherent. We also provide a probabilistic analysis and show that if the sparse coefficient matrix is generated from the widely adopted Bernoulli-Gaussian model, then it is globally identifiable if the sample size is bigger than a constant times $k\log k$, where $k$ is the number atoms in the dictionary, with overwhelming probability. The bound is essentially the same as those local identifiability results, but we show that it is also global. Finally, we propose algorithms to solve the new proposed formulation, specifically one based on the linearized-ADMM with efficient per-iteration updates. The proposed algorithms exhibit surprisingly effective performance in correctly and efficiently recovering the dictionary, as demonstrated in the numerical experiments.
tl;dr: Improving the performance of GNNs with an aggregation method based on the generalised f-mean.
Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures are defined by their implementations of update and aggregation modules. While many works focus on new ways to parametrise the update modules, the aggregation modules receive comparatively little attention. Because it is difficult to parametrise aggregation functions, currently most methods select a ``standard aggregator'' such as mean, sum, or max. While this selection is often made without any reasoning, it has been shown that the choice in aggregator has a significant impact on performance, and the best choice in aggregator is problem-dependent. Since aggregation is a lossy operation, it is crucial to select the most appropriate aggregator in order to minimise information loss. In this paper, we present GenAgg, a generalised aggregation operator, which parametrises a function space that includes all standard aggregators. In our experiments, we show that GenAgg is able to represent the standard aggregators with much higher accuracy than baseline methods. We also show that using GenAgg as a drop-in replacement for an existing aggregator in a GNN often leads to a significant boost in performance across various tasks.
1721. What is the Inductive Bias of Flatness Regularization? A Study of Deep Matrix Factorization Models
Recent works on over-parameterized neural networks have shown that the stochasticity in optimizers has the implicit regularization effect of minimizing the sharpness of the loss function (in particular, the trace of its Hessian) over the family zero-loss solutions. More explicit forms of flatness regularization also empirically improve the generalization performance. However, it remains unclear why and when flatness regularization leads to better generalization.
This work takes the first step towards understanding the inductive bias of the minimum trace of the Hessian solutions in an important setting: learning deep linear networks from linear measurements, also known as \emph{deep matrix factorization}. We show that with the standard Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) on the measurements, minimizing the trace of Hessian is approximately equivalent to minimizing the Schatten 1-norm of the corresponding end-to-end matrix parameters (i.e., the product of all layer matrices), which in turn leads to better generalization.
We develop a series of differential privacy (DP) algorithms from a family of random projection (RP) and sign random projection (SignRP) methods. We first show how to improve the previous DP-RP approach using the ``optimal Gaussian mechanism''. Then, we propose a series of DP-SignRP algorithms that leverage the robustness of the ``sign flipping probability'' of random projections. That is, given $x = \sum_{i=1}^p u_i w_{i}$ where $u$ is a $p$-dimensional data vector and $w$ is a symmetric random vector, $sign(x)$ only has a fairly small probability to be flipped if there is a small modification on data $u$, depending on the specific distribution of $w$. This robustness leads to our novel design of ``smooth flipping probability'' for SignRP-type algorithms with better utility than using the standard randomized response mechanism. Retrieval and classification experiments demonstrate that, among the presented DP-RP algorithms, \textbf{DP-SignOPORP} (where OPORP is an improvement over the celebrated count-sketch algorithms), performs the best in general.
In the industrial practice, DP methods were not very popular for machine learning or search, largely because the performance typically would drop substantially if DP is applied. Since our proposed new DP algorithms have significantly improved the performance, it is anticipated that our work will motivate a wide adoption of DP in practice. Finally, we stress that, since our methods are applied to the original data (i.e., feature vectors), the privacy of downstream tasks is naturally protected.
Measuring dependence between two random variables is of great importance in various domains but is difficult to compute in today's complex environments with high-dimensional data. Recently, slicing methods have shown to be a scalable approach to measuring mutual information (MI) between high-dimensional variables by projecting these variables into one-dimensional spaces. Unfortunately, these methods use uniform distributions of slicing directions, which generally discard informative features between variables and thus lead to inaccurate quantification of dependence. In this paper, we propose a principled framework that searches for an \textit{optimal} distribution of slices for MI. Importantly, we answer theoretical questions about finding the optimal slicing distribution in the context of MI and develop corresponding theoretical analyses. We also develop a practical algorithm, connecting our theoretical results with modern machine learning frameworks. Through comprehensive experiments in benchmark domains, we demonstrate significant gains in our information measure than state-of-the-art baselines.
1724. A Combinatorial Algorithm for Approximating the Optimal Transport in the Parallel and MPC Settings
Optimal Transport is a popular distance metric for measuring similarity between distributions. Exact and approximate combinatorial algorithms for computing the optimal transport distance are hard to parallelize. This has motivated the development of numerical solvers (e.g. Sinkhorn method) that can exploit GPU parallelism and produce approximate solutions.
We introduce the first parallel combinatorial algorithm to find an additive $\varepsilon$-approximation of the OT distance. The parallel complexity of our algorithm is $O(\log(n)/ \varepsilon^2)$ where $n$ is the total support size for the input distributions. In Massive Parallel Computation (MPC) frameworks such as Hadoop and MapReduce, our algorithm computes an $\varepsilon$-approximate transport plan in $O(\log (\log (n/\varepsilon))/\varepsilon^2)$ rounds with $O(n/\varepsilon)$ space per machine; all prior algorithms in the MPC framework take $\Omega(\log n)$ rounds.
We also provide a GPU-friendly matrix-based interpretation of our algorithm where each step of the algorithm is row or column manipulation of the matrix. Experiments suggest that our combinatorial algorithm is faster than the state-of-the-art approximate solvers in the GPU, especially for higher values of $n$.
tl;dr: We present a new framework on generative modeling using the semi-dual formulation of Unbalanced Optimal Transport.
Optimal Transport (OT) problem investigates a transport map that bridges two distributions while minimizing a given cost function. In this regard, OT between tractable prior distribution and data has been utilized for generative modeling tasks. However, OT-based methods are susceptible to outliers and face optimization challenges during training.
In this paper, we propose a novel generative model based on the semi-dual formulation of Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT). Unlike OT, UOT relaxes the hard constraint on distribution matching. This approach provides better robustness against outliers, stability during training, and faster convergence. We validate these properties empirically through experiments. Moreover, we study the theoretical upper-bound of divergence between distributions in UOT. Our model outperforms existing OT-based generative models, achieving FID scores of 2.97 on CIFAR-10 and 5.80 on CelebA-HQ-256. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Jae-Moo/UOTM}.
tl;dr: We study the problem of diminishing marginal utility in reinforcement learning, deriving a novel state representation that is required for solving such problems and applying it in both tabular and continuous domains.
A common setting in multitask reinforcement learning (RL) demands that an agent rapidly adapt to various stationary reward functions randomly sampled from a fixed distribution. In such situations, the successor representation (SR) is a popular framework which supports rapid policy evaluation by decoupling a policy's expected discounted, cumulative state occupancies from a specific reward function. However, in the natural world, sequential tasks are rarely independent, and instead reflect shifting priorities based on the availability and subjective perception of rewarding stimuli. Reflecting this disjunction, in this paper we study the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility and introduce a novel state representation, the $\lambda$ representation ($\lambda$R) which, surprisingly, is required for policy evaluation in this setting and which generalizes the SR as well as several other state representations from the literature. We establish the $\lambda$R's formal properties and examine its normative advantages in the context of machine learning, as well as its usefulness for studying natural behaviors, particularly foraging.
tl;dr: We propose a test-time multi-source domain adaptation method that use optimal transport on signals to adapt to the spectral variability between domains on biosignals.
In many machine learning applications on signals and biomedical data, especially electroencephalogram (EEG), one major challenge is the variability of the data across subjects, sessions, and hardware devices. In this work, we propose a new method called Convolutional Monge Mapping Normalization ($\texttt{CMMN}$), which consists in filtering the signals in order to adapt their power spectrum density (PSD) to a Wasserstein barycenter estimated on training data. $\texttt{CMMN}$ relies on novel closed-form solutions for optimal transport mappings and barycenters and provides individual test time adaptation to new data without needing to retrain a prediction model. Numerical experiments on sleep EEG data show that $\texttt{CMMN}$ leads to significant and consistent performance gains independent from the neural network architecture when adapting between subjects, sessions, and even datasets collected with different hardware. Notably our performance gain is on par with much more numerically intensive Domain Adaptation (DA) methods and can be used in conjunction with those for even better performances.
1728. AMAG: Additive, Multiplicative and Adaptive Graph Neural Network For Forecasting Neuron Activity
tl;dr: In this work, we emphasize the importance of modeling neural population dynamics via forecasting tasks and aim to improve the forecasting performance with Graph Neural Networks
Latent Variable Models (LVMs) propose to model the dynamics of neural populations by capturing low-dimensional structures that represent features involved in neural activity. Recent LVMs are based on deep learning methodology where a deep neural network is trained to reconstruct the same neural activity given as input and as a result to build the latent representation. Without taking past or future activity into account such a task is non-causal. In contrast, the task of forecasting neural activity based on given input extends the reconstruction task. LVMs that are trained on such a task could potentially capture temporal causality constraints within its latent representation. Forecasting has received less attention than reconstruction due to recording challenges such as limited neural measurements and trials. In this work, we address modeling neural population dynamics via the forecasting task and improve forecasting performance by including a prior, which consists of pairwise neural unit interaction as a multivariate dynamic system. Our proposed model---Additive, Multiplicative, and Adaptive Graph Neural Network (AMAG)---leverages additive and multiplicative message-passing operations analogous to the interactions in neuronal systems and adaptively learns the interaction among neural units to forecast their future activity. We demonstrate the advantage of AMAG compared to non-GNN based methods on synthetic data and multiple modalities of neural recordings (field potentials from penetrating electrodes or surface-level micro-electrocorticography) from four rhesus macaques. Our results show the ability of AMAG to recover ground truth spatial interactions and yield estimation for future dynamics of the neural population.
Recent development in vision-language approaches has instigated a paradigm shift in learning visual recognition models from language supervision. These approaches align objects with language queries (e.g. "a photo of a cat") and thus improve the models' adaptability to novel objects and domains. Recent studies have attempted to query these models with complex language expressions that include specifications of fine-grained details, such as colors, shapes, and relations. However, simply incorporating language descriptions into queries does not guarantee accurate interpretation by the models. In fact, our experiments show that GLIP, a state-of-the-art vision-language model for object detection, often disregards contextual information in the language descriptions and instead relies heavily on detecting objects solely by their names. To tackle the challenge, we propose a new description-conditioned (DesCo) paradigm of learning object recognition models with rich language descriptions consisting of two innovations: 1) we employ a large language model as a commonsense knowledge engine to generate rich language descriptions of objects; 2) we design context-sensitive queries to improve the model's ability in deciphering intricate nuances embedded within descriptions and enforce the model to focus on context rather than object names alone. On two novel object detection benchmarks, LVIS and OminiLabel, under the zero-shot detection setting, our approach achieves 34.8 APr minival (+9.1) and 29.3 AP (+3.6), respectively, surpassing the prior state-of-the-art models, GLIP and FIBER, by a large margin.
tl;dr: We provide a unified approach for weakly supervised learning through count-based constraints.
High-quality labels are often very scarce, whereas unlabeled data with inferred weak labels occurs more naturally. In many cases, these weak labels dictate the frequency of each respective class over a set of instances. In this paper, we develop a unified approach to learning from such weakly-labeled data, which we call *count-based weakly-supervised learning*. At the heart of our approach is the ability to compute the probability of exactly $k$ out of $n$ outputs being set to true. This computation is differentiable, exact, and efficient. Building upon the previous computation, we derive a *count loss* penalizing the model for deviations in its distribution from an arithmetic constraint defined over label counts.
tl;dr: To benchmark classical and neural mutual information estimators, we develop a rich set of distributions easy to sample from and with known ground-truth mutual information.
Mutual information is a general statistical dependency measure which has found applications in representation learning, causality, domain generalization and computational biology. However, mutual information estimators are typically evaluated on simple families of probability distributions, namely multivariate normal distribution and selected distributions with one-dimensional random variables. In this paper, we show how to construct a diverse family of distributions with known ground-truth mutual information and propose a language-independent benchmarking platform for mutual information estimators. We discuss the general applicability and limitations of classical and neural estimators in settings involving high dimensions, sparse interactions, long-tailed distributions, and high mutual information. Finally, we provide guidelines for practitioners on how to select appropriate estimator adapted to the difficulty of problem considered and issues one needs to consider when applying an estimator to a new data set.
tl;dr: ensuring fairness in text-based image retrieval by mitigating test-time bias from target retrieval set.
We address the challenge of generating fair and unbiased image retrieval results given neutral textual queries (with no explicit gender or race connotations), while maintaining the utility (performance) of the underlying vision-language (VL) model. Previous methods aim to disentangle learned representations of images and text queries from gender and racial characteristics. However, we show these are inadequate at alleviating bias for the desired equal representation result, as there usually exists test-time bias in the target retrieval set. So motivated, we introduce a straightforward technique, Post-hoc Bias Mitigation (PBM), that post-processes the outputs from the pre-trained vision-language model. We evaluate our algorithm on real-world image search datasets, Occupation 1 and 2, as well as two large-scale image-text datasets, MS-COCO and Flickr30k. Our approach achieves the lowest bias, compared with various existing bias-mitigation methods, in text-based image retrieval result while maintaining satisfactory retrieval performance. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/timqqt/Fair_Text_based_Image_Retrieval}.
tl;dr: A representation learning method that predicts the Fourier transform of state sequences to improve sample efficiency of RL algorithms.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been demonstrated effective in solving complex control tasks, sample efficiency remains a key challenge due to the large amounts of data required for remarkable performance. Existing research explores the application of representation learning for data-efficient RL, e.g., learning predictive representations by predicting long-term future states. However, many existing methods do not fully exploit the structural information inherent in sequential state signals, which can potentially improve the quality of long-term decision-making but is difficult to discern in the time domain. To tackle this problem, we propose State Sequences Prediction via Fourier Transform (SPF), a novel method that exploits the frequency domain of state sequences to extract the underlying patterns in time series data for learning expressive representations efficiently. Specifically, we theoretically analyze the existence of structural information in state sequences, which is closely related to policy performance and signal regularity, and then propose to predict the Fourier transform of infinite-step future state sequences to extract such information. One of the appealing features of SPF is that it is simple to implement while not requiring storage of infinite-step future states as prediction targets. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both sample efficiency and performance.
tl;dr: This paper presents Contextualized World Models (ContextWM), which utilize pre-training on in-the-wild videos to enable sample-efficient model-based reinforcement learning of visual control tasks in various domains.
Unsupervised pre-training methods utilizing large and diverse datasets have achieved tremendous success across a range of domains. Recent work has investigated such unsupervised pre-training methods for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) but is limited to domain-specific or simulated data. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-training world models with abundant in-the-wild videos for efficient learning of downstream visual control tasks. However, in-the-wild videos are complicated with various contextual factors, such as intricate backgrounds and textured appearance, which precludes a world model from extracting shared world knowledge to generalize better. To tackle this issue, we introduce Contextualized World Models (ContextWM) that explicitly separate context and dynamics modeling to overcome the complexity and diversity of in-the-wild videos and facilitate knowledge transfer between distinct scenes. Specifically, a contextualized extension of the latent dynamics model is elaborately realized by incorporating a context encoder to retain contextual information and empower the image decoder, which encourages the latent dynamics model to concentrate on essential temporal variations. Our experiments show that in-the-wild video pre-training equipped with ContextWM can significantly improve the sample efficiency of MBRL in various domains, including robotic manipulation, locomotion, and autonomous driving. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/ContextWM.
In real applications, interaction between machine learning models and domain experts is critical; however, the classical machine learning paradigm that usually produces only a single model does not facilitate such interaction. Approximating and exploring the Rashomon set, i.e., the set of all near-optimal models, addresses this practical challenge by providing the user with a searchable space containing a diverse set of models from which domain experts can choose. We present algorithms to efficiently and accurately approximate the Rashomon set of sparse, generalized additive models with ellipsoids for fixed support sets and use these ellipsoids to approximate Rashomon sets for many different support sets. The approximated Rashomon set serves as a cornerstone to solve practical challenges such as (1) studying the variable importance for the model class; (2) finding models under user-specified constraints (monotonicity, direct editing); and (3) investigating sudden changes in the shape functions. Experiments demonstrate the fidelity of the approximated Rashomon set and its effectiveness in solving practical challenges.
1736. Differentially Private Statistical Inference through $\beta$-Divergence One Posterior Sampling
tl;dr: We propose a method for unbiased differentially private parameter estimation that samples from a generalised Bayesian posterior targeting the minimisation of the $\beta$-divergence between the model and the data generating process.
Differential privacy guarantees allow the results of a statistical analysis involving sensitive data to be released without compromising the privacy of any individual taking part. Achieving such guarantees generally requires the injection of noise, either directly into parameter estimates or into the estimation process.
Instead of artificially introducing perturbations,
sampling from Bayesian posterior distributions has been shown to be a special case of the exponential mechanism, producing consistent,
and efficient private estimates without altering the data generative process. The application of current approaches has, however, been limited by their strong bounding assumptions which do not hold for basic models, such as simple linear regressors.
To ameliorate this, we propose $\beta$D-Bayes, a posterior sampling scheme from a generalised posterior targeting the minimisation of the $\beta$-divergence between the model and the data generating process. This provides private estimation that is generally applicable without requiring changes to the underlying model and consistently learns the data generating parameter.
We show that $\beta$D-Bayes produces more precise inference estimation for the same privacy guarantees, and further facilitates differentially private estimation of complex classifiers, and continuous regression models such as neural networks, which goes beyond what has been currently possible with private posterior sampling.
tl;dr: We identify that prevailing diffusion enhancement models are susceptible to condition collapse, and we propose an efficient method to address this issue.
Speech enhancement (SE) aims to improve the intelligibility and quality of speech in the presence of non-stationary additive noise. Deterministic deep learning models have traditionally been used for SE, but recent studies have shown that generative approaches, such as denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), can also be effective. However, incorporating condition information into DDPMs for SE remains a challenge. We propose a model-agnostic method called DOSE that employs two efficient condition-augmentation techniques to address this challenge, based on two key insights: (1) We force the model to prioritize the condition factor when generating samples by training it with dropout operation; (2) We inject the condition information into the sampling process by providing an informative adaptive prior. Experiments demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements in high-quality and stable speech generation, consistency with the condition factor, and inference efficiency. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/ICDM-UESTC/DOSE.
An important goal of modern scheduling systems is to efficiently manage power usage. In energy-efficient scheduling, the operating system controls the speed at which a machine is processing jobs with the dual objective of minimizing energy consumption and optimizing the quality of service cost of the resulting schedule. Since machine-learned predictions about future requests can often be learned from historical data, a recent line of work on learning-augmented algorithms aims to achieve improved performance guarantees by leveraging predictions. In particular, for energy-efficient scheduling, Bamas et. al. [NeurIPS '20] and Antoniadis et. al. [SWAT '22]
designed algorithms with predictions for the energy minimization with deadlines problem and achieved an improved competitive ratio when the prediction error is small while also maintaining worst-case bounds even when the prediction error is arbitrarily large.
In this paper, we consider a general setting for energy-efficient scheduling and provide a flexible learning-augmented algorithmic framework that takes as input an offline and an online algorithm for the desired energy-efficient scheduling problem. We show that, when the prediction error is small, this framework gives improved competitive ratios for many different energy-efficient scheduling problems, including energy minimization with deadlines, while also maintaining a bounded competitive ratio regardless of the prediction error. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that this framework achieves an improved performance on real and synthetic datasets.
tl;dr: Technique which leverages retrieval methods for recalling relevant pretrain data used to condition the network for improved transfer learning/distribution shift accuracy.
We propose Neural Priming, a technique for adapting large pretrained models to distribution shifts and downstream tasks given few or no labeled examples. Presented with class names or unlabeled test samples, Neural Priming enables the model to recall and conditions its parameters on relevant data seen throughout pretraining, thereby priming it for the test distribution. Neural Priming can be performed at test time in even for pretraining datasets as large as LAION-2B. Performing lightweight updates on the recalled data significantly improves accuracy across a variety of distribution shift and transfer learning benchmarks. Concretely, in the zero-shot setting, we see a 2.45% improvement in accuracy on ImageNet and 3.81% accuracy improvement on average across standard transfer learning benchmarks. Further, using our test time inference scheme, we see a 1.41% accuracy improvement on ImageNetV2. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Neural Priming in addressing the common challenge of limited labeled data and changing distributions. Code and models are open-sourced at [https://www.github.com/RAIVNLab/neural-priming](https://www.github.com/RAIVNLab/neural-priming).
tl;dr: An AI that can generate from any combinations of modalities to any combinations, including text, image, video and audio.
We present Composable Diffusion (CoDi), a novel generative model capable of generating any combination of output modalities, such as language, image, video, or audio, from any combination of input modalities. Unlike existing generative AI systems, CoDi can generate multiple modalities in parallel and its input is not limited to a subset of modalities like text or image. Despite the absence of training datasets for many combinations of modalities, we propose to align modalities in both the input and output space. This allows CoDi to freely condition on any input combination and generate any group of modalities, even if they are not present in the training data. CoDi employs a novel composable generation strategy which involves building a shared multimodal space by bridging alignment in the diffusion process, enabling the synchronized generation of intertwined modalities, such as temporally aligned video and audio. Highly customizable and flexible, CoDi achieves strong joint-modality generation quality, and outperforms or is on par with the unimodal state-of-the-art for single-modality synthesis.
tl;dr: We present a block-coordinate PnP method with theoretical analysis for blind inverse problems by applying learned denoisers as priors on both the image and measurement operator.
Plug-and-play (PnP) prior is a well-known class of methods for solving imaging inverse problems by computing fixed-points of operators combining physical measurement models and learned image denoisers. While PnP methods have been extensively used for image recovery with known measurement operators, there is little work on PnP for solving blind inverse problems. We address this gap by presenting a new block-coordinate PnP (BC-PnP) method that efficiently solves this joint estimation problem by introducing learned denoisers as priors on both the unknown image and the unknown measurement operator. We present a new convergence theory for BC-PnP compatible with blind inverse problems by considering nonconvex data-fidelity terms and expansive denoisers. Our theory analyzes the convergence of BC-PnP to a stationary point of an implicit function associated with an approximate minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) denoiser. We numerically validate our method on two blind inverse problems: automatic coil sensitivity estimation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and blind image deblurring. Our results show that BC-PnP provides an efficient and principled framework for using denoisers as PnP priors for jointly estimating measurement operators and images.
tl;dr: We propose a theoretically sound loss function designed to minimize number of expanded states in best-first search with merit function. The advantage is demostrated on extensive experimental comparison to SOTA.
In imitation learning for planning, parameters of heuristic functions are optimized against a set of solved problem instances. This work revisits the necessary and sufficient conditions of strictly optimally efficient heuristics for forward search algorithms, mainly A* and greedy best-first search, which expand only states on the returned optimal path. It then proposes a family of loss functions based on ranking tailored for a given variant of the forward search algorithm. Furthermore, from a learning theory point of view, it discusses why optimizing cost-to-goal h* is unnecessarily difficult. The experimental comparison on a diverse set of problems unequivocally supports the derived theory.
tl;dr: We propose a generic and efficient methodology to lift the 2D Segment Anything Model to 3D with NeRFs, where only single-view prompts are required to segment the 3D object accurately within minutes.
Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) emerged as a powerful vision foundation model which is capable to segment anything in 2D images. This paper aims to generalize SAM to segment 3D objects. Rather than replicating the data acquisition and annotation procedure which is costly in 3D, we design an efficient solution, leveraging the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) as a cheap and off-the-shelf prior that connects multi-view 2D images to the 3D space. We refer to the proposed solution as SA3D, for Segment Anything in 3D. It is only required to provide a manual segmentation prompt (e.g., rough points) for the target object in a single view, which is used to generate its 2D mask in this view with SAM. Next, SA3D alternately performs mask inverse rendering and cross-view self-prompting across various views to iteratively complete the 3D mask of the target object constructed with voxel grids. The former projects the 2D mask obtained by SAM in the current view onto 3D mask with guidance of the density distribution learned by the NeRF; The latter extracts reliable prompts automatically as the input to SAM from the NeRF-rendered 2D mask in another view. We show in experiments that SA3D adapts to various scenes and achieves 3D segmentation within minutes. Our research offers a generic and efficient methodology to lift a 2D vision foundation model to 3D, as long as the 2D model can steadily address promptable segmentation across multiple views.
Pre-training has been widely adopted in deep learning to improve model performance, especially when the training data for a target task is limited. In our work, we seek to understand the implications of this training strategy on the generalization properties of downstream models. More specifically, we ask the following question: how do properties of the pre-training distribution affect the robustness of a fine-tuned model? The properties we explore include the label space, label semantics, image diversity, data domains, and data quantity of the pre-training distribution. We find that the primary factor influencing downstream effective robustness (Taori et al., 2020) is data quantity, while other factors have limited significance. For example, reducing the number of ImageNet pre-training classes by 4x while increasing the number of images per class by 4x (that is, keeping total data quantity fixed) does not impact the robustness of fine-tuned models. We demonstrate our findings on pre-training distributions drawn from various natural and synthetic data sources, primarily using the iWildCam-WILDS distribution shift as a test for robustness.
tl;dr: A new class of Markov Game with networked separable interaction.
We study a new class of Markov games, \textit{(multi-player) zero-sum Markov Games} with {\it Networked separable interactions} (zero-sum NMGs), to model the local interaction structure in non-cooperative multi-agent sequential decision-making. We define a zero-sum NMG as a model where {the payoffs of the auxiliary games associated with each state are zero-sum and} have some separable (i.e., polymatrix) structure across the neighbors over some interaction network.
We first identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which an MG can be presented as a zero-sum NMG, and show that the set of Markov coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE) collapses to the set of Markov Nash equilibrium (NE) in these games, in that the {product of} per-state marginalization of the former for all players yields the latter. Furthermore, we show that finding approximate Markov \emph{stationary} CCE in infinite-horizon discounted zero-sum NMGs is \texttt{PPAD}-hard, unless the underlying network has a ``star topology''. Then, we propose fictitious-play-type dynamics, the classical learning dynamics in normal-form games, for zero-sum NMGs, and establish convergence guarantees to Markov stationary NE under a star-shaped network structure. Finally, in light of the hardness result, we focus on computing a Markov \emph{non-stationary} NE and provide finite-iteration guarantees for a series of value-iteration-based algorithms. We also provide numerical experiments to corroborate our theoretical results.
1746. What is Flagged in Uncertainty Quantification? Latent Density Models for Uncertainty Categorization
tl;dr: In this work, we propose a framework for categorizing uncertain examples flagged by uncertainty quantification methods.
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for creating trustworthy machine learning models. Recent years have seen a steep rise in UQ methods that can flag suspicious examples, however, it is often unclear what exactly these methods identify. In this work, we propose a framework for categorizing uncertain examples flagged by UQ methods. We introduce the confusion density matrix---a kernel-based approximation of the misclassification density---and use this to categorize suspicious examples identified by a given uncertainty method into three classes: out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, boundary (Bnd) examples, and examples in regions of high in-distribution misclassification (IDM). Through extensive experiments, we show that our framework provides a new and distinct perspective for assessing differences between uncertainty quantification methods, thereby forming a valuable assessment benchmark.
Computational cognitive models are a fundamental tool in behavioral neuroscience. They embody in software precise hypotheses about the cognitive mechanisms underlying a particular behavior. Constructing these models is typically a difficult iterative process that requires both inspiration from the literature and the creativity of an individual researcher. Here, we adopt an alternative approach to learn parsimonious cognitive models directly from data. We fit behavior data using a recurrent neural network that is penalized for carrying excess information between timesteps, leading to sparse, interpretable representations and dynamics. When fitting synthetic behavioral data from known cognitive models, our method recovers the underlying form of those models. When fit to choice data from rats performing a bandit task, our method recovers simple and interpretable models that make testable predictions about neural mechanisms.
tl;dr: An inherently interpretable modular network which sequentially fuses inputs from multiple data modalities while being robust to biased patterns of missingness, evaluated on healthcare, education and meteorology tasks
Predicting multiple real-world tasks in a single model often requires a particularly diverse feature space. Multimodal (MM) models aim to extract the synergistic predictive potential of multiple data types to create a shared feature space with aligned semantic meaning across inputs of drastically varying sizes (i.e. images, text, sound). Most current MM architectures fuse these representations in parallel, which not only limits their interpretability but also creates a dependency on modality availability. We present MultiModN, a multimodal, modular network that fuses latent representations in a sequence of any number, combination, or type of modality while providing granular real-time predictive feedback on any number or combination of predictive tasks. MultiModN's composable pipeline is interpretable-by-design, as well as innately multi-task and robust to the fundamental issue of biased missingness. We perform four experiments on several benchmark MM datasets across 10 real-world tasks (predicting medical diagnoses, academic performance, and weather), and show that MultiModN's sequential MM fusion does not compromise performance compared with a baseline of parallel fusion. By simulating the challenging bias of missing not-at-random (MNAR), this work shows that, contrary to MultiModN, parallel fusion baselines erroneously learn MNAR and suffer catastrophic failure when faced with different patterns of MNAR at inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first inherently MNAR-resistant approach to MM modeling. In conclusion, MultiModN provides granular insights, robustness, and flexibility without compromising performance.
tl;dr: We propose to reparametrize the pre-trained ViT with mixture of multiplication primitives, e.g., bitwise shifts and additions, towards a new type of multiplication-reduced model, dubbed ShiftAddViT for end-to-end inference speedups.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown impressive performance and have become a unified backbone for multiple vision tasks. However, both the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) in ViTs are not sufficiently efficient due to dense multiplications, leading to costly training and inference. To this end, we propose to reparameterize pre-trained ViTs with a mixture of multiplication primitives, e.g., bitwise shifts and additions, towards a new type of multiplication-reduced model, dubbed $\textbf{ShiftAddViT}$, which aims to achieve end-to-end inference speedups on GPUs without requiring training from scratch. Specifically, all $\texttt{MatMuls}$ among queries, keys, and values are reparameterized using additive kernels, after mapping queries and keys to binary codes in Hamming space. The remaining MLPs or linear layers are then reparameterized with shift kernels. We utilize TVM to implement and optimize those customized kernels for practical hardware deployment on GPUs. We find that such a reparameterization on (quadratic or linear) attention maintains model accuracy, while inevitably leading to accuracy drops when being applied to MLPs. To marry the best of both worlds, we further propose a new mixture of experts (MoE) framework to reparameterize MLPs by taking multiplication or its primitives as experts, e.g., multiplication and shift, and designing a new latency-aware load-balancing loss. Such a loss helps to train a generic router for assigning a dynamic amount of input tokens to different experts according to their latency. In principle, the faster the experts run, the more input tokens they are assigned. Extensive experiments on various 2D/3D Transformer-based vision tasks consistently validate the effectiveness of our proposed ShiftAddViT, achieving up to $\textbf{5.18$\times$}$ latency reductions on GPUs and $\textbf{42.9}$% energy savings, while maintaining a comparable accuracy as original or efficient ViTs. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/ShiftAddViT.
1750. Boosting Verification of Deep Reinforcement Learning via Piece-Wise Linear Decision Neural Networks
tl;dr: We propose a novel DNN-based piece-wise linear decision model to facilitate the verification of DRL systems while achieving the comparable performance as ordinary DNN.
Formally verifying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) systems suffers from both inaccurate verification results and limited scalability. The major obstacle lies in the large overestimation introduced inherently during training and then transforming the inexplicable decision-making models, i.e., deep neural networks (DNNs), into easy-to-verify models. In this paper, we propose an inverse transform-then-train approach, which first encodes a DNN into an equivalent set of efficiently and tightly verifiable linear control policies and then optimizes them via reinforcement learning. We accompany our inverse approach with a novel neural network model called piece-wise linear decision neural networks (PLDNNs), which are compatible with most existing DRL training algorithms with comparable performance against conventional DNNs. Our extensive experiments show that, compared to DNN-based DRL systems, PLDNN-based systems can be more efficiently and tightly verified with up to $438$ times speedup and a significant reduction in overestimation. In particular, even a complex $12$-dimensional DRL system is efficiently verified with up to 7 times deeper computation steps.
tl;dr: Based on the analysis of existing approaches, we develop an iterative RL algorithm for discovering diverse high-reward strategies with provable convergence properties.
In complex reinforcement learning (RL) problems, policies with similar rewards may have substantially different behaviors. It remains a fundamental challenge to optimize rewards while also discovering as many *diverse* strategies as possible, which can be crucial in many practical applications. Our study examines two design choices for tackling this challenge, i.e., *diversity measure* and *computation framework*. First, we find that with existing diversity measures, visually indistinguishable policies can still yield high diversity scores. To accurately capture the behavioral difference, we propose to incorporate the state-space distance information into the diversity measure. In addition, we examine two common computation frameworks for this problem, i.e., population-based training (PBT) and iterative learning (ITR). We show that although PBT is the precise problem formulation, ITR can achieve comparable diversity scores with higher computation efficiency, leading to improved solution quality in practice. Based on our analysis, we further combine ITR with two tractable realizations of the state-distance-based diversity measures and develop a novel diversity-driven RL algorithm, *State-based Intrinsic-reward Policy Optimization* (SIPO), with provable convergence properties. We empirically examine SIPO across three domains from robot locomotion to multi-agent games. In all of our testing environments, SIPO consistently produces strategically diverse and human-interpretable policies that cannot be discovered by existing baselines.
1752. Taylor TD-learning
tl;dr: Providing lower variance TD updates through a first-order Taylor expansion of expected TD updates with a model-based approach.
Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic.
However, TD-learning updates can be high variance.
Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in continuous state-action settings.
Taylor TD uses a first-order Taylor series expansion of TD updates.
This expansion allows Taylor TD to analytically integrate over stochasticity in the action-choice, and some stochasticity in the state distribution for the initial state and action of each TD update.
We include theoretical and empirical evidence that Taylor TD updates are indeed lower variance than standard TD updates.
Additionally, we show Taylor TD has the same stable learning guarantees as standard TD-learning with linear function approximation under a reasonable assumption.
Next, we combine Taylor TD with the TD3 algorithm, forming TaTD3.
We show TaTD3 performs as well, if not better, than several state-of-the art model-free and model-based baseline algorithms on a set of standard benchmark tasks.
tl;dr: We generate motions for physically-based characters from human instructions.
Generating animation of physics-based characters with intuitive control has long been a desirable task with numerous applications. However, generating physically simulated animations that reflect high-level human instructions remains a difficult problem due to the complexity of physical environments and the richness of human language.
In this paper, we present $\textbf{InsActor}$, a principled generative framework that leverages recent advancements in diffusion-based human motion models to produce instruction-driven animations of physics-based characters.
Our framework empowers InsActor to capture complex relationships between high-level human instructions and character motions by employing diffusion policies for flexibly conditioned motion planning.
To overcome invalid states and infeasible state transitions in planned motions, InsActor discovers low-level skills and maps plans to latent skill sequences in a compact latent space.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that InsActor achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including instruction-driven motion generation and instruction-driven waypoint heading. Notably, the ability of InsActor to generate physically simulated animations using high-level human instructions makes it a valuable tool, particularly in executing long-horizon tasks with a rich set of instructions. Our project page is available at [jiawei-ren.github.io/projects/insactor/index.html](https://jiawei-ren.github.io/projects/insactor/index.html)
tl;dr: Utilizing enriched text embeddings to enhance hardware reliability of image classification models, achieving upto 14-fold increase in hardware reliability with minimal accuracy drop.
This paper presents a novel method to enhance the reliability of image classification models during deployment in the face of transient hardware errors. By utilizing enriched text embeddings derived from GPT-3 with question prompts per class and CLIP pretrained text encoder, we investigate their impact as an initialization for the classification layer. Our approach achieves a remarkable $5.5\times$ average increase in hardware reliability (and up to $14\times$) across various architectures in the most critical layer, with minimal accuracy drop ($0.3\%$ on average) compared to baseline PyTorch models. Furthermore, our method seamlessly integrates with any image classification backbone, showcases results across various network architectures, decreases parameter and FLOPs overhead, and follows a consistent training recipe. This research offers a practical and efficient solution to bolster the robustness of image classification models against hardware failures, with potential implications for future studies in this domain. Our code and models are released at https://github.com/TalalWasim/TextGuidedResilience.
Image restoration techniques, spanning from the convolution to the transformer paradigm, have demonstrated robust spatial representation capabilities to deliver high-quality performance.Yet, many of these methods, such as convolution and the Feed Forward Network (FFN) structure of transformers, primarily leverage the basic first-order channel interactions and have not maximized the potential benefits of higher-order modeling. To address this limitation, our research dives into understanding relationships within the channel dimension and introduces a simple yet efficient, high-order channel-wise operator tailored for image restoration. Instead of merely mimicking high-order spatial interaction, our approach offers several added benefits: Efficiency: It adheres to the zero-FLOP and zero-parameter principle, using a spatial-shifting mechanism across channel-wise groups. Simplicity: It turns the favorable channel interaction and aggregation capabilities into element-wise multiplications and convolution units with $1 \times 1$ kernel. Our new formulation expands the first-order channel-wise interactions seen in previous works to arbitrary high orders, generating a hierarchical receptive field akin to a Rubik's cube through the combined action of shifting and interactions. Furthermore, our proposed Rubik's cube convolution is a flexible operator that can be incorporated into existing image restoration networks, serving as a drop-in replacement for the standard convolution unit with fewer parameters overhead. We conducted experiments across various low-level vision tasks, including image denoising, low-light image enhancement, guided image super-resolution, and image de-blurring. The results consistently demonstrate that our Rubik's cube operator enhances performance across all tasks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zheng980629/RubikCube.
tl;dr: We study best-response independent learning dynamics in zero-sum matrix games and stochastic games and provide finite-sample convergence guarantees.
In this work, we study two-player zero-sum stochastic games and develop a variant of the smoothed best-response learning dynamics that combines independent learning dynamics for matrix games with the minimax value iteration for stochastic games. The resulting learning dynamics are payoff-based, convergent, rational, and symmetric between the two players. Our theoretical results present to the best of our knowledge the first last-iterate finite-sample analysis of such independent learning dynamics. To establish the results, we develop a coupled Lyapunov drift approach to capture the evolution of multiple sets of coupled and stochastic iterates, which might be of independent interest.
Synthesizing images with user-specified subjects has received growing attention due to its practical applications. Despite the recent success in single subject customization, existing algorithms suffer from high training cost and low success rate along with increased number of subjects. Towards controllable image synthesis with multiple subjects as the constraints, this work studies how to efficiently represent a particular subject as well as how to appropriately compose different subjects. We find that the text embedding regarding the subject token already serves as a simple yet effective representation that supports arbitrary combinations without any model tuning. Through learning a residual on top of the base embedding, we manage to robustly shift the raw subject to the customized subject given various text conditions. We then propose to employ layout, a very abstract and easy-to-obtain prior, as the spatial guidance for subject arrangement. By rectifying the activations in the cross-attention map, the layout appoints and separates the location of different subjects in the image, significantly alleviating the interference across them. Using cross-attention map as the intermediary, we could strengthen the signal of target subjects and weaken the signal of irrelevant subjects within a certain region, significantly alleviating the interference across subjects. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives under a variety of settings for multi-subject customization.
tl;dr: MQ-Det: the first multi-modal queried open-world object detector
We introduce MQ-Det, an efficient architecture and pre-training strategy design to utilize both textual description with open-set generalization and visual exemplars with rich description granularity as category queries, namely, Multi-modal Queried object Detection, for real-world detection with both open-vocabulary categories and various granularity. MQ-Det incorporates vision queries into existing well-established language-queried-only detectors. A plug-and-play gated class-scalable perceiver module upon the frozen detector is proposed to augment category text with class-wise visual information. To address the learning inertia problem brought by the frozen detector, a vision conditioned masked language prediction strategy is proposed. MQ-Det's simple yet effective architecture and training strategy design is compatible with most language-queried object detectors, thus yielding versatile applications. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-modal queries largely boost open-world detection. For instance, MQ-Det significantly improves the state-of-the-art open-set detector GLIP by +7.8% AP on the LVIS benchmark via multi-modal queries without any downstream finetuning, and averagely +6.3% AP on 13 few-shot downstream tasks, with merely additional 3% modulating time required by GLIP. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/MQ-Det.
tl;dr: We recast Machine learning from explanations (MLX) as a robustness problem and show both theoretically and empirically how this approach is better suited for learning from explanations.
Machine learning from explanations (MLX) is an approach to learning that uses human-provided explanations of relevant or irrelevant features for each input to ensure that model predictions are right for the right reasons. Existing MLX approaches rely on local model interpretation methods and require strong model smoothing to align model and human explanations, leading to sub-optimal performance. We recast MLX as a robustness problem, where human explanations specify a lower dimensional manifold from which perturbations can be drawn, and show both theoretically and empirically how this approach alleviates the need for strong model smoothing. We consider various approaches to achieving robustness, leading to improved performance over prior MLX methods. Finally, we show how to combine robustness with an earlier MLX method, yielding state-of-the-art results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
tl;dr: A novel representation of dynamic 3D scenes by disentangling physical velocities from geometry and appearance --> future frame extrapolation, semantic scene decomposition, velocity transfer
In this paper, we aim to model 3D scene dynamics from multi-view videos. Unlike the majority of existing works which usually focus on the common task of novel view synthesis within the training time period, we propose to simultaneously learn the geometry, appearance, and physical velocity of 3D scenes only from video frames, such that multiple desirable applications can be supported, including future frame extrapolation, unsupervised 3D semantic scene decomposition, and dynamic motion transfer. Our method consists of three major components, 1) the keyframe dynamic radiance field, 2) the interframe velocity field, and 3) a joint keyframe and interframe optimization module which is the core of our framework to effectively train both networks. To validate our method, we further introduce two dynamic 3D datasets: 1) Dynamic Object dataset, and 2) Dynamic Indoor Scene dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets, demonstrating the superior performance of our method over all baselines, particularly in the critical tasks of future frame extrapolation and unsupervised 3D semantic scene decomposition.
tl;dr: We present a scalable and domain-agnostic approach utilizing the relational structure of data for identifying label noise and outliers.
Diagnosing and cleaning data is a crucial step for building robust machine learning systems. However, identifying problems within large-scale datasets with real-world distributions is challenging due to the presence of complex issues such as label errors, under-representation, and outliers. In this paper, we propose a unified approach for identifying the problematic data by utilizing a largely ignored source of information: a relational structure of data in the feature-embedded space. To this end, we present scalable and effective algorithms for detecting label errors and outlier data based on the relational graph structure of data. We further introduce a visualization tool that provides contextual information of a data point in the feature-embedded space, serving as an effective tool for interactively diagnosing data. We evaluate the label error and outlier/out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performances of our approach on the large-scale image, speech, and language domain tasks, including ImageNet, ESC-50, and SST2. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on all tasks considered and demonstrates its effectiveness in debugging large-scale real-world datasets across various domains. We release codes at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Neural-Relation-Graph.
1762. Contrastive Retrospection: honing in on critical steps for rapid learning and generalization in RL
tl;dr: ConSpec uses offline contrastive learning to hone in on the critical steps of RL tasks, helping both rapid long term credit assignment and out-of-distribution generalization.
In real life, success is often contingent upon multiple critical steps that are distant in time from each other and from the final reward. These critical steps are challenging to identify with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods that rely on the Bellman equation for credit assignment. Here, we present a new RL algorithm that uses offline contrastive learning to hone in on these critical steps. This algorithm, which we call Contrastive Retrospection (ConSpec), can be added to any existing RL algorithm. ConSpec learns a set of prototypes for the critical steps in a task by a novel contrastive loss and delivers an intrinsic reward when the current state matches one of the prototypes. The prototypes in ConSpec provide two key benefits for credit assignment: (i) They enable rapid identification of all the critical steps. (ii) They do so in a readily interpretable manner, enabling out-of-distribution generalization when sensory features are altered. Distinct from other contemporary RL approaches to credit assignment, ConSpec takes advantage of the fact that it is easier to retrospectively identify the small set of steps that success is contingent upon (and ignoring other states) than it is to prospectively predict reward at every taken step. ConSpec greatly improves learning in a diverse set of RL tasks. The code is available at the link: https://github.com/sunchipsster1/ConSpec
tl;dr: We study which parameterized elementary functions of bounded complexity can approximate arbitrary continuous functions
By universal formulas we understand parameterized analytic expressions that have a fixed complexity, but nevertheless can approximate any continuous function on a compact set. There exist various examples of such formulas, including some in the form of neural networks. In this paper we analyze the essential structural elements of these highly expressive models. We introduce a hierarchy of expressiveness classes connecting the global approximability property to the weaker property of infinite VC dimension, and prove a series of classification results for several increasingly complex functional families. In particular, we introduce a general family of polynomially-exponentially-algebraic functions that, as we prove, is subject to polynomial constraints. As a consequence, we show that fixed-size neural networks with not more than one layer of neurons having transcendental activations (e.g., sine or standard sigmoid) cannot in general approximate functions on arbitrary finite sets. On the other hand, we give examples of functional families, including two-hidden-layer neural networks, that approximate functions on arbitrary finite sets, but fail to do that on the whole domain of definition.
tl;dr: We demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our generative video moment retrieval model.
Video moment retrieval pursues an efficient and generalized solution to identify the specific temporal segments within an untrimmed video that correspond to a given language description.
To achieve this goal, we provide a generative diffusion-based framework called MomentDiff, which simulates a typical human retrieval process from random browsing to gradual localization.
Specifically, we first diffuse the real span to random noise, and learn to denoise the random noise to the original span with the guidance of similarity between text and video.
This allows the model to learn a mapping from arbitrary random locations to real moments, enabling the ability to locate segments from random initialization.
Once trained, MomentDiff could sample random temporal segments as initial guesses and iteratively refine them to generate an accurate temporal boundary.
Different from discriminative works (e.g., based on learnable proposals or queries), MomentDiff with random initialized spans could resist the temporal location biases from datasets.
To evaluate the influence of the temporal location biases, we propose two ``anti-bias'' datasets with location distribution shifts, named Charades-STA-Len and Charades-STA-Mom.
The experimental results demonstrate that our efficient framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public benchmarks, and exhibits better generalization and robustness on the proposed anti-bias datasets.
The code, model, and anti-bias evaluation datasets will be released publicly.
tl;dr: Jittering, a training method that adds noise during training, enables to obtain provably optimal worst-case robust denoisers and is shown to be effective for training neural networks for denoising, deconvolution and compressive sensing.
Deep neural networks provide excellent performance for inverse problems such as denoising. However, neural networks can be sensitive to adversarial or worst-case perturbations. This raises the question of whether such networks can be trained efficiently to be worst-case robust. In this paper, we investigate whether jittering, a simple regularization technique that adds isotropic Gaussian noise during training, is effective for learning worst-case robust estimators for inverse problems. While well studied for prediction in classification tasks, the effectiveness of jittering for inverse problems has not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we present a novel analytical characterization of the optimal $\ell_2$-worst-case robust estimator for linear denoising and show that jittering yields optimal robust denoisers. Furthermore, we examine jittering empirically via training deep neural networks (U-nets) for natural image denoising, deconvolution, and accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The results show that jittering significantly enhances the worst-case robustness, but can be suboptimal for inverse problems beyond denoising. Moreover, our results imply that training on real data which often contains slight noise is somewhat robustness enhancing.
Collaborative learning techniques have the potential to enable training machine learning models that are superior to models trained on a single entity’s data. However, in many cases, potential participants in such collaborative schemes are competitors on a downstream task, such as firms that each aim to attract customers by providing the best recommendations. This can incentivize dishonest updates that damage other participants' models, potentially undermining the benefits of collaboration. In this work, we formulate a game that models such interactions and study two learning tasks within this framework: single-round mean estimation and multi-round SGD on strongly-convex objectives. For a natural class of player actions, we show that rational clients are incentivized to strongly manipulate their updates, preventing learning. We then propose mechanisms that incentivize honest communication and ensure learning quality comparable to full cooperation. Lastly, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our incentive scheme on a standard non-convex federated learning benchmark. Our work shows that explicitly modeling the incentives and actions of dishonest clients, rather than assuming them malicious, can enable strong robustness guarantees for collaborative learning.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel human-asissting dexterous grasping task and propose a RL framework incorporated with score-matching.
The use of anthropomorphic robotic hands for assisting individuals in situations where human hands may be unavailable or unsuitable has gained significant importance. In this paper, we propose a novel task called human-assisting dexterous grasping that aims to train a policy for controlling a robotic hand's fingers to assist users in grasping objects. Unlike conventional dexterous grasping, this task presents a more complex challenge as the policy needs to adapt to diverse user intentions, in addition to the object's geometry. We address this challenge by proposing an approach consisting of two sub-modules: a hand-object-conditional grasping primitive called Grasping Gradient Field (GraspGF), and a history-conditional residual policy. GraspGF learns 'how' to grasp by estimating the gradient of a synthesised success grasping example set, while the residual policy determines 'when' and at what speed the grasping action should be executed based on the trajectory history. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to baselines, highlighting the user-awareness and practicality in real-world applications. The codes and demonstrations can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/view/graspgf.
1768. Compositional Abilities Emerge Multiplicatively: Exploring Diffusion Models on a Synthetic Task
Modern generative models exhibit unprecedented capabilities to generate extremely realistic data. However, given the inherent compositionality of real world, reliable use of these models in practical applications mandates they exhibit the ability to compose their capabilities, generating and reasoning over entirely novel samples never seen in the training distribution. Prior work demonstrates recent vision diffusion models exhibit intriguing compositional generalization abilities, but also fail rather unpredictably. What are the reasons underlying this behavior? Which concepts does the model generally find difficult to compose to form novel data? To address these questions, we perform a controlled study of compositional generalization in conditional diffusion models in a synthetic setting, varying different attributes of the training data and measuring the model's ability to generate samples out-of-distribution. Our results show that: (i) the compositional structure of the data-generating process governs the order in which capabilities and an ability to compose them emerges; (ii) learning individual concepts impacts performance on compositional tasks, multiplicatively explaining sudden emergence; and (iii) learning and composing capabilities is difficult under correlations. We hope our study inspires further grounded research on understanding capabilities and compositionality in generative models from a data-centric perspective.
Adversarial contrastive learning (ACL) does not require expensive data annotations but outputs a robust representation that withstands adversarial attacks and also generalizes to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, ACL needs tremendous running time to generate the adversarial variants of all training data, which limits its scalability to large datasets. To speed up ACL, this paper proposes a robustness-aware coreset selection (RCS) method. RCS does not require label information and searches for an informative subset that minimizes a representational divergence, which is the distance of the representation between natural data and their virtual adversarial variants. The vanilla solution of RCS via traversing all possible subsets is computationally prohibitive. Therefore, we theoretically transform RCS into a surrogate problem of submodular maximization, of which the greedy search is an efficient solution with an optimality guarantee for the original problem. Empirically, our comprehensive results corroborate that RCS can speed up ACL by a large margin without significantly hurting the robustness transferability. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct ACL efficiently on the large-scale ImageNet-1K dataset to obtain an effective robust representation via RCS. Our source code is at https://github.com/GodXuxilie/Efficient_ACL_via_RCS.
tl;dr: This paper explores the design of permutation equivariant neural networks called "neural functional networks" (NFNs), designed to process the weights or gradients of other neural networks.
This work studies the design of neural networks that can process the weights or gradients of other neural networks, which we refer to as *neural functional networks* (NFNs). Despite a wide range of potential applications, including learned optimization, processing implicit neural representations, network editing, and policy evaluation, there are few unifying principles for designing effective architectures that process the weights of other networks. We approach the design of neural functionals through the lens of symmetry, in particular by focusing on the permutation symmetries that arise in the weights of deep feedforward networks because hidden layer neurons have no inherent order. We introduce a framework for building *permutation equivariant* neural functionals, whose architectures encode these symmetries as an inductive bias. The key building blocks of this framework are *NF-Layers* (neural functional layers) that we constrain to be permutation equivariant through an appropriate parameter sharing scheme. In our experiments, we find that permutation equivariant neural functionals are effective on a diverse set of tasks that require processing the weights of MLPs and CNNs, such as predicting classifier generalization, producing "winning ticket" sparsity masks for initializations, and classifying or editing implicit neural representations (INRs). In addition, we provide code for our models and experiments at https://github.com/AllanYangZhou/nfn.
Reconstructing the 3D articulated shape of an animal from a single in-the-wild image is a challenging task. We propose LEPARD, a learning-based framework that discovers semantically meaningful 3D parts and reconstructs 3D shapes in a part-based manner. This is advantageous as 3D parts are robust to pose variations due to articulations and their shape is typically simpler than the overall shape of the object. In our framework, the parts are explicitly represented as parameterized primitive surfaces with global and local deformations in 3D that deform to match the image evidence. We propose a kinematics-inspired optimization to guide each transformation of the primitive deformation given 2D evidence. Similar to recent approaches, LEPARD is only trained using off-the-shelf deep features from DINO and does not require any form of 2D or 3D annotations. Experiments on 3D animal shape reconstruction, demonstrate significant improvement over existing alternatives in terms of both the overall reconstruction performance as well as the ability to discover semantically meaningful and consistent parts.
tl;dr: A heuristic that runs in seconds and can reduce memory required for training by 73% with extra 18% computation on average
Training large-scale neural networks is heavily constrained by GPU memory. In order to circumvent this limitation, gradient checkpointing, or recomputation is a powerful technique. There is active research in this area with methods such as Checkmake or Moccasin. However, both Checkmate and Moccasin rely on mixed integer linear programming or constraint programming, resulting in limited scalability due to their exponentially large search space.
This paper proposes a novel algorithm for recomputation (FastSA) based on a simulated annealing heuristic that achieves comparable or even better solutions than state-of-the-art alternatives. FastSA can optimize computational graphs with thousands of nodes within 3 to 30 seconds, several orders of magnitude faster than current solutions.
We applied FastSA to PyTorch models and verified its effectiveness through popular large vision and text models, including recent language models with the transformer architecture. The results demonstrate significant memory reductions by 73% with extra 18% computational overheads on average. Our experiments demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of our recomputation algorithm, further highlighting its potential for wide application in various deep learning domains.
tl;dr: We propose a multi-step SDE solver for fast sampling of diffusion models.
Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved considerable success in generation tasks. As sampling from DPMs is equivalent to solving diffusion SDE or ODE which is time-consuming, numerous fast sampling methods built upon improved differential equation solvers are proposed. The majority of such techniques consider solving the diffusion ODE due to its superior efficiency. However, stochastic sampling could offer additional advantages in generating diverse and high-quality data. In this work, we engage in a comprehensive analysis of stochastic sampling from two aspects: variance-controlled diffusion SDE and linear multi-step SDE solver. Based on our analysis, we propose SA-Solver, which is an improved efficient stochastic Adams method for solving diffusion SDE to generate data with high quality. Our experiments show that SA-Solver achieves: 1) improved or comparable performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) sampling methods for few-step sampling; 2) SOTA FID on substantial benchmark datasets under a suitable number of function evaluations (NFEs).
tl;dr: We present Mind-Video for reconstructing continuous video from fMRI data via multimodal contrastive learning and inflated Stable Diffusion model.
Reconstructing human vision from brain activities has been an appealing task that helps to understand our cognitive process. Even though recent research has seen great success in reconstructing static images from non-invasive brain recordings, work on recovering continuous visual experiences in the form of videos is limited. In this work, we propose Mind-Video that learns spatiotemporal information from continuous fMRI data of the cerebral cortex progressively through masked brain modeling, multimodal contrastive learning with spatiotemporal attention, and co-training with an augmented Stable Diffusion model that incorporates network temporal inflation.
We show that high-quality videos of arbitrary frame rates can be reconstructed with Mind-Video using adversarial guidance. The recovered videos were evaluated with various semantic and pixel-level metrics. We achieved an average accuracy of 85% in semantic classification tasks and 0.19 in structural similarity index (SSIM), outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by 45%. We also show that our model is biologically plausible and interpretable, reflecting established physiological processes.
tl;dr: We learn a diving heuristic for use in branch and bound to solve to integer programs
Primal heuristics are important for solving mixed integer linear programs, because they find feasible solutions that facilitate branch and bound search. A prominent group of primal heuristics are diving heuristics. They iteratively modify and resolve linear programs to conduct a depth-first search from any node in the search tree. Existing divers rely on generic decision rules that fail to exploit structural commonality between similar problem instances that often arise in practice. Therefore, we propose L2Dive to learn specific diving heuristics with graph neural networks: We train generative models to predict variable assignments and leverage the duality of linear programs to make diving decisions based on the model's predictions. L2Dive is fully integrated into the open-source solver SCIP. We find that L2Dive outperforms standard divers to find better feasible solutions on a range of combinatorial optimization problems. For real-world applications from server load balancing and neural network verification, L2Dive improves the primal-dual integral by up to 7% (35%) on average over a tuned (default) solver baseline and reduces average solving time by 20% (29%).
tl;dr: We show ERM learns both invariant and spurious features and propose a new algorithm to learn richer features than ERM for facilitating OOD generalization.
A common explanation for the failure of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is that the model trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) learns spurious features instead of invariant features. However, several recent studies challenged this explanation and found that deep networks may have already learned sufficiently good features for OOD generalization. Despite the contradictions at first glance, we theoretically show that ERM essentially learns both spurious and invariant features, while ERM tends to learn spurious features faster if the spurious correlation is stronger. Moreover, when fed the ERM learned features to the OOD objectives, the invariant feature learning quality significantly affects the final OOD performance, as OOD objectives rarely learn new features. Therefore, ERM feature learning can be a bottleneck to OOD generalization. To alleviate the reliance, we propose Feature Augmented Training (FeAT), to enforce the model to learn richer features ready for OOD generalization. FeAT iteratively augments the model to learn new features while retaining the already learned features. In each round, the retention and augmentation operations are performed on different subsets of the training data that capture distinct features. Extensive experiments show that FeAT effectively learns richer features thus boosting the performance of various OOD objectives.
tl;dr: A qualitative trichotomy and some quantitative mistakes bounds relating the transductive online learning setting to known combinatorial dimensions.
We present new upper and lower bounds on the number of learner mistakes in the `transductive' online learning setting of Ben-David, Kushilevitz and Mansour (1997).
This setting is similar to standard online learning, except that the adversary fixes a sequence of instances $x_1,\dots,x_n$ to be labeled at the start of the game, and this sequence is known to the learner.
Qualitatively, we prove a \emph{trichotomy}, stating that the minimal number of mistakes made by the learner as $n$ grows can take only one of precisely three possible values: $n$, $\Theta\left(\log (n)\right)$, or $\Theta(1)$.
Furthermore, this behavior is determined by a combination of the VC dimension and the Littlestone dimension.
Quantitatively, we show a variety of bounds relating the number of mistakes to well-known combinatorial dimensions.
In particular, we improve the known lower bound on the constant in the $\Theta(1)$ case from $\Omega\left(\sqrt{\log(d)}\right)$ to $\Omega(\log(d))$ where $d$ is the Littlestone dimension.
Finally, we extend our results to cover multiclass classification and the agnostic setting.
Active learning (AL) methods have been proven to be an effective way to reduce the labeling effort by intelligently selecting valuable instances for annotation. Despite their great success with in-distribution (ID) scenarios, AL methods suffer from performance degradation in many real-world applications because out-of-distribution (OOD) instances are always inevitably contained in unlabeled data, which may lead to inefficient sampling. Therefore, several attempts have been explored open-set AL by strategically selecting pure ID instances while filtering OOD instances. However, concentrating solely on selecting pseudo-ID instances may cause the training constraint of the ID classifier and OOD detector. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective sampling scheme, Progressive Active Learning (PAL), which employs a progressive sampling mechanism to leverage the active selection of valuable OOD instances. The proposed PAL measures unlabeled instances by synergistically evaluating instances' informativeness and representativeness, and thus it can balance the pseudo-ID and pseudo-OOD instances in each round to enhance both the capacity of the ID classifier and the OOD detector. %Meanwhile, PAL measures unlabeled instances by synergistically evaluating instances' informativeness and representativeness, which can more effectively estimate the values of instances.
Extensive experiments on various open-set AL scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PAL, compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/njustkmg/PAL}.
tl;dr: We propose a general framework achieving a new type of dynamic regret bounds on unconstrained domains.
Motivated by the challenge of nonstationarity in sequential decision making, we study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) under the coupling of two problem structures: the domain is unbounded, and the comparator sequence $u_1,\ldots,u_T$ is arbitrarily time-varying. As no algorithm can guarantee low regret simultaneously against all comparator sequences, handling this setting requires moving from minimax optimality to comparator adaptivity. That is, sensible regret bounds should depend on certain complexity measures of the comparator relative to one's prior knowledge. This paper achieves a new type of such adaptive regret bounds leveraging a sparse coding framework. The complexity of the comparator is measured by its energy and its sparsity on a user-specified dictionary, which offers considerable versatility. For example, equipped with a wavelet dictionary, our framework improves the state-of-the-art bound (Jacobsen & Cutkosky, 2022) by adapting to both ($i$) the magnitude of the comparator average $||\bar u||=||\sum_{t=1}^Tu_t/T||$, rather than the maximum $\max_t||u_t||$; and ($ii$) the comparator variability $\sum_{t=1}^T||u_t-\bar u||$, rather than the uncentered sum $\sum_{t=1}^T||u_t||$. Furthermore, our proof is simpler due to decoupling function approximation from regret minimization.
tl;dr: Existing methods might be too complex and require too many extra parameters. Our simple and efficient method can yield the state-of-the-art random/structured/channel pruning results.
DNN pruning is a popular way to reduce the size of a model, improve the inference
latency, and minimize the power consumption on DNN accelerators. However,
existing approaches might be too complex, expensive or ineffective to apply to
a variety of vision/language tasks, DNN architectures and to honor structured
pruning constraints. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet effective train-time
pruning scheme, Parameter-free Differentiable Pruning (PDP), which offers state-
of-the-art qualities in model size, accuracy, and training cost. PDP uses a dynamic
function of weights during training to generate soft pruning masks for the weights
in a parameter-free manner for a given pruning target. While differentiable, the
simplicity and efficiency of PDP make it universal enough to deliver state-of-the-art
random/structured/channel pruning results on various vision and natural language
tasks. For example, for MobileNet-v1, PDP can achieve 68.2% top-1 ImageNet1k
accuracy at 86.6% sparsity, which is 1.7% higher accuracy than those from the
state-of-the-art algorithms. Also, PDP yields over 83.1% accuracy on Multi-Genre
Natural Language Inference with 90% sparsity for BERT, while the next best from
the existing techniques shows 81.5% accuracy. In addition, PDP can be applied to
structured pruning, such as N:M pruning and channel pruning. For 1:4 structured
pruning of ResNet18, PDP improved the top-1 ImageNet1k accuracy by over 3.6%
over the state-of-the-art. For channel pruning of ResNet50, PDP reduced the top-1
ImageNet1k accuracy by 0.6% from the state-of-the-art.
tl;dr: use graph neural network, unsupervised learning and search to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem
We propose UTSP, an Unsupervised Learning (UL) framework for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). We train a Graph Neural Network (GNN) using a surrogate loss. The GNN outputs a heat map representing the probability for each edge to be part of the optimal path. We then apply local search to generate our final prediction based on the heat map. Our loss function consists of two parts: one pushes the model to find the shortest path and the other serves as a surrogate for the constraint that the route should form a Hamiltonian Cycle.
Experimental results show that UTSP
outperforms the existing data-driven TSP heuristics.
Our approach is parameter efficient as well as data efficient: the model takes $\sim$ 10\% of the number of parameters and $\sim$ 0.2\% of training samples compared with Reinforcement Learning or Supervised Learning methods.
This paper proposes a novel contrastive learning framework, called FOCAL, for extracting comprehensive features from multimodal time-series sensing signals through self-supervised training. Existing multimodal contrastive frameworks mostly rely on the shared information between sensory modalities, but do not explicitly consider the exclusive modality information that could be critical to understanding the underlying sensing physics. Besides, contrastive frameworks for time series have not handled the temporal information locality appropriately. FOCAL solves these challenges by making the following contributions: First, given multimodal time series, it encodes each modality into a factorized latent space consisting of shared features and private features that are orthogonal to each other. The shared space emphasizes feature patterns consistent across sensory modalities through a modal-matching objective. In contrast, the private space extracts modality-exclusive information through a transformation-invariant objective. Second, we propose a temporal structural constraint for modality features, such that the average distance between temporally neighboring samples is no larger than that of temporally distant samples. Extensive evaluations are performed on four multimodal sensing datasets with two backbone encoders and two classifiers to demonstrate the superiority of FOCAL. It consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in downstream tasks with a clear margin, under different ratios of available labels. The code and self-collected dataset are available at https://github.com/tomoyoshki/focal.
tl;dr: The paper proposes new PFL methods called pFedBreD that injects personalized prior knowledge into clients' global models to address the incomplete information problem with theoretical support, achieves state-of-the-art performance on 8 benchmarks.
Classical federated learning (FL) enables training machine learning models without sharing data for privacy preservation, but heterogeneous data characteristic degrades the performance of the localized model. Personalized FL (PFL) addresses this by synthesizing personalized models from a global model via training on local data. Such a global model may overlook the specific information that the clients have been sampled. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to inject personalized prior knowledge into the global model in each client, which attempts to mitigate the introduced incomplete information problem in PFL. At the heart of our proposed approach is a framework, the $\textit{PFL with Bregman Divergence}$ (pFedBreD), decoupling the personalized prior from the local objective function regularized by Bregman divergence for greater adaptability in personalized scenarios. We also relax the mirror descent (RMD) to extract the prior explicitly to provide optional strategies. Additionally, our pFedBreD is backed up by a convergence analysis. Sufficient experiments demonstrate that our method reaches the $\textit{state-of-the-art}$ performances on 5 datasets and outperforms other methods by up to 3.5% across 8 benchmarks. Extensive analyses verify the robustness and necessity of proposed designs. The code will be made public.
Designing efficient algorithms to compute a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in multiplayer games is still an open challenge. In this paper, we focus on computing an NE that optimizes a given objective function. For example, when there is a team of players independently playing against an adversary in a game (e.g., several groups in a forest trying to interdict illegal loggers in green security games), these team members may need to find an NE minimizing the adversary’s utility. Finding an optimal NE in multiplayer games can be formulated as a mixed-integer bilinear program by introducing auxiliary variables to represent bilinear terms, leading to a huge number of bilinear terms, making it hard to solve. To overcome this challenge, we first propose a general framework for this formulation based on a set of correlation plans. We then develop a novel algorithm called CRM based on this framework, which uses correlation plans with their relations to strictly reduce the feasible solution space after the convex relaxation of bilinear terms while minimizing the number of correlation plans to significantly reduce the number of bilinear terms. We show that our techniques can significantly reduce the time complexity and CRM can be several orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art baseline.
tl;dr: We propose a simple and flexible method for learning with label proportions and investigate applications to widely used learning methods, like ERM and SGD.
We consider the problem of Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), a weakly supervised classification setup where instances are grouped into i.i.d. “bags”, and only the frequency of class labels at each bag is available. Albeit, the objective of the learner is to achieve low task loss at an individual instance level. Here we propose EASYLLP, a flexible and simple-to-implement debiasing approach based on aggregate labels, which operates on arbitrary loss functions. Our technique allows us to accurately estimate the expected loss of an arbitrary model at an individual level. We elucidate the differences between our method and standard methods based on label proportion matching, in terms of applicability and optimality conditions. We showcase the flexibility of our approach compared to alternatives by applying our method to popular learning frameworks, like Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with provable guarantees on instance level performance. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on multiple datasets, empirically illustrating the conditions under which our algorithm is expected to perform better or worse than previous LLP approaches
In recent years, domains such as natural language processing and image recognition have popularized the paradigm of using large datasets to pretrain representations that can be effectively transferred to downstream tasks. In this work we evaluate how such a paradigm should be done in imitation learning, where both pretraining and finetuning data are trajectories collected by experts interacting with an unknown environment. Namely, we consider a setting where the pretraining corpus consists of multitask demonstrations and the task for each demonstration is set by an unobserved latent context variable. The goal is to use the pretraining corpus to learn a low dimensional representation of the high dimensional (e.g., visual) observation space which can be transferred to a novel context for finetuning on a limited dataset of demonstrations. Among a variety of possible pretraining objectives, we argue that inverse dynamics modeling -- i.e., predicting an action given the observations appearing before and after it in the demonstration -- is well-suited to this setting. We provide empirical evidence of this claim through evaluations on a variety of simulated visuomotor manipulation problems. While previous work has attempted various theoretical explanations regarding the benefit of inverse dynamics modeling, we find that these arguments are insufficient to explain the empirical advantages often observed in our settings, and so we derive a novel analysis using a simple but general environment model.
tl;dr: A simple yet effective feature correlation distillation for large Transformer-based PLMs.
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a promising approach for compressing large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The performance of KD relies on how to effectively formulate and transfer the knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Prior arts mainly focus on directly aligning output features from the transformer block, which may impose overly strict constraints on the student model's learning process and complicate the training process by introducing extra parameters and computational cost. Moreover, our analysis indicates that the different relations within self-attention, as adopted in other works, involves more computation complexities and can easily be constrained by the number of heads, potentially leading to suboptimal solutions.
To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that builds relationships directly from output features. Specifically, we introduce token-level and sequence-level relations concurrently
to fully exploit the knowledge from the teacher model. Furthermore, we propose a correlation-based distillation loss to alleviate the exact match properties inherent in traditional KL divergence or MSE loss functions. Our method, dubbed FCD, presents a simple yet effective method to compress various architectures (BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT) and model sizes (base-size and large-size).
Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our distilled, smaller language models significantly surpass existing KD methods across various NLP tasks.
tl;dr: We develop an algorithm for Display Ads and GAP that leverages machine-learned predictions.
Display Ads and the generalized assignment problem are two well-studied online packing problems with important applications in ad allocation and other areas. In both problems, ad impressions arrive online and have to be allocated immediately to budget-constrained advertisers. Worst-case algorithms that achieve the ideal competitive ratio are known for both problems, but might act overly conservative given the predictable and usually tame nature of real-world input. Given this discrepancy, we develop an algorithm for both problems that incorporate machine-learned predictions and can thus improve the performance beyond the worst-case. Our algorithm is based on the work of Feldman et al. (2009) and similar in nature to Mahdian et al. (2007) who were the first to develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the related, but more structured Ad Words problem. We use a novel analysis to show that our algorithm is able to capitalize on a good prediction, while being robust against poor predictions. We experimentally evaluate our algorithm on synthetic and real-world data on a wide range of predictions. Our algorithm is consistently outperforming the worst-case algorithm without predictions.
tl;dr: We aim to learn necessary and sufficient causal graphs containing only causally relevant variables for specific outcomes by linking probabilities of causation and natural causal effects.
The causal revolution has stimulated interest in understanding complex relationships in various fields. Most of the existing methods aim to discover causal relationships among all variables within a complex large-scale graph. However, in practice, only a small subset of variables in the graph are relevant to the outcomes of interest. Consequently, causal estimation with the full causal graph---particularly given limited data---could lead to numerous *falsely discovered, spurious* variables that exhibit high correlation with, but exert no causal impact on, the target outcome. In this paper, we propose learning a class of *necessary and sufficient causal graphs (NSCG)* that exclusively comprises causally relevant variables for an outcome of interest, which we term *causal features*. The key idea is to employ *probabilities of causation* to systematically evaluate the importance of features in the causal graph, allowing us to identify a subgraph relevant to the outcome of interest. To learn NSCG from data, we develop a *necessary and sufficient causal structural learning (NSCSL)* algorithm, by establishing theoretical properties and relationships between probabilities of causation and natural causal effects of features. Across empirical studies of simulated and real data, we demonstrate that NSCSL outperforms existing algorithms and can reveal crucial yeast genes for target heritable traits of interest.
tl;dr: A validation method for conditional density estimators particularly tailored for the simulation-based inference setting, with theoretical guarantees and interpretable diagnostics.
Many recent works in simulation-based inference (SBI) rely on deep generative models to approximate complex, high-dimensional posterior distributions. However, evaluating whether or not these approximations can be trusted remains a challenge. Most approaches evaluate the posterior estimator only in expectation over the observation space. This limits their interpretability and is not sufficient to identify for which observations the approximation can be trusted or should be improved. Building upon the well-known classifier two-sample test (C2ST), we introduce $\ell$-C2ST, a new method that allows for a local evaluation of the posterior estimator at any given observation. It offers theoretically grounded and easy to interpret -- e.g. graphical -- diagnostics, and unlike C2ST, does not require access to samples from the true posterior. In the case of normalizing flow-based posterior estimators, $\ell$-C2ST can be specialized to offer better statistical power, while being computationally more efficient. On standard SBI benchmarks, $\ell$-C2ST provides comparable results to C2ST and outperforms alternative local approaches such as coverage tests based on highest predictive density (HPD). We further highlight the importance of local evaluation and the benefit of interpretability of $\ell$-C2ST on a challenging application from computational neuroscience.
tl;dr: Propose multi-task learning and orthogonal loss for concept bottleneck models
The increasing use of neural networks in various applications has lead to increasing apprehensions, underscoring the necessity to understand their operations beyond mere final predictions. As a solution to enhance model transparency, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have gained popularity since their introduction. CBMs essentially limit the latent space of a model to human-understandable high-level concepts. While beneficial, CBMs have been reported to often learn irrelevant concept representations that consecutively damage model performance. To overcome the performance trade-off, we propose a cooperative-Concept Bottleneck Model (coop-CBM). The concept representation of our model is particularly meaningful when fine-grained concept labels are absent. Furthermore, we introduce the concept orthogonal loss (COL) to encourage the separation between the concept representations and to reduce the intra-concept distance. This paper presents extensive experiments on real-world datasets for image classification tasks, namely CUB, AwA2, CelebA and TIL. We also study the performance of coop-CBM models under various distributional shift settings. We show that our proposed method achieves higher accuracy in all distributional shift settings even compared to the black-box models with the highest concept accuracy.
tl;dr: Pretraining a language model with active forgetting imbues it with more plasticity and makes it adapt to new languages faster in low-data scenarios.
Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities universally accessible. While prior work has shown it possible to address this issue by learning a new embedding layer for the new language, doing so is both data and compute inefficient. We propose to use an active forgetting mechanism during pretraining, as a simple way of creating PLMs that can quickly adapt to new languages. Concretely, by resetting the embedding layer every K updates during pretraining, we encourage the PLM to improve its ability of learning new embeddings within limited number of updates, similar to a meta-learning effect. Experiments with RoBERTa show that models pretrained with our forgetting mechanism not only demonstrate faster convergence during language adaptation, but also outperform standard ones in a low-data regime, particularly for languages that are distant from English. Code will be available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/language-model-plasticity.
tl;dr: This paper provides a finite-time analysis for the single-timescale actor-critic
Actor-critic methods have achieved significant success in many challenging applications. However, its finite-time convergence is still poorly understood in the most practical single-timescale form. Existing works on analyzing single-timescale actor-critic have been limited to i.i.d. sampling or tabular setting for simplicity. We investigate the more practical online single-timescale actor-critic algorithm on continuous state space, where the critic assumes linear function approximation and updates with a single Markovian sample per actor step. Previous analysis has been unable to establish the convergence for such a challenging scenario. We demonstrate that the online single-timescale actor-critic method provably finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point with $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ sample complexity under standard assumptions, which can be further improved to $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ under the i.i.d. sampling. Our novel framework systematically evaluates and controls the error propagation between the actor and critic. It offers a promising approach for analyzing other single-timescale reinforcement learning algorithms as well.
tl;dr: MKOR is a distributed second-order optimizer with cheap computatoins and communications and a high convergence rate.
This work proposes a Momentum-Enabled Kronecker-Factor-Based Optimizer Using Rank-1 updates, called MKOR, that improves the training time and convergence properties of deep neural networks (DNNs). Second-order techniques, while enjoying higher convergence rates vs first-order counterparts, have cubic complexity with respect to either the model size and/or the training batch size. Hence they exhibit poor scalability and performance in transformer models, e.g. large language models (LLMs), because the batch sizes in these models scale by the attention mechanism sequence length, leading to large model size and batch sizes. MKOR's complexity is quadratic with respect to the model size, alleviating the computation bottlenecks in second-order methods. Because of their high computation complexity, state-of-the-art implementations of second-order methods can only afford to update the second order information infrequently, and thus do not fully exploit the promise of better convergence from these updates. By reducing the communication complexity of the second-order updates as well as achieving a linear communication complexity, MKOR increases the frequency of second order updates. We also propose a hybrid version of MKOR (called MKOR-H) that mid-training falls backs to a first order optimizer if the second order updates no longer accelerate convergence. Our experiments show that MKOR outperforms state -of-the-art first order methods, e.g. the LAMB optimizer, and best implementations of second-order methods, i.e. KAISA/KFAC, up to 2.57x and 1.85x respectively on BERT-Large-Uncased on 64 GPUs.
In this paper, we make a bold attempt toward an ambitious task: given a pre-trained classifier, we aim to reconstruct an image generator, without relying on any data samples. From a black-box perspective, this challenge seems intractable, since it inevitably involves identifying the inverse function for a classifier, which is, by nature, an information extraction process. As such, we resort to leveraging the knowledge encapsulated within the parameters of the neural network. Grounded on the theory of Maximum-Margin Bias of gradient descent, we propose a novel learning paradigm, in which the generator is trained to ensure that the convergence conditions of the network parameters are satisfied over the generated distribution of the samples. Empirical validation from various image generation tasks substantiates the efficacy of our strategy.
tl;dr: Competing objectives and mismatched generalization lead to jailbreak attacks on safety-trained LLMs.
Large language models trained for safety and harmlessness remain susceptible to adversarial misuse, as evidenced by the prevalence of “jailbreak” attacks on early releases of ChatGPT that elicit undesired behavior. Going beyond recognition of the issue, we investigate why such attacks succeed and how they can be created. We hypothesize two failure modes of safety training: competing objectives and mismatched generalization. Competing objectives arise when a model’s capabilities and safety goals conflict, while mismatched generalization occurs when safety training fails to generalize to a domain for which capabilities exist. We use these failure modes to guide jailbreak design and then evaluate state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude v1.3, against both existing and newly designed attacks. We find that vulnerabilities persist despite the extensive red-teaming and safety-training efforts behind these models. Notably, new attacks utilizing our failure modes succeed on every prompt in a collection of unsafe requests from the models’ red-teaming evaluation sets and outperform existing ad hoc jailbreaks. Our analysis emphasizes the need for safety-capability parity—that safety mechanisms should be as sophisticated as the underlying model—and argues against the idea that scaling alone can resolve these safety failure modes.
tl;dr: Learning how to choose useful visual observations in Active-RL task by sensorimotor reward.
In this work, we investigate Active Vision Reinforcement Learning (ActiveVision-RL), where an embodied agent simultaneously learns action policy for the task while also controlling its visual observations in partially observable environments. We denote the former as motor policy and the latter as sensory policy. For example, humans solve real world tasks by hand manipulation (motor policy) together with eye movements (sensory policy). ActiveVision-RL poses challenges on coordinating two policies given their mutual influence. We propose SUGARL, Sensorimotor Understanding Guided Active Reinforcement Learning, a framework that models motor and sensory policies separately, but jointly learns them using with an intrinsic sensorimotor reward. This learnable reward is assigned by sensorimotor reward module, incentivizes the sensory policy to select observations that are optimal to infer its own motor action, inspired by the sensorimotor stage of humans. Through a series of experiments, we show the effectiveness of our method across a range of observability conditions and its adaptability to existed RL algorithms. The sensory policies learned through our method are observed to exhibit effective active vision strategies.
As a classical generative modeling approach, energy-based models have the natural advantage of flexibility in the form of the energy function. Recently, energy-based models have achieved great success in modeling high-dimensional data in computer vision and natural language processing. In line with these advancements, we build a multi-purpose energy-based probabilistic model for High Energy Physics events at the Large Hadron Collider. This framework builds on a powerful generative model and describes higher-order inter-particle interactions. It suits different encoding architectures and builds on implicit generation. As for applicational aspects, it can serve as a powerful parameterized event generator for physics simulation, a generic anomalous signal detector free from spurious correlations, and an augmented event classifier for particle identification.
Diffusion models are powerful, but they require a lot of time and data to train. We propose Patch Diffusion, a generic patch-wise training framework, to significantly reduce the training time costs while improving data efficiency, which thus helps democratize diffusion model training to broader users. At the core of our innovations is a new conditional score function at the patch level, where the patch location in the original image is included as additional coordinate channels, while the patch size is randomized and diversified throughout training to encode the cross-region dependency at multiple scales. Sampling with our method is as easy as in the original diffusion model. Through Patch Diffusion, we could achieve $\mathbf{\ge 2\times}$ faster training, while maintaining comparable or better generation quality. Patch Diffusion meanwhile improves the performance of diffusion models trained on relatively small datasets, $e.g.$, as few as 5,000 images to train from scratch. We achieve outstanding FID scores in line with state-of-the-art benchmarks: 1.77 on CelebA-64$\times$64, 1.93 on AFHQv2-Wild-64$\times$64, and 2.72 on ImageNet-256$\times$256. We share our code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/Zhendong-Wang/Patch-Diffusion.
Time series forecasting has played the key role in different industrial, including finance, traffic, energy, and healthcare domains. While existing literatures have designed many sophisticated architectures based on RNNs, GNNs, or Transformers, another kind of approaches based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are proposed with simple structure, low complexity, and superior performance. However, most MLP-based forecasting methods suffer from the point-wise mappings and information bottleneck, which largely hinders the forecasting performance. To overcome this problem, we explore a novel direction of applying MLPs in the frequency domain for time series forecasting. We investigate the learned patterns of frequency-domain MLPs and discover their two inherent characteristic benefiting forecasting, (i) global view: frequency spectrum makes MLPs own a complete view for signals and learn global dependencies more easily, and (ii) energy compaction: frequency-domain MLPs concentrate on smaller key part of frequency components with compact signal energy. Then, we propose FreTS, a simple yet effective architecture built upon Frequency-domain MLPs for Time Series forecasting. FreTS mainly involves two stages, (i) Domain Conversion, that transforms time-domain signals into complex numbers of frequency domain; (ii) Frequency Learning, that performs our redesigned MLPs for the learning of real and imaginary part of frequency components. The above stages operated on both inter-series and intra-series scales further contribute to channel-wise and time-wise dependency learning. Extensive experiments on 13 real-world benchmarks (including 7 benchmarks for short-term forecasting and 6 benchmarks for long-term forecasting) demonstrate our consistent superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/aikunyi/FreTS.
tl;dr: We propose a neural approach that is inspired by dynamic programming to tackle the Maximum Independent Set problem
This work presents a graph neural network (GNN) framework for solving the maximum independent set (MIS) problem, inspired by dynamic programming (DP). Specifically, given a graph, we propose a DP-like recursive algorithm based on GNNs that firstly constructs two smaller sub-graphs, predicts the one with the larger MIS, and then uses it in the next recursive call. To train our algorithm, we require annotated comparisons of different graphs concerning their MIS size. Annotating the comparisons with the output of our algorithm leads to a self-training process that results in more accurate self-annotation of the comparisons and vice versa. We provide numerical evidence showing the superiority of our method vs prior methods in multiple synthetic and real-world datasets.
tl;dr: If ML agents observe how similar they are to each other, they can cooperate in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma.
As machine learning agents act more autonomously in the world, they will increasingly interact with each other. Unfortunately, in many social dilemmas like the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, standard game theory predicts that ML agents will fail to cooperate with each other. Prior work has shown that one way to enable cooperative outcomes in the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma is to make the agents mutually transparent to each other, i.e., to allow them to access one another’s source code (Rubinstein, 1998; Tennenholtz, 2004) – or weights in the case of ML agents. However, full transparency is often unrealistic, whereas partial transparency is commonplace. Moreover, it is challenging for agents to learn their way to cooperation in the full transparency setting. In this paper, we introduce a more realistic setting in which agents only observe a single number indicating how similar they are to each other. We prove that this allows for the same set of cooperative outcomes as the full transparency setting. We also demonstrate experimentally that cooperation can be learned using simple ML methods.
tl;dr: We propose a simple adaptor for pretrained models to enable the prediction of unobserved classes using metric space information.
Machine learning models---including prominent zero-shot models---are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes---or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance---without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping $\text{argmax}$ with the Fréchet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.
1804. LaFTer: Label-Free Tuning of Zero-shot Classifier using Language and Unlabeled Image Collections
tl;dr: Training a visual classifier on text-only data and later employing it for unsupervised finetuning of vision language models.
Recently, large-scale pre-trained Vision and Language (VL) models have set a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) in zero-shot visual classification enabling open-vocabulary recognition of potentially unlimited set of categories defined as simple language prompts. However, despite these great advances, the performance of these zero-shot classifiers still falls short of the results of dedicated (closed category set) classifiers trained with supervised fine-tuning. In this paper we show, for the first time, how to reduce this gap without any labels and without any paired VL data, using an unlabeled image collection and a set of texts auto-generated using a Large Language Model (LLM) describing the categories of interest and effectively substituting labeled visual instances of those categories. Using our label-free approach, we are able to attain significant performance improvements over the zero-shot performance of the base VL model and other contemporary methods and baselines on a wide variety of datasets, demonstrating absolute improvement of up to $11.7\%$ ($3.8\%$ on average) in the label-free setting. Moreover, despite our approach being label-free, we observe $1.3\%$ average gains over leading few-shot prompting baselines that do use 5-shot supervision.
tl;dr: We evaluate LLMs' ability for inferring the structure of the environment and using it in multi-step planning
Recently an influx of studies claims emergent cognitive abilities in large language models (LLMs). Yet, most rely on anecdotes, overlook contamination of training sets, or lack systematic Evaluation involving multiple tasks, control conditions, multiple iterations, and statistical robustness tests. Here we make two major contributions. First, we propose CogEval, a cognitive science-inspired protocol for the systematic evaluation of cognitive capacities in LLMs. The CogEval protocol can be followed for the evaluation of various abilities. Second, here we follow CogEval to systematically evaluate cognitive maps and planning ability across eight LLMs (OpenAI GPT-4, GPT-3.5-turbo-175B, davinci-003-175B, Google Bard, Cohere-xlarge-52.4B, Anthropic Claude-1-52B, LLaMA-13B, and Alpaca-7B). We base our task prompts on human experiments, which offer both established construct validity for evaluating planning, and are absent from LLM training sets. We find that, while LLMs show apparent competence in a few planning tasks with simpler structures, systematic evaluation reveals striking failure modes in planning tasks, including hallucinations of invalid trajectories and falling in loops. These findings do not support the idea of emergent out-of-the-box planning ability in LLMs. This could be because LLMs do not understand the latent relational structures underlying planning problems, known as cognitive maps, and fail at unrolling goal-directed trajectories based on the underlying structure. Implications for application and future directions are discussed.
tl;dr: We develop LAMP, a framework that utilizes the reasoning ability of large language models to help improve the prediction accuracy of event sequence models.
Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about real-world events and help improve the prediction performance of event sequence models. We design LAMP, a framework that integrates a large language model in event prediction. Particularly, the language model performs abductive reasoning to assist an event sequence model: the event model proposes predictions on future events given the past; instructed by a few expert-annotated demonstrations, the language model learns to suggest possible causes for each proposal; a search module finds out the previous events that match the causes; a scoring function learns to examine whether the retrieved events could actually cause the proposal. Through extensive experiments on several challenging real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our framework---thanks to the reasoning capabilities of large language models---could significantly outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In supervised learning, this adaptation problem is addressed by large-scale pre-training followed by fine-tuning to new down-stream tasks. Recently, pre-training on multiple tasks has been gaining traction in RL. However, fine-tuning a pre-trained model often suffers from catastrophic forgetting. That is, the performance on the pre-training tasks deteriorates when fine-tuning on new tasks. To investigate the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon, we first jointly pre-train a model on datasets from two benchmark suites, namely Meta-World and DMControl. Then, we evaluate and compare a variety of fine-tuning methods prevalent in natural language processing, both in terms of performance on new tasks, and how well performance on pre-training tasks is retained. Our study shows that with most fine-tuning approaches, the performance on pre-training tasks deteriorates significantly. Therefore, we propose a novel method, Learning-to-Modulate (L2M), that avoids the degradation of learned skills by modulating the information flow of the frozen pre-trained model via a learnable modulation pool. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Continual-World benchmark, while retaining performance on the pre-training tasks. Finally, to aid future research in this area, we release a dataset encompassing 50 Meta-World and 16 DMControl tasks.
tl;dr: Enhancing Adaptive History Reserving by Spiking Convolutional Block Attention Module in Recurrent Neural Networks
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) serve as one type of efficient model to process spatio-temporal patterns in time series, such as the Address-Event Representation data collected from Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). Although convolutional SNNs have achieved remarkable performance on these AER datasets, benefiting from the predominant spatial feature extraction ability of convolutional structure, they ignore temporal features related to sequential time points. In this paper, we develop a recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN) model embedded with an advanced spiking convolutional block attention module (SCBAM) component to combine both spatial and temporal features of spatio-temporal patterns. It invokes the history information in spatial and temporal channels adaptively through SCBAM, which brings the advantages of efficient memory calling and history redundancy elimination. The performance of our model was evaluated in DVS128-Gesture dataset and other time-series datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed SRNN-SCBAM model makes better use of the history information in spatial and temporal dimensions with less memory space, and achieves higher accuracy compared to other models.
tl;dr: We present a rehearsal learning framework based on structural rehearsal models and Bayesian inference for recommending appropriate decisions to avoid undesired future outcomes.
Machine learning (ML) models have been widely used to make predictions. Instead of a predictive statement about future outcomes, in many situations we want to pursue a decision: what can we do to avoid the undesired future if an ML model predicts so? In this paper, we present a rehearsal learning framework, in which decisions that can persuasively avoid the happening of undesired outcomes can be found and recommended. Based on the influence relation, we characterize the generative process of variables with structural rehearsal models, consisting of a probabilistic graphical model called rehearsal graphs and structural equations, and find actionable decisions that can alter the outcome by reasoning under a Bayesian framework. Moreover, we present a probably approximately correct bound to quantify the associated risk of a decision. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed rehearsal learning framework and the informativeness of the bound.
Over the last decade, deep neural networks have transformed our society, and they are already widely applied in various machine learning applications. State-of-the-art deep neural networks are becoming larger in size every year to deliver increasing model accuracy, and as a result, model training consumes substantial computing resources and will only consume more in the future.
Using current training methods, in each iteration, to process a data point $x \in \mathbb{R}^d$ in a layer, we need to spend $\Theta(md)$ time to evaluate all the $m$ neurons in the layer. This means processing the entire layer takes $\Theta(nmd)$ time for $n$ data points. Recent work [Song, Yang and Zhang, NeurIPS 2021] reduces this time per iteration to $o(nmd)$, but requires exponential time to preprocess either the data or the neural network weights, making it unlikely to have practical usage.
In this work, we present a new preprocessing method that simply stores the weight-data correlation in a tree data structure in order to quickly and dynamically detect which neurons fire at each iteration. Our method requires only $O(nmd)$ time in preprocessing and still achieves $o(nmd)$ time per iteration. We complement our new algorithm with a lower bound, proving that assuming a popular conjecture from complexity theory, one could not substantially speed up our algorithm for dynamic detection of firing neurons.
tl;dr: We prove convergence of shallow neural networks when learning the inner layer more slowly than the outer layer.
We study the training dynamics of shallow neural networks, in a two-timescale regime in which the stepsizes for the inner layer are much smaller than those for the outer layer. In this regime, we prove convergence of the gradient flow to a global optimum of the non-convex optimization problem in a simple univariate setting. The number of neurons need not be asymptotically large for our result to hold, distinguishing our result from popular recent approaches such as the neural tangent kernel or mean-field regimes. Experimental illustration is provided, showing that the stochastic gradient descent behaves according to our description of the gradient flow and thus converges to a global optimum in the two-timescale regime, but can fail outside of this regime.
tl;dr: We study task-agnostic methods for improving language model performance, making it competitive with task-specific adaptation approaches.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit in-context learning abilities which enable the same model to perform several tasks without any task-specific training. In contrast, traditional adaptation approaches, such as fine-tuning, modify the underlying models for each specific task. In-context learning, however, consistently underperforms task-specific tuning approaches even when presented with the same examples. While most existing approaches (e.g., prompt engineering) focus on the LLM's learned representations to patch this performance gap, our experiments actually reveal that LLM representations contain sufficient information to make good predictions. As such, we focus on the LLM's reasoning abilities and demonstrate that this performance gap exists due to their inability to perform simple probabilistic reasoning tasks. This raises an intriguing question: Are LLMs actually capable of learning how to reason in a task-agnostic manner? We answer this in the affirmative and, as a proof of concept, propose TART which generically improves an LLM's reasoning abilities using a synthetically trained reasoning module. TART trains this Transformer-based reasoning module in a task-agnostic manner using only synthetic logistic regression tasks and composes it with an arbitrary real-world pre-trained model without any additional training. With a single inference module, TART improves performance across different model families (GPT-Neo, Pythia, Bloom), model sizes (100M - 6B), tasks (14 NLP classification tasks), and even across different modalities (audio and vision). On the RAFT Benchmark, TART improves GPT-Neo (125M)'s performance such that it outperforms Bloom (176B), and is within $4$% of GPT-3.
tl;dr: We give the first near-linear time constructions of optimal diagonal preconditioners and families of structured linear system solvers, improving the state-of-the-art by factors polynomial in the dimension.
We develop a general framework for finding approximately-optimal preconditioners for solving linear systems. Leveraging this framework we obtain improved runtimes for fundamental preconditioning and linear system solving problems including:
Diagonal preconditioning. We give an algorithm which, given positive definite $\mathbf{K} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ with $\mathrm{nnz}(\mathbf{K})$ nonzero entries, computes an $\epsilon$-optimal diagonal preconditioner in time $\widetilde{O}(\mathrm{nnz}(\mathbf{K}) \cdot \mathrm{poly}(\kappa^\star,\epsilon^{-1}))$, where $\kappa^\star$ is the optimal condition number of the rescaled matrix.
Structured linear systems. We give an algorithm which, given $\mathbf{M} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ that is either the pseudoinverse of a graph Laplacian matrix or a constant spectral approximation of one, solves linear systems in $\mathbf{M}$ in $\widetilde{O}(d^2)$ time.
Our diagonal preconditioning results improve state-of-the-art runtimes of $\Omega(d^{3.5})$ attained by general-purpose semidefinite programming, and our solvers improve state-of-the-art runtimes of $\Omega(d^{\omega})$ where $\omega > 2.3$ is the current matrix multiplication constant. We attain our results via new algorithms for a class of semidefinite programs (SDPs) we call matrix-dictionary approximation SDPs, which we leverage to solve an associated problem we call matrix-dictionary recovery.
tl;dr: camera ready version
In this work, we study the low-rank MDPs with adversarially changed losses in the full-information feedback setting. In particular, the unknown transition probability kernel admits a low-rank matrix decomposition \citep{REPUCB22}, and the loss functions may change adversarially but are revealed to the learner at the end of each episode. We propose a policy optimization-based algorithm POLO, and we prove that it attains the $\widetilde{O}(dA^{\frac{1}{2}}K^{\frac{3}{4}}\ln^{\frac{1}{4}}M/(1-\gamma)^2)$ regret guarantee, where $d$ is rank of the transition kernel (and hence the dimension of the unknown representations), $A$ is the cardinality of the action space, $M$ is the cardinality of the model class, and $\gamma$ is the discounted factor. Notably, our algorithm is oracle-efficient and has a regret guarantee with no dependence on the size of potentially arbitrarily large state space. Furthermore, we also prove an $\Omega(\frac{\gamma^2}{1-\gamma} \sqrt{d A K})$ regret lower bound for this problem, showing that low-rank MDPs are statistically more difficult to learn than linear MDPs in the regret minimization setting. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first algorithm that interleaves representation learning, exploration, and exploitation to achieve the sublinear regret guarantee for RL with nonlinear function approximation and adversarial losses.
We consider a weakly supervised learning scenario where the supervision signal is generated by a transition function $\sigma$ of labels associated with multiple input instances. We formulate this problem as *multi-instance Partial Label Learning (multi-instance PLL)*, which is an extension to the standard PLL problem. Our problem is met in different fields, including latent structural learning and neuro-symbolic integration. Despite the existence of many learning techniques, limited theoretical analysis has been dedicated to this problem. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical study of multi-instance PLL with possibly an unknown transition $\sigma$. Our main contributions are as follows: First, we proposed a necessary and sufficient condition for the learnability of the problem. This condition nontrivially generalizes and relaxes the existing *small ambiguity degree* in PLL literature since we allow the transition to be deterministic. Second, we derived Rademacher-style error bounds based on the top-$k$ surrogate loss that is widely used in the neuro-symbolic literature. Furthermore, we conclude with empirical experiments for learning with an unknown transition. The empirical results align with our theoretical findings; however, they also expose the issue of scalability in the weak supervision literature.
tl;dr: We show deep equilibrium model as a infinite-depth neural network with shared weight is equivalent to a non-degenerate Gaussian process in the limit of width approaching to infinite
Neural networks with wide layers have attracted significant attention due to their equivalence to Gaussian processes, enabling perfect fitting of training data while maintaining generalization performance, known as benign overfitting. However, existing results mainly focus on shallow or finite-depth networks, necessitating a comprehensive analysis of wide neural networks with infinite-depth layers, such as neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and deep equilibrium models (DEQs).
In this paper, we specifically investigate the deep equilibrium model (DEQ), an infinite-depth neural network with shared weight matrices across layers. Our analysis reveals that as the width of DEQ layers approaches infinity, it converges to a Gaussian process, establishing what is known as the Neural Network and Gaussian Process (NNGP) correspondence. Remarkably, this convergence holds even when the limits of depth and width are interchanged, which is not observed in typical infinite-depth Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the associated Gaussian vector remains non-degenerate for any pairwise distinct input data, ensuring a strictly positive smallest eigenvalue of the corresponding kernel matrix using the NNGP kernel. These findings serve as fundamental elements for studying the training and generalization of DEQs, laying the groundwork for future research in this area.
We consider the problem of solving stochastic monotone variational inequalities with a separable structure using a stochastic first-order oracle. Building on standard extragradient for variational inequalities we propose a novel algorithm---stochastic \emph{accelerated gradient-extragradient} (AG-EG)---for strongly monotone variational inequalities (VIs). Our approach combines the strengths of extragradient and Nesterov acceleration. By showing that its iterates remain in a bounded domain and applying scheduled restarting, we prove that AG-EG has an optimal convergence rate for strongly monotone VIs. Furthermore, when specializing to the particular case of bilinearly coupled strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems, including bilinear games, our algorithm achieves fine-grained convergence rates that match the respective lower bounds, with the stochasticity being characterized by an additive statistical error term that is optimal up to a constant prefactor.
In this paper, we propose a novel text promptable surgical instrument segmentation approach to overcome challenges associated with diversity and differentiation of surgical instruments in minimally invasive surgeries. We redefine the task as text promptable, thereby enabling a more nuanced comprehension of surgical instruments and adaptability to new instrument types. Inspired by recent advancements in vision-language models, we leverage pretrained image and text encoders as our model backbone and design a text promptable mask decoder consisting of attention- and convolution-based prompting schemes for surgical instrument segmentation prediction. Our model leverages multiple text prompts for each surgical instrument through a new mixture of prompts mechanism, resulting in enhanced segmentation performance. Additionally, we introduce a hard instrument area reinforcement module to improve image feature comprehension and segmentation precision. Extensive experiments on several surgical instrument segmentation datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance and promising generalization capability. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a promptable approach to surgical instrument segmentation, offering significant potential for practical application in the field of robotic-assisted surgery.
1819. Integration-free Training for Spatio-temporal Multimodal Covariate Deep Kernel Point Processes
tl;dr: We propose a novel deep spatio-temporal point process model that incorporates multimodal covariate information, and utilize an integration-free method based on score matching to address the intractable training procedure.
In this study, we propose a novel deep spatio-temporal point process model, Deep Kernel Mixture Point Processes (DKMPP), that incorporates multimodal covariate information. DKMPP is an enhanced version of Deep Mixture Point Processes (DMPP), which uses a more flexible deep kernel to model complex relationships between events and covariate data, improving the model's expressiveness. To address the intractable training procedure of DKMPP due to the non-integrable deep kernel, we utilize an integration-free method based on score matching, and further improve efficiency by adopting a scalable denoising score matching method. Our experiments demonstrate that DKMPP and its corresponding score-based estimators outperform baseline models, showcasing the advantages of incorporating covariate information, utilizing a deep kernel, and employing score-based estimators.
This paper explores the connection between learning trajectories of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and their generalization capabilities when optimized using (stochastic) gradient descent algorithms.
Instead of concentrating solely on the generalization error of the DNN post-training, we present a novel perspective for analyzing generalization error by investigating the contribution of each update step to the change in generalization error. This perspective enable a more direct comprehension of how the learning trajectory influences generalization error. Building upon this analysis, we propose a new generalization bound that incorporates more extensive trajectory information.
Our proposed generalization bound depends on the complexity of learning trajectory and the ratio between the bias and diversity of training set. Experimental observations reveal that our method effectively captures the generalization error throughout the training process. Furthermore, our approach can also track changes in generalization error when adjustments are made to learning rates and label noise levels. These results demonstrate that learning trajectory information is a valuable indicator of a model's generalization capabilities.
Decoding visual stimuli from neural responses recorded by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) presents an intriguing intersection between cognitive neuroscience and machine learning, promising advancements in understanding human visual perception. However, the task is challenging due to the noisy nature of fMRI signals and the intricate pattern of brain visual representations. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a two-phase fMRI representation learning framework. The first phase pre-trains an fMRI feature learner with a proposed Double-contrastive Mask Auto-encoder to learn denoised representations. The second phase tunes the feature learner to attend to neural activation patterns most informative for visual reconstruction with guidance from an image auto-encoder. The optimized fMRI feature learner then conditions a latent diffusion model to reconstruct image stimuli from brain activities. Experimental results demonstrate our model's superiority in generating high-resolution and semantically accurate images, substantially exceeding previous state-of-the-art methods by 39.34% in the 50-way-top-1 semantic classification accuracy. The code implementations will be available at https://github.com/soinx0629/vis_dec_neurips/.
1822. CELLE-2: Translating Proteins to Pictures and Back with a Bidirectional Text-to-Image Transformer
tl;dr: A bidirectional text-to-image transformer trained on a large corpus of amino acid and fluorescent image data. We demonstrated a novel image-based protein engineering method.
We present CELL-E 2, a novel bidirectional transformer that can generate images depicting protein subcellular localization from the amino acid sequences (and vice versa). Protein localization is a challenging problem that requires integrating sequence and image information, which most existing methods ignore. CELL-E 2 extends the work of CELL-E, not only capturing the spatial complexity of protein localization and produce probability estimates of localization atop a nucleus image, but also being able to generate sequences from images, enabling de novo protein design. We train and finetune CELL-E 2 on two large-scale datasets of human proteins. We also demonstrate how to use CELL-E 2 to create hundreds of novel nuclear localization signals (NLS). Results and interactive demos are featured at https://bohuanglab.github.io/CELL-E_2/.
tl;dr: We empirically find a structure in representations from big language models and theoretically proves it helps transferring pre-training performance to downstream task performances.
Recently, researchers have found that representations learned by large-scale pre-trained language models are useful in various downstream tasks. However, there is little theoretical understanding of how pre-training performance is related to downstream task performance. In this paper, we analyze how this performance transfer depends on the properties of the downstream task and the structure of the representations. We consider a log-linear model where a word can be predicted from its context through a network having softmax as its last layer. We show that even if the downstream task is highly structured and depends on a simple function of the hidden representation, there are still cases when a low pre-training loss cannot guarantee good performance on the downstream task. On the other hand, we propose and empirically validate the existence of an ``anchor vector'' in the representation space, and show that this assumption, together with properties of the downstream task, guarantees performance transfer.
tl;dr: We develop an inpainting diffusion model to factorize egocentric videos into agent and environment representations, and show the power of the factored representation for downstream tasks in vision and robot learning.
The analysis and use of egocentric videos for robotics tasks is made challenging by occlusion and the visual mismatch between the human hand and a robot end-effector. Past work views the human hand as a nuisance and removes it from the scene. However, the hand also provides a valuable signal for learning. In this work, we propose to extract a factored representation of the scene that separates the agent (human hand) and the environment. This alleviates both occlusion and mismatch while preserving the signal, thereby easing the design of models for downstream robotics tasks. At the heart of this factorization is our proposed Video Inpainting via Diffusion Model (VIDM) that leverages both a prior on real-world images (through a large-scale pre-trained diffusion model) and the appearance of the object in earlier frames of the video (through attention). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VIDM at improving the in-painting quality in egocentric videos and the power of our factored representation for numerous tasks: object detection, 3D reconstruction of manipulated objects, and learning of reward functions, policies, and affordances from videos.
tl;dr: We propose a practical algorithm for running large language models by pooling together weak geographically distributed devices. Our system can inference Llama 2 (70B) and BLOOM (176B) over the Internet more than 10x faster compared to RAM offloading.
Large language models (LLMs) are useful in many NLP tasks and become more capable with size, with the best open-source models having over 50 billion parameters. However, using these 50B+ models requires high-end hardware, making them inaccessible to most researchers. In this work, we investigate methods for cost-efficient inference and fine-tuning of LLMs, comparing local and distributed strategies. We observe that a large enough model (50B+) can run efficiently even on geodistributed devices in a consumer-grade network. This could allow running LLM efficiently by pooling together idle compute resources of multiple research groups and volunteers. We address two open problems: (1) how to perform inference and fine-tuning reliably if any device can disconnect abruptly and (2) how to partition LLMs between devices with uneven hardware, joining and leaving at will. In order to do that, we develop special fault-tolerant inference algorithms and load-balancing protocols that automatically assign devices to maximize the total system throughput. We showcase these algorithms in Petals — a decentralized system that runs Llama 2 (70B) and BLOOM (176B) over the Internet up to $10\times$ faster than offloading for interactive generation. We evaluate the performance of our system in simulated conditions and a real-world setup spanning two continents.
Pseudo labeling (PL) is a wide-applied strategy to enlarge the labeled dataset by self-annotating the potential samples during the training process. Several works have shown that it can improve the graph learning model performance in general. However, we notice that the incorrect labels can be fatal to the graph training process. Inappropriate PL may result in the performance degrading, especially on graph data where the noise can propagate. Surprisingly, the corresponding error is seldom theoretically analyzed in the literature. In this paper, we aim to give deep insights of PL on graph learning models. We first present the error analysis of PL strategy by showing that the error is bounded by the confidence of PL threshold and consistency of multi-view prediction. Then, we theoretically illustrate the effect of PL on convergence property. Based on the analysis, we propose a cautious pseudo labeling methodology in which we pseudo label the samples with highest confidence and multi-view consistency. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves graph learning process and outperforms other PL strategies on link prediction and node classification tasks.
tl;dr: We propose a novel stochastic process named $Q$-exponential process that generalizes Gaussian process with shaper regularization and is more suitable for modeling objects with abrupt changes and sharp contrast such as images with edges.
Regularization is one of the most fundamental topics in optimization, statistics and machine learning. To get sparsity in estimating a parameter $u\in\mathbb{R}^d$, an $\ell_q$ penalty term, $\Vert u\Vert_q$, is usually added to the objective function. What is the probabilistic distribution corresponding to such $\ell_q$ penalty? What is the \emph{correct} stochastic process corresponding to $\Vert u\Vert_q$ when we model functions $u\in L^q$? This is important for statistically modeling high-dimensional objects such as images, with penalty to preserve certainty properties, e.g. edges in the image.
In this work, we generalize the $q$-exponential distribution (with density proportional to) $\exp{(- \frac{1}{2}|u|^q)}$ to a stochastic process named \emph{$Q$-exponential (Q-EP) process} that corresponds to the $L_q$ regularization of functions. The key step is to specify consistent multivariate $q$-exponential distributions by choosing from a large family of elliptic contour distributions. The work is closely related to Besov process which is usually defined in terms of series. Q-EP can be regarded as a definition of Besov process with explicit probabilistic formulation, direct control on the correlation strength, and tractable prediction formula. From the Bayesian perspective, Q-EP provides a flexible prior on functions with sharper penalty ($q<2$) than the commonly used Gaussian process (GP, $q=2$).
We compare GP, Besov and Q-EP in modeling functional data, reconstructing images and solving inverse problems and demonstrate the advantage of our proposed methodology.
tl;dr: Reducing target function frequency improves neural network performance on tabular data
Deep learning methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in most modeling tasks involving images, text and audio, however, they typically underperform tree-based methods on tabular data. In this paper, we hypothesize that a significant contributor to this performance gap is the interaction between irregular target functions resulting from the heterogeneous nature of tabular feature spaces, and the well-known tendency of neural networks to learn smooth functions. Utilizing tools from spectral analysis, we show that functions described by tabular datasets often have high irregularity, and that they can be smoothed by transformations such as scaling and ranking in order to improve performance. However, because these transformations tend to lose information or negatively impact the loss landscape during optimization, they need to be rigorously fine-tuned for each feature to achieve performance gains. To address these problems, we propose introducing frequency reduction as an inductive bias. We realize this bias as a neural network layer that promotes learning low-frequency representations of the input features, allowing the network to operate in a space where the target function is more regular. Our proposed method introduces less computational complexity than a fully connected layer, while significantly improving neural network performance, and speeding up its convergence on 14 tabular datasets.
tl;dr: We use Large Language Models as both the commonsense world model and the heuristic policy within the Monte Carlo Tree Search framework, enabling better-reasoned decision-making for daily tasks.
Large-scale task planning is a major challenge. Recent work exploits large
language models (LLMs) directly as a policy and shows surprisingly
interesting results. This paper shows that LLMs provide a
commonsense model of the world in addition to a policy that acts on
it. The world model and the policy can be combined in a search
algorithm, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), to scale up task
planning. In our new LLM-MCTS algorithm, the LLM-induced world model
provides a commonsense prior belief for MCTS to achieve effective reasoning;
the LLM-induced policy acts as a heuristic to guide the search, vastly
improving search efficiency. Experiments show that LLM-MCTS outperforms
both MCTS alone and policies induced by LLMs (GPT2 and GPT3.5) by a wide
margin, for complex, novel tasks.
Further experiments and analyses on multiple tasks --
multiplication, travel planning, object rearrangement --
suggest minimum description length (MDL)
as a general guiding principle: if the
description length of the world model is substantially smaller than that of the
policy, using LLM as a world model for model-based planning is likely better
than using LLM solely as a policy.
1830. Action Inference by Maximising Evidence: Zero-Shot Imitation from Observation with World Models
tl;dr: We propose Action Inference by Maximising Evidence (AIME), a novel algorithm for imitation from observation by transferring learnt world models.
Unlike most reinforcement learning agents which require an unrealistic amount of environment interactions to learn a new behaviour, humans excel at learning quickly by merely observing and imitating others. This ability highly depends on the fact that humans have a model of their own embodiment that allows them to infer the most likely actions that led to the observed behaviour. In this paper, we propose Action Inference by Maximising Evidence (AIME) to replicate this behaviour using world models. AIME consists of two distinct phases. In the first phase, the agent learns a world model from its past experience to understand its own body by maximising the ELBO. While in the second phase, the agent is given some observation-only demonstrations of an expert performing a novel task and tries to imitate the expert's behaviour. AIME achieves this by defining a policy as an inference model and maximising the evidence of the demonstration under the policy and world model. Our method is "zero-shot" in the sense that it does not require further training for the world model or online interactions with the environment after given the demonstration. We empirically validate the zero-shot imitation performance of our method on the Walker and Cheetah embodiment of the DeepMind Control Suite and find it outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/argmax-ai/aime.
Multi-view clustering (MVC) based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and its variants have attracted much attention due to their advantages in clustering interpretability. However, existing NMF-based multi-view clustering methods perform NMF on each view respectively and ignore the impact of between-view. Thus, they can't well exploit the within-view spatial structure and between-view complementary information. To resolve this issue, we present orthogonal non-negative tensor factorization (Orth-NTF) and develop a novel multi-view clustering based on Orth-NTF with one-side orthogonal constraint. Our model directly performs Orth-NTF on the 3rd-order tensor which is composed of anchor graphs of views. Thus, our model directly considers the between-view relationship. Moreover, we use the tensor Schatten $p$-norm regularization as a rank approximation of the 3rd-order tensor which characterizes the cluster structure of multi-view data and exploits the between-view complementary information. In addition, we provide an optimization algorithm for the proposed method and prove mathematically that the algorithm always converges to the stationary KKT point. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets indicate that our proposed method is able to achieve satisfactory clustering performance.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a method for long-period unstable multivariate time series anomaly detection in the real world.
Many unsupervised methods have recently been proposed for multivariate time series anomaly detection. However, existing works mainly focus on stable data yet often omit the drift generated from non-stationary environments, which may lead to numerous false alarms. We propose **D**ynamic **D**ecomposition with **D**iffusion **R**econstruction (D$^3$R), a novel anomaly detection network for real-world unstable data to fill the gap. D$^3$R tackles the drift via decomposition and reconstruction. In the decomposition procedure, we utilize data-time mix-attention to dynamically decompose long-period multivariate time series, overcoming the limitation of the local sliding window. The information bottleneck is critical yet difficult to determine in the reconstruction procedure. To avoid retraining once the bottleneck changes, we control it externally by noise diffusion and directly reconstruct the polluted data. The whole model can be trained end-to-end. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that D$^3$R significantly outperforms existing methods, with a 11% average relative improvement over the previous SOTA models.
1833. FlowCam: Training Generalizable 3D Radiance Fields without Camera Poses via Pixel-Aligned Scene Flow
tl;dr: We propose to train generalizable 3D scene representations without known camera poses
Reconstruction of 3D neural fields from posed images has emerged as a promising method for self-supervised representation learning. The key challenge preventing the deployment of these 3D scene learners on large-scale video data is their dependence on precise camera poses from structure-from-motion, which is prohibitively expensive to run at scale. We propose a method that jointly reconstructs camera poses and 3D neural scene representations online and in a single forward pass. We estimate poses by first lifting frame-to-frame optical flow to 3D scene flow via differentiable rendering, preserving locality and shift-equivariance of the image processing backbone. SE(3) camera pose estimation is then performed via a weighted least-squares fit to the scene flow field. This formulation enables us to jointly supervise pose estimation and a generalizable neural scene representation via re-rendering the input video, and thus, train end-to-end and fully self-supervised on real-world video datasets. We demonstrate that our method performs robustly on diverse, real-world video, notably on sequences traditionally challenging to optimization-based pose estimation techniques.
tl;dr: Resilient Multiple Choice Learning is an extension of Multiple Choice Learning approaches for conditional distribution estimation in regression settings, relying on an interpretable scoring scheme and applicable for sound source localization.
We introduce Resilient Multiple Choice Learning (rMCL), an extension of the MCL approach for conditional distribution estimation in regression settings where multiple targets may be sampled for each training input.
Multiple Choice Learning is a simple framework to tackle multimodal density estimation, using the Winner-Takes-All (WTA) loss for a set of hypotheses. In regression settings, the existing MCL variants focus on merging the hypotheses, thereby eventually sacrificing the diversity of the predictions. In contrast, our method relies on a novel learned scoring scheme underpinned by a mathematical framework based on Voronoi tessellations of the output space, from which we can derive a probabilistic interpretation.
After empirically validating rMCL with experiments on synthetic data, we further assess its merits on the sound source localization problem, demonstrating its practical usefulness and the relevance of its interpretation.
tl;dr: We derive a simple, efficient method for surgically editing neural representations to erase unwanted concepts, with strong theoretical guarantees.
Concept erasure aims to remove specified features from a representation. It can improve fairness (e.g. preventing a classifier from using gender or race) and interpretability (e.g. removing a concept to observe changes in model behavior). We introduce LEAst-squares Concept Erasure (LEACE), a closed-form method which provably prevents all linear classifiers from detecting a concept while changing the representation as little as possible, as measured by a broad class of norms. We apply LEACE to large language models with a novel procedure called concept scrubbing, which erases target concept information from _every_ layer in the network. We demonstrate our method on two tasks: measuring the reliance of language models on part-of-speech information, and reducing gender bias in BERT embeddings. Our code is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/concept-erasure.
tl;dr: We introduce DiffVL, a method that enables non-expert users to communicate soft-body manipulation tasks -- a combination of vision and natural language, given in multiple stages -- that can be readily leveraged by a differential physics solver.
Combining gradient-based trajectory optimization with differentiable physics simulation is an efficient technique for solving soft-body manipulation problems.
Using a well-crafted optimization objective, the solver can quickly converge onto a valid trajectory.
However, writing the appropriate objective functions requires expert knowledge, making it difficult to collect a large set of naturalistic problems from non-expert users.
We introduce DiffVL, a method that enables non-expert users to communicate soft-body manipulation tasks -- a combination of vision and natural language, given in multiple stages -- that can be readily leveraged by a differential physics solver.
We have developed GUI tools that enable non-expert users to specify 100 tasks inspired by real-life soft-body manipulations from online videos, which we'll make public.
We leverage large language models to translate task descriptions into machine-interpretable optimization objectives. The optimization objectives can help differentiable physics solvers to solve these long-horizon multistage tasks that are challenging for previous baselines.
1837. Penguin: Parallel-Packed Homomorphic Encryption for Fast Graph Convolutional Network Inference
The marriage of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE) enables the inference of graph data on the cloud with significantly enhanced client data privacy. However, the tremendous computation and memory overhead associated with HE operations challenges the practicality of HE-based GCN inference. GCN inference involves a sequence of expensive matrix-matrix multiplications, and we observe that directly applying the state-of-the-art HE-based secure matrix-matrix multiplication solutions to accelerate HE-GCN inference is far less efficient as it does not exploit the unique aggregation mechanism of two-dimension graph node-features in GCN layer computation.
As a result, in this paper, we propose a novel HE-based ciphertext packing technique, i.e., Penguin, that can take advantage of the unique computation pattern during the HE-GCN inference to significantly reduce the computation and memory overhead associated with HE operations.
Specifically, Penguin employs (i) an effective two-dimension parallel packing technique for feature ciphertext with optimal graph node partitioning and graph feature interleaving, and (ii) an interleaved assembly technique that can effectively make use of the blank slots to merge ciphertexts after feature reduction and significantly reduce the costly rotation operation.
We provide theoretical analysis and experimental validation to demonstrate the speedup achieved by Penguin in accelerating GCN inference using popular GCN models and datasets. Our results show that Penguin can achieve up to $\sim10\times$ speedup and around $\sim79$% reduction in computational memory overhead, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that can ensure the protection of both graph structure and features when accelerating HE-GCN inference on encrypted data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ranran0523/Penguin.
tl;dr: We propose an efficient large language model (LLM) inference pipeline that leverages LLMs' response length perception ability for sequence scheduling, resulting in an 86% increase in inference throughput.
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI, demonstrating unprecedented capacity across various tasks. However, the inference process for LLMs comes with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient LLM inference pipeline that harnesses the power of LLMs. Our approach begins by tapping into the potential of LLMs to accurately perceive and predict the response length with minimal overhead. By leveraging this information, we introduce an efficient sequence scheduling technique that groups queries with similar response lengths into micro-batches. We evaluate our approach on real-world instruction datasets using the LLaMA-based model, and our results demonstrate an impressive 86% improvement in inference throughput without compromising effectiveness. Notably, our method is orthogonal to other inference acceleration techniques, making it a valuable addition to many existing toolkits (e.g., FlashAttention, Quantization) for LLM inference.
tl;dr: ASPEN uncovers a novel source of parallelism in DNNs by breaking the synchronization barriers in operators and leverages them by letting each parallel resource dynamically locate and execute the fine-grained parallel computation opportunities.
Modern Deep Neural Network (DNN) frameworks use tensor operators as the main building blocks of DNNs. However, we observe that operator-based construction of DNNs incurs significant drawbacks in parallelism in the form of synchronization barriers. Synchronization barriers of operators confine the scope of parallel computation to each operator and obscure the rich parallel computation opportunities that exist across operators. To this end, we present ASPEN, a novel parallel computation solution for DNNs that achieves fine-grained dynamic execution of DNNs, which (1) removes the operator barriers and expresses DNNs in dataflow graphs of fine-grained tiles to expose the parallel computation opportunities across operators, and (2) exploits these opportunities by dynamically locating and scheduling them in runtime. This novel approach of ASPEN enables opportunistic parallelism, a new class of parallelism for DNNs that is unavailable in the existing operator-based approaches. ASPEN also achieves high resource utilization and memory reuse by letting each resource asynchronously traverse depthwise in the DNN graph to its full computing potential. We provide challenges and solutions to our approach and show that our proof-of-concept implementation of ASPEN on CPU shows exceptional performance, outperforming state-of-the-art inference systems of TorchScript and TVM by up to 3.2$\times$ and 4.3$\times$, respectively.
tl;dr: We propose the double-randomized underdamped Langevin algorithm that achieves a dimension-independent convergence speed.
This paper focuses on the high-dimensional sampling of log-concave distributions with composite structures: $p^*(\mathrm{d}x)\propto \exp(-g(x)-f(x))\mathrm{d}x$. We develop a double randomization technique, which leads to a fast underdamped Langevin algorithm with a dimension-independent convergence guarantee. We prove that the algorithm enjoys an overall $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\frac{\left(\mathrm{tr}(H)\right)^{1/3}}{\epsilon^{2/3}}\right)$ iteration complexity to reach an $\epsilon$-tolerated sample whose distribution $p$ admits $W_2(p,p^*)\leq \epsilon$. Here, $H$ is an upper bound of the Hessian matrices for $f$ and does not explicitly depend on dimension $d$. For the posterior sampling over linear models with normalized data, we show a clear superiority of convergence rate which is dimension-free and outperforms the previous best-known results by a $d^{1/3}$ factor. The analysis to achieve a faster convergence rate brings new insights into high-dimensional sampling.
tl;dr: We study strategyproof voting rules when agents have beliefs about how others may vote.
In voting theory, when voters have ranked preferences over candidates, the celebrated Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem essentially rules out the existence of reasonable strategyproof methods for picking a winner. What if we weaken strategyproofness to only hold for Bayesian voters with beliefs over others' preferences? When voters believe other participants' rankings are drawn independently from a fixed distribution, the impossibility persists. However, it is quite reasonable for a voter to believe that other votes are correlated, either to each other or to their own ranking. We consider such beliefs induced by classic probabilistic models in social choice such as the Mallows, Placket-Luce, and Thurstone-Mosteller models. We single out the plurality rule (choosing the candidate ranked first most often) as a particularly promising choice as it is strategyproof for a large class of beliefs containing the specific ones we introduce. Further, we show that plurality is unique among positional scoring rules in having this property: no other scoring rule is strategyproof for beliefs induced by the Mallows model when there are a sufficient number of voters. Finally, we give examples of prominent non-scoring voting rules failing to be strategyproof on beliefs in this class, further bolstering the case for plurality.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires an agent to navigate through complex environments based on natural language instructions. In contrast to conventional approaches, which primarily focus on the spatial domain exploration, we propose a paradigm shift toward the Fourier domain. This alternative perspective aims to enhance visual-textual matching, ultimately improving the agent's ability to understand and execute navigation tasks based on the given instructions. In this study, we first explore the significance of high-frequency information in VLN and provide evidence that it is instrumental in bolstering visual-textual matching processes. Building upon this insight, we further propose a sophisticated and versatile Frequency-enhanced Data Augmentation (FDA) technique to improve the VLN model's capability of capturing critical high-frequency information. Specifically, this approach requires the agent to navigate in environments where only a subset of high-frequency visual information corresponds with the provided textual instructions, ultimately fostering the agent's ability to selectively discern and capture pertinent high-frequency features according to the given instructions. Promising results on R2R, RxR, CVDN and REVERIE demonstrate that our FDA can be readily integrated with existing VLN approaches, improving performance without adding extra parameters, and keeping models simple and efficient. The code is available at https://github.com/hekj/FDA.
tl;dr: We propose COT and COTT, which provably improve over existing methods of predicting OOD performance by leveraging pseudo label shift to account for miscalibration. Our methods significantly outperform existing methods on a variety of benchmarks.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) data poses serious challenges in deployed machine learning models,
so methods of predicting a model's performance on OOD data without labels are important for machine learning safety.
While a number of methods have been proposed by prior work,
they often underestimate the actual error, sometimes by a large margin, which greatly impacts their applicability to real tasks.
In this work, we identify *pseudo-label shift*, or the difference between the predicted and true OOD label distributions, as a key indicator to this underestimation. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel method for estimating model performance by leveraging optimal transport theory, Confidence Optimal Transport (COT), and show that it provably provides more robust error estimates in the presence of pseudo-label shift. Additionally, we introduce an empirically-motivated variant of COT, Confidence Optimal Transport with Thresholding (COTT), which applies thresholding to the individual transport costs and further improves the accuracy of COT's error estimates. We evaluate COT and COTT on a variety of standard benchmarks that induce various types of distribution shift -- synthetic, novel subpopulation, and natural -- and show that our approaches significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art methods with up to 3x lower prediction errorS.
tl;dr: We present a $O(1)$-approximate fully dynamic algorithm for the $k$-clustering problem with amortized update time $\tilde O(k)$ and worst-case query time $\tilde O(k^2)$.
We present a $O(1)$-approximate fully dynamic algorithm for the $k$-median and $k$-means problems on metric spaces with amortized update time $\tilde O(k)$ and worst-case query time $\tilde O(k^2)$. We complement our theoretical analysis with the first in-depth experimental study for the dynamic $k$-median problem on general metrics, focusing on comparing our dynamic algorithm to the current state-of-the-art by Henzinger and Kale [ESA'20]. Finally, we also provide a lower bound for dynamic $k$-median which shows that any $O(1)$-approximate algorithm with $\tilde O(\text{poly}(k))$ query time must have $\tilde \Omega(k)$ amortized update time, even in the incremental setting.
tl;dr: We built a fast data structure to sample rows from a Khatri-Rao product according to its exact leverage scores, which leads to asymptotically faster and practically more accurate randomized CP decomposition.
We present a data structure to randomly sample rows from the Khatri-Rao product of several matrices according to the exact distribution of its leverage scores. Our proposed sampler draws each row in time logarithmic in the height of the Khatri-Rao product and quadratic in its column count, with persistent space overhead at most the size of the input matrices. As a result, it tractably draws samples even when the matrices forming the Khatri-Rao product have tens of millions of rows each. When used to sketch the linear least-squares problems arising in Candecomp / PARAFAC decomposition, our method achieves lower asymptotic complexity per solve than recent state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on billion-scale sparse tensors and synthetic data validate our theoretical claims, with our algorithm achieving higher accuracy than competing methods as the decomposition rank grows.
tl;dr: This work analyses modular learning behaviors and proposes modular adaptive method for efficient training.
Despite their prevalence in deep-learning communities, over-parameterized models convey high demands of computational costs for proper training. This work studies the fine-grained, modular-level learning dynamics of over-parameterized models to attain a more efficient and fruitful training strategy. Empirical evidence reveals that when scaling down into network modules, such as heads in self-attention models, we can observe varying learning patterns implicitly associated with each module's trainability. To describe such modular-level learning capabilities, we introduce a novel concept dubbed modular neural tangent kernel (mNTK), and we demonstrate that the quality of a module's learning is tightly associated with its mNTK's principal eigenvalue $\lambda_{\max}$. A large $\lambda_{\max}$ indicates that the module learns features with better convergence, while those miniature ones may impact generalization negatively. Inspired by the discovery, we propose a novel training strategy termed Modular Adaptive Training (MAT) to update those modules with their $\lambda_{\max}$ exceeding a dynamic threshold selectively, concentrating the model on learning common features and ignoring those inconsistent ones. Unlike most existing training schemes with a complete BP cycle across all network modules, MAT can significantly save computations by its partially-updating strategy and can further improve performance. Experiments show that MAT nearly halves the computational cost of model training and outperforms the accuracy of baselines.
tl;dr: We present a generalized safe RL problem and propose an algorithm that is practically useful and supported by theoretical foundations.
Safe exploration is essential for the practical use of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a generalized safe exploration (GSE) problem as a unified formulation of common safe exploration problems. We then propose a solution of the GSE problem in the form of a meta-algorithm for safe exploration, MASE, which combines an unconstrained RL algorithm with an uncertainty quantifier to guarantee safety in the current episode while properly penalizing unsafe explorations before actual safety violation to discourage them in future episodes. The advantage of MASE is that we can optimize a policy while guaranteeing with a high probability that no safety constraint will be violated under proper assumptions. Specifically, we present two variants of MASE with different constructions of the uncertainty quantifier: one based on generalized linear models with theoretical guarantees of safety and near-optimality, and another that combines a Gaussian process to ensure safety with a deep RL algorithm to maximize the reward. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm achieves better performance than state-of-the-art algorithms on grid-world and Safety Gym benchmarks without violating any safety constraints, even during training.
tl;dr: We provide a new local explanation method that is unidirectional and stable
Locally interpretable model agnostic explanations (LIME) method is one of the most popular methods used to explain black-box models at a per example level. Although many variants have been proposed, few provide a simple way to produce high fidelity explanations that are also stable and intuitive. In this work, we provide a novel perspective by proposing a model agnostic local explanation method inspired by the invariant risk minimization (IRM) principle -- originally proposed for (global) out-of-distribution generalization -- to provide such high fidelity explanations that are also stable and unidirectional across nearby examples. Our method is based on a game theoretic formulation where we theoretically show that our approach has a strong tendency to eliminate features where the gradient of the black-box function abruptly changes sign in the locality of the example we want to explain, while in other cases it is more careful and will choose a more conservative (feature) attribution, a behavior which can be highly desirable for recourse. Empirically, we show on tabular, image and text data that the quality of our explanations with neighborhoods formed using random perturbations are much better than LIME and in some cases even comparable to other methods that use realistic neighbors sampled from the data manifold. This is desirable given that learning a manifold to either create realistic neighbors or to project explanations is typically expensive or may even be impossible. Moreover, our algorithm is simple and efficient to train, and can ascertain stable input features for local decisions of a black-box without access to side information such as a (partial) causal graph as has been seen in some recent works.
We study multi-product inventory control problems where a manager makes sequential replenishment decisions based on partial historical information in order to minimize its cumulative losses. Our motivation is to consider general demands, losses and dynamics to go beyond standard models which usually rely on newsvendor-type losses, fixed dynamics, and unrealistic i.i.d. demand assumptions. We propose MaxCOSD, an online algorithm that has provable guarantees even for problems with non-i.i.d. demands and stateful dynamics, including for instance perishability. We consider what we call non-degeneracy assumptions on the demand process, and argue that they are necessary to allow learning.
tl;dr: We show that message-passing neural networks are optimal node classifiers on sparse feature-decorated graphs.
We study the node classification problem on feature-decorated graphs in the sparse setting, i.e., when the expected degree of a node is $O(1)$ in the number of nodes, in the fixed-dimensional asymptotic regime, i.e., the dimension of the feature data is fixed while the number of nodes is large. Such graphs are typically known to be locally tree-like. We introduce a notion of Bayes optimality for node classification tasks, called asymptotic local Bayes optimality, and compute the optimal classifier according to this criterion for a fairly general statistical data model with arbitrary distributions of the node features and edge connectivity. The optimal classifier is implementable using a message-passing graph neural network architecture. We then compute the generalization error of this classifier and compare its performance against existing learning methods theoretically on a well-studied statistical model with naturally identifiable signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the data. We find that the optimal message-passing architecture interpolates between a standard MLP in the regime of low graph signal and a typical convolution in the regime of high graph signal. Furthermore, we prove a corresponding non-asymptotic result.
tl;dr: We propose a Bregman generalization of the plug-and-play framework to solve image inverse problems involving non-Lipschitz gradient data-fidelity terms.
Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods are efficient iterative algorithms for solving ill-posed image inverse problems. PnP methods are obtained by using deep Gaussian denoisers instead of the proximal operator or the gradient-descent step within proximal algorithms. Current PnP schemes rely on data-fidelity terms that have either Lipschitz gradients or closed-form proximal operators, which is not applicable to Poisson inverse problems. Based on the observation that the Gaussian noise is not the adequate noise model in this setting, we propose to generalize PnP using the Bregman Proximal Gradient (BPG) method. BPG replaces the Euclidean distance with a Bregman divergence that can better capture the smoothness properties of the problem. We introduce the Bregman Score Denoiser specifically parametrized and trained for the new Bregman geometry and prove that it corresponds to the proximal operator of a nonconvex potential. We propose two PnP algorithms based on the Bregman Score Denoiser for solving Poisson inverse problems. Extending the convergence results of BPG in the nonconvex settings, we show that the proposed methods converge, targeting stationary points of an explicit global functional. Experimental evaluations conducted on various Poisson inverse problems validate the convergence results and showcase effective restoration performance.
tl;dr: A novel sin-based activation function that improves upon state-of-the-art convolutional image prediction models.
ReLU networks have remained the default choice for models in the area of image prediction despite their well-established spectral bias towards learning low frequencies faster, and consequently their difficulty of reproducing high frequency visual details. As an alternative, sin networks showed promising results in learning implicit representations of visual data. However training these networks in practically relevant settings proved to be difficult, requiring careful initialization, dealing with issues due to inconsistent gradients, and a degeneracy in local minima. In this work, we instead propose replacing a baseline network’s existing activations with a novel ensemble function with trainable parameters. The proposed MetaSin activation can be trained reliably without requiring intricate initialization schemes, and results in consistently lower test loss compared to alternatives. We demonstrate our method in the areas of Monte-Carlo denoising and image resampling where we set new state-of-the-art through a knowledge distillation based training procedure. We present ablations on hyper-parameter settings, comparisons with alternative activation function formulations, and discuss the use of our method in other domains, such as image classification.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a general biosignal transformer (named BIOT) that allows learning cross datasets with mismatched channels, variable lengths, and missing values.
Biological signals, such as electroencephalograms (EEG), play a crucial role in numerous clinical applications, exhibiting diverse data formats and quality profiles. Current deep learning models for biosignals (based on CNN, RNN, and Transformers) are typically specialized for specific datasets and clinical settings, limiting their broader applicability. This paper explores the development of a flexible biosignal encoder architecture that can enable pre-training on multiple datasets and fine-tuned on downstream biosignal tasks with different formats.
To overcome the unique challenges associated with biosignals of various formats, such as mismatched channels, variable sample lengths, and prevalent missing val- ues, we propose Biosignal Transformer (BIOT). The proposed BIOT model can enable cross-data learning with mismatched channels, variable lengths, and missing values by tokenizing different biosignals into unified "sentences" structure. Specifically, we tokenize each channel separately into fixed-length segments containing local signal features and then rearrange the segments to form a long "sentence". Channel embeddings and relative position embeddings are added to each segment (viewed as "token") to preserve spatio-temporal features.
The BIOT model is versatile and applicable to various biosignal learning settings across different datasets, including joint pre-training for larger models. Comprehensive evaluations on EEG, electrocardiogram (ECG), and human activity sensory signals demonstrate that BIOT outperforms robust baselines in common settings and facilitates learning across multiple datasets with different formats. Using CHB-MIT seizure detection task as an example, our vanilla BIOT model shows 3% improvement over baselines in balanced accuracy, and the pre-trained BIOT models (optimized from other data sources) can further bring up to 4% improvements. Our repository is public at https://github.com/ycq091044/BIOT.
tl;dr: We propose a reinforcement learning algorithm for enabling efficient policy learning in natural language instruction following.
Natural language-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to follow human instructions. Previous approaches generally implemented language-conditioned RL by providing the policy with human instructions in natural language (NL) and training the policy to follow instructions. In this is outside-in approach, the policy must comprehend the NL and manage the task simultaneously. However, the unbounded NL examples often bring much extra complexity for solving concrete RL tasks, which can distract policy learning from completing the task. To ease the learning burden of the policy, we investigate an inside-out scheme for natural language-conditioned RL by developing a task language (TL) that is task-related and easily understood by the policy, thus reducing the policy learning burden. Besides, we employ a translator to translate natural language into the TL, which is used in RL to achieve efficient policy training. We implement this scheme as TALAR (TAsk Language with predicAte Representation) that learns multiple predicates to model object relationships as the TL. Experiments indicate that TALAR not only better comprehends NL instructions but also leads to a better instruction-following policy that significantly improves the success rate over baselines and adapts to unseen expressions of NL instruction. Besides, the TL is also an effective sub-task abstraction compatible with hierarchical RL.
tl;dr: We propose Robust State-Confounded Markov Decision Processes to make RL agent robust against spurious correlation, where different portions of the state do not have causality but have correlations induced by unobserved confounders.
Robustness has been extensively studied in reinforcement learning (RL) to handle various forms of uncertainty such as random perturbations, rare events, and malicious attacks. In this work, we consider one critical type of robustness against spurious correlation, where different portions of the state do not have correlations induced by unobserved confounders. These spurious correlations are ubiquitous in real-world tasks, for instance, a self-driving car usually observes heavy traffic in the daytime and light traffic at night due to unobservable human activity. A model that learns such useless or even harmful correlation could catastrophically fail when the confounder in the test case deviates from the training one. Although motivated, enabling robustness against spurious correlation poses significant challenges since the uncertainty set, shaped by the unobserved confounder and causal structure, is difficult to characterize and identify. Existing robust algorithms that assume simple and unstructured uncertainty sets are therefore inadequate to address this challenge. To solve this issue, we propose Robust State-Confounded Markov Decision Processes (RSC-MDPs) and theoretically demonstrate its superiority in avoiding learning spurious correlations compared with other robust RL counterparts. We also design an empirical algorithm to learn the robust optimal policy for RSC-MDPs, which outperforms all baselines in eight realistic self-driving and manipulation tasks.
tl;dr: We provide a primal-dual representation for the asymmetric self-attention in transformer that allows to avoid explicit computation of the kernel matrix.
Recently, a new line of works has emerged to understand and improve self-attention in Transformers by treating it as a kernel machine. However, existing works apply the methods for symmetric kernels to the asymmetric self-attention, resulting in a nontrivial gap between the analytical understanding and numerical implementation. In this paper, we provide a new perspective to represent and optimize self-attention through asymmetric Kernel Singular Value Decomposition (KSVD), which is also motivated by the low-rank property of self-attention normally observed in deep layers. Through asymmetric KSVD, i) a primal-dual representation of self-attention is formulated, where the optimization objective is cast to maximize the projection variances in the attention outputs; ii) a novel attention mechanism, i.e., Primal-Attention, is proposed via the primal representation of KSVD, avoiding explicit computation of the kernel matrix in the dual; iii) with KKT conditions, we prove that the stationary solution to the KSVD optimization in Primal-Attention yields a zero-value objective. In this manner, KSVD optimization can be implemented by simply minimizing a regularization loss, so that low-rank property is promoted without extra decomposition. Numerical experiments show state-of-the-art performance of our Primal-Attention with improved efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that the deployed KSVD optimization regularizes Primal-Attention with a sharper singular value decay than that of the canonical self-attention, further verifying the great potential of our method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides a primal-dual representation for the asymmetric kernel in self-attention and successfully applies it to modelling and optimization.
A Bayesian pseudocoreset is a compact synthetic dataset summarizing essential information of a large-scale dataset and thus can be used as a proxy dataset for scalable Bayesian inference. Typically, a Bayesian pseudocoreset is constructed by minimizing a divergence measure between the posterior conditioning on the pseudocoreset and the posterior conditioning on the full dataset. However, evaluating the divergence can be challenging, particularly for the models like deep neural networks having high-dimensional parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian pseudocoreset construction method that operates on a function space. Unlike previous methods, which construct and match the coreset and full data posteriors in the space of model parameters (weights), our method constructs variational approximations to the coreset posterior on a function space and matches it to the full data posterior in the function space. By working directly on the function space, our method could bypass several challenges that may arise when working on a weight space, including limited scalability and multi-modality issue. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that the Bayesian pseudocoresets constructed from our method enjoys enhanced uncertainty quantification and better robustness across various model architectures.
tl;dr: We comprehensively study the behaviour of several popular video self-supervised methods in response to various forms of natural distribution shift, uncovering a series of intriguing findings and interesting behaviors.
Video self-supervised learning (VSSL) has made significant progress in recent years. However, the exact behavior and dynamics of these models under different forms of distribution shift are not yet known. In this paper, we comprehensively study the behavior of six popular self-supervised methods (v-SimCLR, v-MoCo, v-BYOL, v-SimSiam, v-DINO, v-MAE) in response to various forms of natural distribution shift, i.e., (i) context shift, (ii) viewpoint shift, (iii) actor shift, (iv) source shift, (v) generalizability to unknown classes (zero-shot), and (vi) open-set recognition. To perform this extensive study, we carefully craft a test bed consisting of 17 in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmark pairs using available public datasets and a series of evaluation protocols to stress-test the different methods under the intended shifts. Our study uncovers a series of intriguing findings and interesting behaviors of VSSL methods. For instance, we observe that while video models generally struggle with context shifts, v-MAE and supervised learning exhibit more robustness. Moreover, our study shows that v-MAE is a strong temporal learner, whereas contrastive methods, v-SimCLR and v-MoCo, exhibit strong performances against viewpoint shifts. When studying the notion of open-set recognition, we notice a trade-off between closed-set and open-set recognition performance if the pretrained VSSL encoders are used without finetuning. We hope that our work will contribute to the development of robust video representation learning frameworks for various real-world scenarios. The project page and code are available at: https://pritamqu.github.io/OOD-VSSL.
tl;dr: We propose a Riemannian extension of the Laplace approximation that can be used for Bayesian neural networks.
Bayesian neural networks often approximate the weight-posterior with a Gaussian distribution. However, practical posteriors are often, even locally, highly non-Gaussian, and empirical performance deteriorates. We propose a simple parametric approximate posterior that adapts to the shape of the true posterior through a Riemannian metric that is determined by the log-posterior gradient. We develop a Riemannian Laplace approximation where samples naturally fall into weight-regions with low negative log-posterior. We show that these samples can be drawn by solving a system of ordinary differential equations, which can be done efficiently by leveraging the structure of the Riemannian metric and automatic differentiation. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves over the conventional Laplace approximation across tasks. We further show that, unlike the conventional Laplace approximation, our method is not overly sensitive to the choice of prior, which alleviates a practical pitfall of current approaches.
tl;dr: We theoretically quantify the ability of certain graph neural networks to model interactions between vertices, and develop, based on our theory, a simple and efficient edge sparsification algorithm.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for modeling complex interactions between entities represented as vertices of a graph. Despite recent efforts to theoretically analyze the expressive power of GNNs, a formal characterization of their ability to model interactions is lacking. The current paper aims to address this gap. Formalizing strength of interactions through an established measure known as separation rank, we quantify the ability of certain GNNs to model interaction between a given subset of vertices and its complement, i.e. between the sides of a given partition of input vertices. Our results reveal that the ability to model interaction is primarily determined by the partition's walk index --- a graph-theoretical characteristic defined by the number of walks originating from the boundary of the partition. Experiments with common GNN architectures corroborate this finding. As a practical application of our theory, we design an edge sparsification algorithm named Walk Index Sparsification (WIS), which preserves the ability of a GNN to model interactions when input edges are removed. WIS is simple, computationally efficient, and in our experiments has markedly outperformed alternative methods in terms of induced prediction accuracy. More broadly, it showcases the potential of improving GNNs by theoretically analyzing the interactions they can model.
tl;dr: Sharp generalization bounds for finite-rank kernel ridge regressors; these arise when fine-tuning the final layer of pre-trained deep neural networks during transfer learning and multi-task learning.
Existing statistical learning guarantees for general kernel regressors often yield loose bounds when used with finite-rank kernels. Yet, finite-rank kernels naturally appear in a number of machine learning problems, e.g. when fine-tuning a pre-trained deep neural network's last layer to adapt it to a novel task when performing transfer learning. We address this gap for finite-rank kernel ridge regression (KRR) by deriving sharp non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds for the KRR test error of any finite-rank KRR. Our bounds are tighter than previously derived bounds on finite-rank KRR and, unlike comparable results, they also remain valid for any regularization parameters.
tl;dr: We show that a variant of the Pivot algorithm for Correlation Clustering gives a (3+eps) approximation in the single-pass semi-streaming model with O(n/eps) words of memory.
We show that a simple single-pass semi-streaming variant of the Pivot algorithm for Correlation Clustering gives a (3+eps)-approximation using O(n/eps) words of memory. This is a slight improvement over the recent results of Cambus, Kuhn, Lindy, Pai, and Uitto, who gave a (3+eps)-approximation using O(n log n) words of memory, and Behnezhad, Charikar, Ma, and Tan, who gave a 5-approximation using O(n) words of memory. One of the main contributions of our paper is that the algorithm and its analysis are simple and easy to understand.
We present a new method that includes three key components of distributed optimization and federated learning: variance reduction of stochastic gradients, partial participation, and compressed communication. We prove that the new method has optimal oracle complexity and state-of-the-art communication complexity in the partial participation setting. Regardless of the communication compression feature, our method successfully combines variance reduction and partial participation: we get the optimal oracle complexity, never need the participation of all nodes, and do not require the bounded gradients (dissimilarity) assumption.
tl;dr: We propose a robust natural actor-critic approach with provable guarantee and experimental advantages for robust reinforcement learning employing function approximation.
We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms mainly focus on the tabular setting under uncertainty sets that facilitate robust policy evaluation, but are no longer tractable when the number of states scales up. To this end, we propose two novel uncertainty set formulations, one based on double sampling and the other on an integral probability metric. Both make large-scale robust RL tractable even when one only has access to a simulator. We propose a robust natural actor-critic (RNAC) approach that incorporates the new uncertainty sets and employs function approximation. We provide finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed RNAC algorithm to the optimal robust policy within the function approximation error. Finally, we demonstrate the robust performance of the policy learned by our proposed RNAC approach in multiple MuJoCo environments and a real-world TurtleBot navigation task.
tl;dr: We introduce, analyze, and implement a framework for DRO which is robust to both Wasserstein and TV corruptions
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is an effective approach for data-driven decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. Geometric uncertainty due to~sampling or localized perturbations of data points is captured by Wasserstein DRO (WDRO), which seeks to learn a model that performs uniformly well over a Wasserstein ball centered around the observed data distribution. However, WDRO fails to account for non-geometric perturbations such as adversarial outliers, which can greatly distort the Wasserstein distance measurement and impede the learned model. We address this gap by proposing a novel outlier-robust WDRO framework for decision-making under both geometric (Wasserstein) perturbations and non-geometric (total variation (TV)) contamination that allows an $\varepsilon$-fraction of data to be arbitrarily corrupted. We design an uncertainty set using a certain robust Wasserstein ball that accounts for both perturbation types and derive minimax optimal excess risk bounds for this procedure that explicitly capture the Wasserstein and TV risks. We prove a strong duality result that enables tractable convex reformulations and efficient computation of our outlier-robust WDRO problem. When the loss function depends only on low-dimensional features of the data, we eliminate certain dimension dependencies from the risk bounds that are unavoidable in the general setting. Finally, we present experiments validating our theory on standard regression and classification tasks.
1866. Consistent Aggregation of Objectives with Diverse Time Preferences Requires Non-Markovian Rewards
tl;dr: It is shown that Markovian aggregation of Markovian reward functions is not possible when the time preference for each objective may vary; a practical non-Markovian aggregation scheme is proposed.
As the capabilities of artificial agents improve, they are being increasingly deployed to service multiple diverse objectives and stakeholders. However, the composition of these objectives is often performed ad hoc, with no clear justification. This paper takes a normative approach to multi-objective agency: from a set of intuitively appealing axioms, it is shown that Markovian aggregation of Markovian reward functions is not possible when the time preference (discount factor) for each objective may vary. It follows that optimal multi-objective agents must admit rewards that are non-Markovian with respect to the individual objectives. To this end, a practical non-Markovian aggregation scheme is proposed, which overcomes the impossibility with only one additional parameter for each objective. This work offers new insights into sequential, multi-objective agency and intertemporal choice, and has practical implications for the design of AI systems deployed to serve multiple generations of principals with varying time preference.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (GSSL) serves as a powerful tool to model the underlying manifold structures of samples in high-dimensional spaces. It involves two phases: constructing an affinity graph from available data and inferring labels for unlabeled nodes on this graph. While numerous algorithms have been developed for label inference, the crucial graph construction phase has received comparatively less attention, despite its significant influence on the subsequent phase. In this paper, we present an optimal asymmetric graph structure for the label inference phase with theoretical motivations. Unlike existing graph construction methods, we differentiate the distinct roles that labeled nodes and unlabeled nodes could play. Accordingly, we design an efficient block-wise graph learning algorithm with a global convergence guarantee. Other benefits induced by our method, such as enhanced robustness to noisy node features, are explored as well. Finally, we perform extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate its superiority to the state-of-the-art graph construction methods in GSSL.
tl;dr: We propose an approach for learning robust and interpretable equivalents of abstract multi-view relational representations by showing that such abstractions are nothing but a way of encoding the transitive relationships across views.
Recent advances in fine-grained representation learning leverage local-to-global (emergent) relationships for achieving state-of-the-art results. The relational representations relied upon by such methods, however, are abstract. We aim to deconstruct this abstraction by expressing them as interpretable graphs over image views. We begin by theoretically showing that abstract relational representations are nothing but a way of recovering transitive relationships among local views. Based on this, we design Transitivity Recovering Decompositions (TRD), a graph-space search algorithm that identifies interpretable equivalents of abstract emergent relationships at both instance and class levels, and with no post-hoc computations. We additionally show that TRD is provably robust to noisy views, with empirical evidence also supporting this finding. The latter allows TRD to perform at par or even better than the state-of-the-art, while being fully interpretable. Implementation is available at https://github.com/abhrac/trd.
tl;dr: We show how to obtain sharp calibrated Gaussian process models by exploiting kernel properties.
While Gaussian processes are a mainstay for various engineering and scientific applications, the uncertainty estimates don't satisfy frequentist guarantees and can be miscalibrated in practice. State-of-the-art approaches for designing calibrated models rely on inflating the Gaussian process posterior variance, which yields confidence intervals that are potentially too coarse. To remedy this, we present a calibration approach that generates predictive quantiles using a computation inspired by the vanilla Gaussian process posterior variance but using a different set of hyperparameters chosen to satisfy an empirical calibration constraint. This results in a calibration approach that is considerably more flexible than existing approaches, which we optimize to yield tight predictive quantiles. Our approach is shown to yield a calibrated model under reasonable assumptions. Furthermore, it outperforms existing approaches in sharpness when employed for calibrated regression.
A point cloud is a discrete set of data points sampled from a 3D geometric surface. Chamfer distance (CD) is a popular metric and training loss to measure the distances between point clouds, but also well known to be sensitive to outliers. To address this issue, in this paper we propose InfoCD, a novel contrastive Chamfer distance loss to learn to spread the matched points for better distribution alignments between point clouds as well as accounting for a surface similarity estimator. We show that minimizing InfoCD is equivalent to maximizing a lower bound of the mutual information between the underlying geometric surfaces represented by the point clouds, leading to a regularized CD metric which is robust and computationally efficient for deep learning. We conduct comprehensive experiments for point cloud completion using InfoCD and observe significant improvements consistently over all the popular baseline networks trained with CD-based losses, leading to new state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets. Demo code is available at https://github.com/Zhang-VISLab/NeurIPS2023-InfoCD.
Bayesian bandit algorithms with approximate Bayesian inference have been widely used in real-world applications. However, there is a large discrepancy between the superior practical performance of these approaches and their theoretical justification. Previous research only indicates a negative theoretical result: Thompson sampling could have a worst-case linear regret $\Omega(T)$ with a constant threshold on the inference error measured by one $\alpha$-divergence. To bridge this gap, we propose an Enhanced Bayesian Upper Confidence Bound (EBUCB) framework that can efficiently accommodate bandit problems in the presence of approximate inference. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that for Bernoulli multi-armed bandits, EBUCB can achieve the optimal regret order $O(\log T)$ if the inference error measured by two different $\alpha$-divergences is less than a constant, regardless of how large this constant is. To our best knowledge, our study provides the first theoretical regret bound that is better than $o(T)$ in the setting of constant approximate inference error. Furthermore, in concordance with the negative results in previous studies, we show that only one bounded $\alpha$-divergence is insufficient to guarantee a sub-linear regret.
tl;dr: We developed a new algorithm based on online PCA to converge Self-consistent Field Equations
Self-consistent Field (SCF) equation is a type of nonlinear eigenvalue problem in which the matrix to be eigen-decomposed is a function of its own eigenvectors. It is of great significance in computational science for its connection to the Schrödinger equation. Traditional fixed-point iteration methods for solving such equations suffer from non-convergence issues. In this work, we present a novel perspective on such SCF equations as a principal component analysis (PCA) for non-stationary time series, in which a distribution and its own top principal components are mutually updated over time, and the equilibrium state of the model corresponds to the solution of the SCF equations. By the new perspective, online PCA techniques are able to engage in so as to enhance the convergence of the model towards the equilibrium state, acting as a new set of tools for converging the SCF equations. With several numerical adaptations, we then develop a new algorithm for converging the SCF equation, and demonstrated its high convergence capacity with experiments on both synthesized and real electronic structure scenarios.
tl;dr: We systematically analyze the cause of negative transfer in auxiliary-task learning and propose a novel method, ForkMerge, to effectively mitigate negative transfer.
Auxiliary-Task Learning (ATL) aims to improve the performance of the target task by leveraging the knowledge obtained from related tasks. Occasionally, learning multiple tasks simultaneously results in lower accuracy than learning only the target task, which is known as negative transfer. This problem is often attributed to the gradient conflicts among tasks, and is frequently tackled by coordinating the task gradients in previous works. However, these optimization-based methods largely overlook the auxiliary-target generalization capability. To better understand the root cause of negative transfer, we experimentally investigate it from both optimization and generalization perspectives. Based on our findings, we introduce ForkMerge, a novel approach that periodically forks the model into multiple branches, automatically searches the varying task weights by minimizing target validation errors, and dynamically merges all branches to filter out detrimental task-parameter updates. On a series of auxiliary-task learning benchmarks, ForkMerge outperforms existing methods and effectively mitigates negative transfer.
In this paper, we consider how to construct best-of-both-worlds linear bandit algorithms that achieve nearly optimal performance for both stochastic and adversarial environments. For this purpose, we show that a natural approach referred to as exploration by optimization [Lattimore and Szepesvári, 2020] works well. Specifically, an algorithm constructed using this approach achieves $O(d \sqrt{ T \log{T}})$-regret in adversarial environments and $O(\frac{d^2 \log T}{\Delta_{\min}} )$-regret in stochastic environments. Symbols $d$, $T$ and $\Delta_{\min}$ here represent the dimensionality of the action set, the time horizon, and the minimum sub-optimality gap, respectively. We also show that this algorithm has even better theoretical guarantees for important special cases including the multi-armed bandit problem and multitask bandits.
tl;dr: We introduce a novel end-to-end Variational Latent Diffusion (VLD) model, unifying variational and latent diffusion models, for a high-dimensional generative inverse problem in high-energy physics.
High-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide valuable insights into open questions in particle physics. However, detector effects must be corrected before measurements can be compared to certain theoretical predictions or measurements from other detectors. Methods to solve this inverse problem of mapping detector observations to theoretical quantities of the underlying collision are essential parts of many physics analyses at the LHC. We investigate and compare various generative deep learning methods to approximate this inverse mapping. We introduce a novel unified architecture, termed latent variational diffusion models, which combines the latent learning of cutting-edge generative art approaches with an end-to-end variational framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for reconstructing global distributions of theoretical kinematic quantities, as well as for ensuring the adherence of the learned posterior distributions to known physics constraints. Our unified approach achieves a distribution-free distance to the truth of over 20 times smaller than non-latent state-of-the-art baseline and 3 times smaller than traditional latent diffusion models.
tl;dr: We present a population-based RL method for CO problems: the training procedure makes the agents complementary to maximize the population's performance.
Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to combinatorial optimization problems is attractive as it removes the need for expert knowledge or pre-solved instances. However, it is unrealistic to expect an agent to solve these (often NP-)hard problems in a single shot at inference due to their inherent complexity. Thus, leading approaches often implement additional search strategies, from stochastic sampling and beam-search to explicit fine-tuning. In this paper, we argue for the benefits of learning a population of complementary policies, which can be simultaneously rolled out at inference. To this end, we introduce Poppy, a simple training procedure for populations. Instead of relying on a predefined or hand-crafted notion of diversity, Poppy induces an unsupervised specialization targeted solely at maximizing the performance of the population. We show that Poppy produces a set of complementary policies, and obtains state-of-the-art RL results on three popular NP-hard problems: traveling salesman, capacitated vehicle routing, and job-shop scheduling.
tl;dr: We give the first provable, algorithm for learning on a data-stream containing heavy-tailed inliers, distribution shifts and outliers.
The real-time estimation of time-varying parameters from high-dimensional, heavy-tailed and corrupted data-streams is a common sub-routine in systems ranging from those for network monitoring and anomaly detection to those for traffic scheduling in data-centers. For estimation tasks that can be cast as minimizing a strongly convex loss function, we prove that an appropriately tuned version of the {\ttfamily clipped Stochastic Gradient Descent} (SGD) is simultaneously {\em(i)} adaptive to drift, {\em (ii)} robust to heavy-tailed inliers and arbitrary corruptions, {\em(iii)} requires no distributional knowledge and {\em (iv)} can be implemented in an online streaming fashion. All prior estimation algorithms have only been proven to posses a subset of these practical desiderata. A observation we make is that, neither the $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{t}\right)$ learning rate for {\ttfamily clipped SGD} known to be optimal for strongly convex loss functions of a \emph{stationary} data-stream, nor the $\mathcal{O}(1)$ learning rate known to be optimal for being adaptive to drift in a \emph{noiseless} environment can be used. Instead, a learning rate of $T^{-\alpha}$ for $ \alpha < 1$ where $T$ is the stream-length is needed to balance adaptivity to potential drift and to combat noise. We develop a new inductive argument and combine it with a martingale concentration result to derive high-probability under \emph{any learning rate} on data-streams exhibiting \emph{arbitrary distribution shift} - a proof strategy that may be of independent interest. Further, using the classical doubling-trick, we relax the knowledge of the stream length $T$. Ours is the first online estimation algorithm that is provably robust to heavy-tails, corruptions and distribution shift simultaneously. We complement our theoretical results empirically on synthetic and real data.
1878. All Points Matter: Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment for Weakly-supervised 3D Segmentation
Pseudo-labels are widely employed in weakly supervised 3D segmentation tasks where only sparse ground-truth labels are available for learning.
Existing methods often rely on empirical label selection strategies, such as confidence thresholding, to generate beneficial pseudo-labels for model training.
This approach may, however, hinder the comprehensive exploitation of unlabeled data points.
We hypothesize that this selective usage arises from the noise in pseudo-labels generated on unlabeled data. The noise in pseudo-labels may result in significant discrepancies between pseudo-labels and model predictions, thus confusing and affecting the model training greatly.
To address this issue, we propose a novel learning strategy to regularize the generated pseudo-labels and effectively narrow the gaps between pseudo-labels and model predictions.
More specifically, our method introduces an Entropy Regularization loss and a Distribution Alignment loss for weakly supervised learning in 3D segmentation tasks, resulting in an ERDA learning strategy.
Interestingly, by using KL distance to formulate the distribution alignment loss, it reduces to a deceptively simple cross-entropy-based loss which optimizes both the pseudo-label generation network and the 3D segmentation network simultaneously.
Despite the simplicity, our method promisingly improves the performance.
We validate the effectiveness through extensive experiments on various baselines and large-scale datasets.
Results show that ERDA effectively enables the effective usage of all unlabeled data points for learning and achieves state-of-the-art performance under different settings.
Remarkably, our method can outperform fully-supervised baselines using only 1\% of true annotations.
Code and model will be made publicly available at https://github.com/LiyaoTang/ERDA.
tl;dr: We propose a hyperparameter optimization algorithm tailored to the needs of deep learning researchers & practitioners that draws on expert beliefs and cheap preliminary explorations, and show its robustness and efficiency.
Hyperparameters of Deep Learning (DL) pipelines are crucial for their downstream performance.
While a large number of methods for Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) have been developed, their incurred costs are often untenable for modern DL.
Consequently, manual experimentation is still the most prevalent approach to optimize hyperparameters, relying on the researcher's intuition, domain knowledge, and cheap preliminary explorations.
To resolve this misalignment between HPO algorithms and DL researchers, we propose PriorBand, an HPO algorithm tailored to DL, able to utilize both expert beliefs and cheap proxy tasks.
Empirically, we demonstrate PriorBand's efficiency across a range of DL benchmarks and show its gains under informative expert input and robustness against poor expert beliefs.
Fourier neural operators (FNOs) can learn highly nonlinear mappings between function spaces, and have recently become a popular tool for learning responses of complex physical systems. However, to achieve good accuracy and efficiency, FNOs rely on the Fast Fourier transform (FFT), which is restricted to modeling problems on rectangular domains. To lift such a restriction and permit FFT on irregular geometries as well as topology changes, we introduce domain agnostic Fourier neural operator (DAFNO), a novel neural operator architecture for learning surrogates with irregular geometries and evolving domains. The key idea is to incorporate a smoothed characteristic function in the integral layer architecture of FNOs, and leverage FFT to achieve rapid computations, in such a way that the geometric information is explicitly encoded in the architecture. In our empirical evaluation, DAFNO has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy as compared to baseline neural operator models on two benchmark datasets of material modeling and airfoil simulation. To further demonstrate the capability and generalizability of DAFNO in handling complex domains with topology changes, we consider a brittle material fracture evolution problem. With only one training crack simulation sample, DAFNO has achieved generalizability to unseen loading scenarios and substantially different crack patterns from the trained scenario. Our code and data accompanying this paper are available at https://github.com/ningliu-iga/DAFNO.
tl;dr: We present an importance resampling framework for selecting language model pretraining data that improves performance on GLUE and domain-specific tasks.
Selecting a suitable pretraining dataset is crucial for both general-domain (e.g., GPT-3) and domain-specific (e.g., Codex) language models (LMs). We formalize this problem as selecting a subset of a large raw unlabeled dataset to match a desired target distribution given some unlabeled target samples. Due to the large scale and dimensionality of the raw text data, existing methods use simple heuristics or use experts to manually curate data. Instead, we extend the classic importance resampling approach used in low-dimensions for LM data selection. We propose Data Selection with Importance Resampling (DSIR), an efficient and scalable framework that estimates importance weights in a reduced feature space for tractability and selects data with importance resampling according to these weights. To determine an appropriate feature space, we show that KL reduction, a data metric that measures the proximity between selected pretraining data and the target in a feature space, has high correlation with average downstream accuracy (r=0.89) when computed with simple n-gram features. This motivates our instantiation of DSIR using n-gram features. When performing continued pretraining towards a specific domain, DSIR performs comparably to expert curation across 8 target distributions. When pretraining general-domain models (target is Wikipedia + books), DSIR improves over random selection and heuristic filtering baselines by 2-2.5% on the GLUE benchmark.
tl;dr: We study statistical inference for adaptively collected data.
Sequential data collection has emerged as a widely adopted technique for enhancing the efficiency of data gathering processes. Despite its advantages, such data collection mechanism often introduces complexities to the statistical inference procedure. For instance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator in an adaptive linear regression model can exhibit non-normal asymptotic behavior, posing challenges for accurate inference and interpretation. In this paper, we propose a general method for constructing debiased estimator which remedies this issue. It makes use of the idea of adaptive linear estimating equations, and we establish theoretical guarantees of asymptotic normality, supplemented by discussions on achieving near-optimal asymptotic variance. A salient feature of our estimator is that in the context of multi-armed bandits, our estimator retains the non-asymptotic performance of the least square estimator while obtaining asymptotic normality property. Consequently, this work helps connect two fruitful paradigms of adaptive inference: a) non-asymptotic inference using concentration inequalities and b) asymptotic inference via asymptotic normality.
tl;dr: We focus on fair user modeling in limited sensitive attributes situations and propose a novel FairLISA framework, which can efficiently utilize data with known and unknown sensitive attributes to facilitate fair model training.
User modeling techniques profile users' latent characteristics (e.g., preference) from their observed behaviors, and play a crucial role in decision-making. Unfortunately, traditional user models may unconsciously capture biases related to sensitive attributes (e.g., gender) from behavior data, even when this sensitive information is not explicitly provided. This can lead to unfair issues and discrimination against certain groups based on these sensitive attributes. Recent studies have been proposed to improve fairness by explicitly decorrelating user modeling results and sensitive attributes. However, most existing approaches assume that fully sensitive attribute labels are available in the training set, which is unrealistic due to collection limitations like privacy concerns, and hence bear the limitation of performance. In this paper, we focus on a practical situation with limited sensitive data and propose a novel FairLISA framework, which can efficiently utilize data with known and unknown sensitive attributes to facilitate fair model training. We first propose a novel theoretical perspective to build the relationship between data with both known and unknown sensitive attributes with the fairness objective. Then, based on this, we provide a general adversarial framework to effectively leverage the whole user data for fair user modeling. We conduct experiments on representative user modeling tasks including recommender system and cognitive diagnosis. The results demonstrate that our FairLISA can effectively improve fairness while retaining high accuracy in scenarios with different ratios of missing sensitive attributes.
tl;dr: We study the convergence and the implicit regularization of (S)GD with large stepsizes over diagonal linear networks.
In this paper, we investigate the impact of stochasticity and large stepsizes on the implicit regularisation of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) over $2$-layer diagonal linear networks. We prove the convergence of GD and SGD with macroscopic stepsizes in an overparametrised regression setting and characterise their solutions through an implicit regularisation problem. Our crisp characterisation leads to qualitative insights about the impact of stochasticity and stepsizes on the recovered solution. Specifically, we show that large stepsizes consistently benefit SGD for sparse regression problems, while they can hinder the recovery of sparse solutions for GD. These effects are magnified for stepsizes in a tight window just below the divergence threshold, in the ``edge of stability'' regime. Our findings are supported by experimental results.
1885. Flocks of Stochastic Parrots: Differentially Private Prompt Learning for Large Language Models
tl;dr: We propose differential learning algorithms for soft and discrete prompts.
Large language models (LLMs) are excellent in-context learners. However, the sensitivity of data contained in prompts raises privacy concerns. Our work first shows that these concerns are valid: we instantiate a simple but highly effective membership inference attack against the data used to prompt LLMs. To address this vulnerability, one could forego prompting and resort to fine-tuning LLMs with known algorithms for private gradient descent. However, this comes at the expense of the practicality and efficiency offered by prompting. Therefore, we propose to privately learn to prompt. We first show that soft prompts can be obtained privately through gradient descent on downstream data. However, this is not the case for discrete prompts. Thus, we orchestrate a noisy vote among an ensemble of LLMs presented with different prompts, i.e., a flock of stochastic parrots. The vote privately transfers the flock's knowledge into a single public prompt. We show that LLMs prompted with our private algorithms closely match the non-private baselines. For example, using GPT3 as the base model, we achieve a downstream accuracy of 92.7% on the sst2 dataset with $(\varepsilon=0.147, \delta=10^{-6})$-differential privacy vs. 95.2% for the non-private baseline. Through our experiments, we also show that our prompt-based approach is easily deployed with existing commercial~APIs.
tl;dr: We propose a swift graph denoising diffusion model to generating diverse protein sequences for inverse folding.
Inverse protein folding is challenging due to its inherent one-to-many mapping characteristic, where numerous possible amino acid sequences can fold into a single, identical protein backbone. This task involves not only identifying viable sequences but also representing the sheer diversity of potential solutions. However, existing discriminative models, such as transformer-based auto-regressive models, struggle to encapsulate the diverse range of plausible solutions. In contrast, diffusion probabilistic models, as an emerging genre of generative approaches, offer the potential to generate a diverse set of sequence candidates for determined protein backbones. We propose a novel graph denoising diffusion model for inverse protein folding, where a given protein backbone guides the diffusion process on the corresponding amino acid residue types. The model infers the joint distribution of amino acids conditioned on the nodes' physiochemical properties and local environment. Moreover, we utilize amino acid replacement matrices for the diffusion forward process, encoding the biologically-meaningful prior knowledge of amino acids from their spatial and sequential neighbors as well as themselves, which reduces the sampling space of the generative process. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance over a set of popular baseline methods in sequence recovery and exhibits great potential in generating diverse protein sequences for a determined protein backbone structure.
Data valuation, a principled way to rank the importance of each training datum, has become increasingly important. However, existing value-based approaches (e.g., Shapley) are known to suffer from the stochasticity inherent in utility functions that render consistent and reliable ranking difficult. Recently, Wang and Jia (2023) proposed the noise-structure-agnostic framework to advocate the Banzhaf value for its robustness against such stochasticity as it achieves the largest safe margin among many alternatives. Surprisingly, our empirical study shows that the Banzhaf value is not always the most robust when compared with a broader family: weighted Banzhaf values. To analyze this scenario, we introduce the concept of Kronecker noise to parameterize stochasticity, through which we prove that the uniquely robust semi-value, which can be analytically derived from the underlying Kronecker noise, lies in the family of weighted Banzhaf values while minimizing the worst-case entropy. In addition, we adopt the maximum sample reuse principle to design an estimator to efficiently approximate weighted Banzhaf values, and show that it enjoys the best time complexity in terms of achieving an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-approximation. Our theory is verified under both synthetic and authentic noises. For the latter, we fit a Kronecker noise to the inherent stochasticity, which is then plugged in to generate the predicted most robust semi-value. Our study suggests that weighted Banzhaf values are promising when facing undue noises in data valuation.
tl;dr: Semi-supervised learning with instance-dependent thresholds
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been a fundamental challenge in machine learning for decades. The primary family of SSL algorithms, known as pseudo-labeling, involves assigning pseudo-labels to confident unlabeled instances and incorporating them into the training set. Therefore, the selection criteria of confident instances are crucial to the success of SSL. Recently, there has been growing interest in the development of SSL methods that use dynamic or adaptive thresholds. Yet, these methods typically apply the same threshold to all samples, or use class-dependent thresholds for instances belonging to a certain class, while neglecting instance-level information. In this paper, we propose the study of instance-dependent thresholds, which has the highest degree of freedom compared with existing methods. Specifically, we devise a novel instance-dependent threshold function for all unlabeled instances by utilizing their instance-level ambiguity and the instance-dependent error rates of pseudo-labels, so instances that are more likely to have incorrect pseudo-labels will have higher thresholds. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our instance-dependent threshold function provides a bounded probabilistic guarantee for the correctness of the pseudo-labels it assigns.
We show that many definitions of stability found in the learning theory literature are equivalent to one another.
We distinguish between two families of definitions of stability: distribution-dependent and distribution-independent Bayesian stability. Within each family, we establish equivalences between various definitions, encompassing approximate differential privacy, pure differential privacy, replicability, global stability, perfect generalization, TV stability, mutual information stability, KL-divergence stability, and Rényi-divergence stability. Along the way, we prove boosting results that enable the amplification of the stability of a learning rule. This work is a step towards a more systematic taxonomy of stability notions in learning theory, which can promote clarity and an improved understanding of an array of stability concepts that have emerged in recent years.
tl;dr: We propose the first in-context subject-drive image generation framework, which is much faster and efficient than any other subject-drive image generation models
Recent text-to-image generation models like DreamBooth have made remarkable progress in generating highly customized images of a target subject, by fine-tuning an ``expert model'' for a given subject from a few examples.
However, this process is expensive, since a new expert model must be learned for each subject.
In this paper, we present SuTI, a Subject-driven Text-to-Image generator that replaces subject-specific fine tuning with {in-context} learning.
Given a few demonstrations of a new subject, SuTI can instantly generate novel renditions of the subject in different scenes, without any subject-specific optimization.
SuTI is powered by {apprenticeship learning}, where a single apprentice model is learned from data generated by a massive number of subject-specific expert models.
Specifically, we mine millions of image clusters from the Internet, each centered around a specific visual subject. We adopt these clusters to train a massive number of expert models, each specializing in a different subject. The apprentice model SuTI then learns to imitate the behavior of these fine-tuned experts.
SuTI can generate high-quality and customized subject-specific images 20x faster than optimization-based SoTA methods. On the challenging DreamBench and DreamBench-v2, our human evaluation shows that SuTI significantly outperforms existing models like InstructPix2Pix, Textual Inversion, Imagic, Prompt2Prompt, Re-Imagen and DreamBooth.
tl;dr: The paper proposes two new approaches to improve spectral clustering on incomplete data using kernel correction and affinity learning.
Spectral clustering has gained popularity for clustering non-convex data due to its simplicity and effectiveness. It is essential to construct a similarity graph using a high-quality affinity measure that models the local neighborhood relations among the data samples. However, incomplete data can lead to inaccurate affinity measures, resulting in degraded clustering performance. To address these issues, we propose an imputation-free framework with two novel approaches to improve spectral clustering on incomplete data. Firstly, we introduce a new kernel correction method that enhances the quality of the kernel matrix estimated on incomplete data with a theoretical guarantee, benefiting classical spectral clustering on pre-defined kernels. Secondly, we develop a series of affinity learning methods that equip the self-expressive framework with $\ell_p$-norm to construct an intrinsic affinity matrix with an adaptive extension. Our methods outperform existing data imputation and distance calibration techniques on benchmark datasets, offering a promising solution to spectral clustering on incomplete data in various real-world applications.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a pivotal form in machine learning to extend the in-domain model to the distinctive target domains where the data distributions differ. Most prior works focus on capturing the inter-domain transferability but largely overlook rich intra-domain structures, which empirically results in even worse discriminability. In this work, we introduce a novel graph SPectral Alignment (SPA) framework to tackle the tradeoff. The core of our method is briefly condensed as follows: (i)-by casting the DA problem to graph primitives, SPA composes a coarse graph alignment mechanism with a novel spectral regularizer towards aligning the domain graphs in eigenspaces; (ii)-we further develop a fine-grained message propagation module --- upon a novel neighbor-aware self-training mechanism --- in order for enhanced discriminability in the target domain. On standardized benchmarks, the extensive experiments of SPA demonstrate that its performance has surpassed the existing cutting-edge DA methods. Coupled with dense model analysis, we conclude that our approach indeed possesses superior efficacy, robustness, discriminability, and transferability. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/CrownX/SPA.
1893. State2Explanation: Concept-Based Explanations to Benefit Agent Learning and User Understanding
As more non-AI experts use complex AI systems for daily tasks, there has been an increasing effort to develop methods that produce explanations of AI decision making that are understandable by non-AI experts. Towards this effort, leveraging higher-level concepts and producing concept-based explanations have become a popular method. Most concept-based explanations have been developed for classification techniques, and we posit that the few existing methods for sequential decision making are limited in scope. In this work, we first contribute a desiderata for defining ``concepts'' in sequential decision making settings. Additionally, inspired by the Protege Effect which states explaining knowledge often reinforces one's self-learning, we explore how concept-based explanations of an RL agent's decision making can in turn improve the agent's learning rate, as well as improve end-user understanding of the agent's decision making. To this end, we contribute a unified framework, State2Explanation (S2E), that involves learning a joint embedding model between state-action pairs and concept-based explanations, and leveraging such learned model to both (1) inform reward shaping during an agent's training, and (2) provide explanations to end-users at deployment for improved task performance. Our experimental validations, in Connect 4 and Lunar Lander, demonstrate the success of S2E in providing a dual-benefit, successfully informing reward shaping and improving agent learning rate, as well as significantly improving end user task performance at deployment time.
Adversarial contrastive learning (ACL) is a technique that enhances standard contrastive learning (SCL) by incorporating adversarial data to learn a robust representation that can withstand adversarial attacks and common corruptions without requiring costly annotations. To improve transferability, the existing work introduced the standard invariant regularization (SIR) to impose style-independence property to SCL, which can exempt the impact of nuisance style factors in the standard representation. However, it is unclear how the style-independence property benefits ACL-learned robust representations. In this paper, we leverage the technique of causal reasoning to interpret the ACL and propose adversarial invariant regularization (AIR) to enforce independence from style factors. We regulate the ACL using both SIR and AIR to output the robust representation. Theoretically, we show that AIR implicitly encourages the representational distance between different views of natural data and their adversarial variants to be independent of style factors. Empirically, our experimental results show that invariant regularization significantly improves the performance of state-of-the-art ACL methods in terms of both standard generalization and robustness on downstream tasks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply causal reasoning to interpret ACL and develop AIR for enhancing ACL-learned robust representations. Our source code is at https://github.com/GodXuxilie/Enhancing_ACL_via_AIR.
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed gradient-based optimizer (Foret et al., ICLR 2021) that greatly improves the prediction performance of deep neural networks. Consequently, there has been a surge of interest in explaining its empirical success. We focus, in particular, on understanding ***the role played by normalization***, a key component of the SAM updates. We theoretically and empirically study the effect of normalization in SAM for both convex and non-convex functions, revealing two key roles played by normalization: i) it helps in stabilizing the algorithm; and ii) it enables the algorithm to drift along a continuum (manifold) of minima -- a property identified by recent theoretical works that is the key to better performance. We further argue that these two properties of normalization make SAM robust against the choice of hyper-parameters, supporting the practicality of SAM. Our conclusions are backed by various experiments.
Deciding on an appropriate intervention requires a causal model of a treatment, the outcome, and potential mediators. Causal mediation analysis lets us distinguish between direct and indirect effects of the intervention, but has mostly been studied in a static setting. In healthcare, data come in the form of complex, irregularly sampled time-series, with dynamic interdependencies between a treatment, outcomes, and mediators across time. Existing approaches to dynamic causal mediation analysis are limited to regular measurement intervals, simple parametric models, and disregard long-range mediator--outcome interactions. To address these limitations, we propose a non-parametric mediator--outcome model where the mediator is assumed to be a temporal point process that interacts with the outcome process. With this model, we estimate the direct and indirect effects of an external intervention on the outcome, showing how each of these affects the whole future trajectory. We demonstrate on semi-synthetic data that our method can accurately estimate direct and indirect effects. On real-world healthcare data, our model infers clinically meaningful direct and indirect effect trajectories for blood glucose after a surgery.
tl;dr: We develop an efficient and effective network experiment design that optimizes covariance matrix of treatment vector through projected gradient descent.
Online A/B tests have become increasingly popular and important for social platforms. However, accurately estimating the global average treatment effect (GATE) has proven to be challenging due to network interference, which violates the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) and poses great challenge to experimental design. Existing network experimental design research was mostly based on the unbiased Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimator with substantial data trimming to ensure unbiasedness at the price of high resultant estimation variance. In this paper, we strive to balance the bias and variance in designing randomized network experiments. Under a potential outcome model with 1-hop interference, we derive the bias and variance of the standard HT estimator and reveal their relation to the network topological structure and the covariance of the treatment assignment vector. We then propose to formulate the experimental design problem as to optimize the covariance matrix of the treatment assignment vector to achieve the bias and variance balance by minimizing the mean squared error (MSE) of the estimator. An efficient projected gradient descent algorithm is presented to the implement of the desired randomization scheme. Finally, we carry out extensive simulation studies to demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method over other existing methods in many settings, with different levels of model misspecification.
tl;dr: conformal prediction for time series that anticipates and forecasts future distribution shifts
We study the problem of uncertainty quantification for time series prediction, with the goal of providing easy-to-use algorithms with formal guarantees. The algorithms we present build upon ideas from conformal prediction and control theory, are able to prospectively model conformal scores in an online setting, and adapt to the presence of systematic errors due to seasonality, trends, and general distribution shifts. Our theory both simplifies and strengthens existing analyses in online conformal prediction. Experiments on 4-week-ahead forecasting of statewide COVID-19 death counts in the U.S. show an improvement in coverage over the ensemble forecaster used in
official CDC communications. We also run experiments on predicting electricity demand, market returns, and temperature using autoregressive, Theta, Prophet, and Transformer models. We provide an extendable codebase for testing our methods and for the integration of new algorithms, data sets, and forecasting rules at [this link](http://github.com/aangelopoulos/conformal-time-series).
tl;dr: We introduce a fast adaptive task weighting method for multitask optimization.
One of the grand enduring goals of AI is to create generalist agents that can learn multiple different tasks from diverse data via multitask learning (MTL). However, in practice, applying gradient descent (GD) on the average loss across all tasks may yield poor multitask performance due to severe under-optimization of certain tasks. Previous approaches that manipulate task gradients for a more balanced loss decrease require storing and computing all task gradients ($\mathcal{O}(k)$ space and time where $k$ is the number of tasks), limiting their use in large-scale scenarios. In this work, we introduce Fast Adaptive Multitask Optimization (FAMO), a dynamic weighting method that decreases task losses in a balanced way using $\mathcal{O}(1)$ space and time. We conduct an extensive set of experiments covering multi-task supervised and reinforcement learning problems. Our results indicate that FAMO achieves comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art gradient manipulation techniques while offering significant improvements in space and computational efficiency. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Cranial-XIX/FAMO}.
Non-contrastive SSL methods like BYOL and SimSiam rely on asymmetric predictor networks to avoid representational collapse without negative samples. Yet, how predictor networks facilitate stable learning is not fully understood. While previous theoretical analyses assumed Euclidean losses, most practical implementations rely on cosine similarity. To gain further theoretical insight into non-contrastive SSL, we analytically study learning dynamics in conjunction with Euclidean and cosine similarity in the eigenspace of closed-form linear predictor networks. We show that both avoid collapse through implicit variance regularization albeit through different dynamical mechanisms. Moreover, we find that the eigenvalues act as effective learning rate multipliers and propose a family of isotropic loss functions (IsoLoss) that equalize convergence rates across eigenmodes. Empirically, IsoLoss speeds up the initial learning dynamics and increases robustness, thereby allowing us to dispense with the EMA target network typically used with non-contrastive methods. Our analysis sheds light on the variance regularization mechanisms of non-contrastive SSL and lays the theoretical grounds for crafting novel loss functions that shape the learning dynamics of the predictor's spectrum.
tl;dr: We identify novel tractable classes for optimally training neural networks with linear or ReLU activation functions.
In spite of the fundamental role of neural networks in contemporary machine learning research, our understanding of the computational complexity of optimally training neural networks remains limited even when dealing with the simplest kinds of activation functions. Indeed, while there has been a number of very recent results that establish ever-tighter lower bounds for the problem under linear and ReLU activation functions, little progress has been made towards the identification of novel polynomial-time tractable network architectures. In this article we obtain novel algorithmic upper bounds for training linear- and ReLU-activated neural networks to optimality which push the boundaries of tractability for these problems beyond the previous state of the art.
tl;dr: This paper developes the sharpest individualized decision-making for recently proposed proximal causal learning
A common concern when a policymaker draws causal inferences from and makes decisions based on observational data is that the measured covariates are insufficiently rich to account for all sources of confounding, i.e., the standard no confoundedness assumption fails to hold. The recently proposed proximal causal inference framework shows that proxy variables that abound in real-life scenarios can be leveraged to identify causal effects and therefore facilitate decision-making. Building upon this line of work, we propose a novel optimal individualized treatment regime based on so-called outcome and treatment confounding bridges. We then show that the value function of this new optimal treatment regime is superior to that of existing ones in the literature. Theoretical guarantees, including identification, superiority, excess value bound, and consistency of the estimated regime, are established. Furthermore, we demonstrate the proposed optimal regime via numerical experiments and a real data application.
tl;dr: We propose a new class of banded matrix mechanisms that (a) are compatible with cross-device FL and (b) fully subsume amplified DP-SGD. This enables MF-DP-FTRL approaches to match or outperform DP-SGD across all $\varepsilon$.
Matrix factorization (MF) mechanisms for differential privacy (DP) have substantially improved the state-of-the-art in privacy-utility-computation tradeoffs for ML applications in a variety of scenarios, but in both the centralized and federated settings there remain instances where either MF cannot be easily applied, or other algorithms provide better tradeoffs (typically, as $\epsilon$ becomes small).
In this work, we show how MF can subsume prior state-of-the-art algorithms in both federated and centralized training settings, across all privacy budgets. The key technique throughout is the construction of MF mechanisms with banded matrices (lower-triangular matrices with at most $\hat{b}$ nonzero bands including the main diagonal). For cross-device federated learning (FL), this enables multiple-participations with a relaxed device participation schema compatible with practical FL infrastructure (as demonstrated by a production deployment). In the centralized setting, we prove that banded matrices enjoy the same privacy amplification results as the ubiquitous DP-SGD algorithm, but can provide strictly better performance in most scenarios---this lets us always at least match DP-SGD, and often outperform it
tl;dr: A novel regularization technique that elevates conditional GANs to the state-of-the-art in posterior image sampling.
In image recovery problems, one seeks to infer an image from distorted, incomplete, and/or noise-corrupted measurements.
Such problems arise in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography, deblurring, super-resolution, inpainting, phase retrieval, image-to-image translation, and other applications. Given a training set of signal/measurement pairs, we seek to do more than just produce one good image estimate. Rather, we aim to rapidly and accurately sample from the posterior distribution. To do this,
we propose a regularized conditional Wasserstein GAN that generates dozens of high-quality posterior samples per second. Our regularization comprises an $\ell_1$ penalty and an adaptively weighted standard-deviation reward. Using quantitative evaluation metrics like conditional Fréchet inception distance, we demonstrate that our method produces state-of-the-art posterior samples in both multicoil MRI and large-scale inpainting applications. The code for our model can be found here: https://github.com/matt-bendel/rcGAN.
tl;dr: We propose a novel event-based algorithm to simulate and train spiking neural networks, reducing computational cost from N to log(N) per network spike for sparse spiking networks.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are biologically-inspired models that are capable of processing information in streams of action potentials. However, simulating and training SNNs is computationally expensive due to the need to solve large systems of coupled differential equations. In this paper, we propose a novel event-based algorithm called SparseProp for simulating and training sparse SNNs. Our algorithm reduces the computational cost of both forward pass and backward pass operations from O(N) to O(log(N)) per network spike, enabling numerically exact simulations of large spiking networks and their efficient training using backpropagation through time. By exploiting the sparsity of the network, SparseProp avoids iterating through all neurons at every spike and uses efficient state updates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SparseProp for several classical integrate-and-fire neuron models, including simulating a sparse SNN with one million LIF neurons, which is sped up by more than four orders of magnitude compared to previous implementations. Our work provides an efficient and exact solution for training large-scale spiking neural networks and opens up new possibilities for building more sophisticated brain-inspired models.
tl;dr: we explain why linear learners show drastic vulnerabilities to best poisoning attacks across benchmark datasets.
We study indiscriminate poisoning for linear learners where an adversary injects a few crafted examples into the training data with the goal of forcing the induced model to incur higher test error. Inspired by the observation that linear learners on some datasets are able to resist the best known attacks even without any defenses, we further investigate whether datasets can be inherently robust to indiscriminate poisoning attacks for linear learners. For theoretical Gaussian distributions, we rigorously characterize the behavior of an optimal poisoning attack, defined as the poisoning strategy that attains the maximum risk of the induced model at a given poisoning budget. Our results prove that linear learners can indeed be robust to indiscriminate poisoning if the class-wise data distributions are well-separated with low variance and the size of the constraint set containing all permissible poisoning points is also small. These findings largely explain the drastic variation in empirical attack performance of the state-of-the-art poisoning attacks on linear learners across benchmark datasets, making an important initial step towards understanding the underlying reasons some learning tasks are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks.
tl;dr: We introduce a new scalable approach for computing optimal equilibria in games via a reduction to a zero-sum extensive-form game.
We introduce a new approach for computing optimal equilibria via learning in games. It applies to extensive-form settings with any number of players, including mechanism design, information design, and solution concepts such as correlated, communication, and certification equilibria. We observe that optimal equilibria are minimax equilibrium strategies of a player in an extensive-form zero-sum game. This reformulation allows to apply techniques for learning in zero-sum games, yielding the first learning dynamics that converge to optimal equilibria, not only in empirical averages, but also in iterates. We demonstrate the practical scalability and flexibility of our approach by attaining state-of-the-art performance in benchmark tabular games, and by computing an optimal mechanism for a sequential auction design problem using deep reinforcement learning.
tl;dr: We propose a method that actively collects visual information in a task-oriented manner.
Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires external knowledge to answer the question about an image. Early methods explicitly retrieve knowledge from external knowledge bases, which often introduce noisy information. Recently large language models like GPT-3 have shown encouraging performance as implicit knowledge source and revealed planning abilities. However, current large language models can not effectively understand image inputs, thus it remains an open problem to extract the image information and input to large language models. Prior works have used image captioning and object descriptions to represent the image. However, they may either drop the essential visual information to answer the question correctly or involve irrelevant objects to the task-of-interest. To address this problem, we propose to let large language models make an initial hypothesis according to their knowledge, then actively collect the visual evidence required to verify the hypothesis. In this way, the model can attend to the essential visual information in a task-oriented manner. We leverage several vision modules from the perspectives of spatial attention (i.e., Where to look) and attribute attention (i.e., What to look), which is similar to human cognition. The experiments show that our proposed method outperforms the baselines on open-ended knowledge-based VQA datasets and presents clear reasoning procedure with better interpretability.
1909. Understanding How Consistency Works in Federated Learning via Stage-wise Relaxed Initialization
tl;dr: We propose a novel FL method and analyze the excess risk theoretically to understand the essential impact of the local consistency.
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed paradigm that coordinates massive local clients to collaboratively train a global model via stage-wise local training processes on the heterogeneous dataset.
Previous works have implicitly studied that FL suffers from the "client-drift" problem, which is caused by the inconsistent optimum across local clients. However, till now it still lacks solid theoretical analysis to explain the impact of this local inconsistency.
To alleviate the negative impact of the "client drift" and explore its substance in FL, in this paper, we first design an efficient FL algorithm FedInit, which allows employing the personalized relaxed initialization state at the beginning of each local training stage. Specifically, FedInit initializes the local state by moving away from the current global state towards the reverse direction of the latest local state. This relaxed initialization helps to revise the local divergence and enhance the local consistency level.
Moreover, to further understand how inconsistency disrupts performance in FL, we introduce the excess risk analysis and study the divergence term to investigate the test error of the proposed FedInit method. Our studies show that on the non-convex objectives, optimization error is not sensitive to this local inconsistency, while it mainly affects the generalization error bound in FedInit.
Extensive experiments are conducted to validate this conclusion. Our proposed FedInit could achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results compared to several advanced benchmarks without any additional costs. Meanwhile, stage-wise relaxed initialization could also be incorporated into the current advanced algorithms to achieve higher performance in the FL paradigm.
It is a crucial challenge to reconstruct population dynamics using unlabeled samples from distributions at coarse time intervals. Recent approaches such as flow-based models or Schrödinger Bridge (SB) models have demonstrated appealing performance, yet the inferred sample trajectories either fail to account for the underlying stochasticity or are unnecessarily rigid. In this article, we extend SB into phase space and propose $\underline{D}$eep $\underline{M}$omentum Multi-Marginal $\underline{S}$chrödinger $\underline{B}$ridge (DMSB), a novel computational framework that learns the smooth measure-valued spline for stochastic systems that satisfy position marginal constraints across time. By tailoring the celebrated Bregman Iteration and extending the Iteration Proportional Fitting to phase space, we manage to handle high-dimensional multi-marginal trajectory inference tasks efficiently. Our algorithm outperforms baselines significantly, as evidenced by experiments for synthetic datasets and a real-world single-cell RNA sequence dataset. Additionally, the proposed approach can reasonably reconstruct the evolution of velocity distribution, from position snapshots only, when there is a ground truth velocity that is nevertheless inaccessible.
1911. A generative model of the hippocampal formation trained with theta driven local learning rules
tl;dr: A simple and biologically plausible generative model of the hippocampal formation accounts for a variety of cognitive functions
Advances in generative models have recently revolutionised machine learning. Meanwhile, in neuroscience, generative models have long been thought fundamental to animal intelligence. Understanding the biological mechanisms that support these processes promises to shed light on the relationship between biological and artificial intelligence. In animals, the hippocampal formation is thought to learn and use a generative model to support its role in spatial and non-spatial memory. Here we introduce a biologically plausible model of the hippocampal formation tantamount to a Helmholtz machine that we apply to a temporal stream of inputs. A novel component of our model is that fast theta-band oscillations (5-10 Hz) gate the direction of information flow throughout the network, training it akin to a high-frequency wake-sleep algorithm. Our model accurately infers the latent state of high-dimensional sensory environments and generates realistic sensory predictions. Furthermore, it can learn to path integrate by developing a ring attractor connectivity structure matching previous theoretical proposals and flexibly transfer this structure between environments. Whereas many models trade-off biological plausibility with generality, our model captures a variety of hippocampal cognitive functions under one biologically plausible local learning rule.
Data augmentation (DA) encodes invariance and provides implicit regularization critical to a model's performance in image classification tasks. However, while DA improves average accuracy, recent studies have shown that its impact can be highly class dependent: achieving optimal average accuracy comes at the cost of significantly hurting individual class accuracy by as much as 20% on ImageNet. There has been little progress in resolving class-level accuracy drops due to a limited understanding of these effects. In this work, we present a framework for understanding how DA interacts with class-level learning dynamics. Using higher-quality multi-label annotations on ImageNet, we systematically categorize the affected classes and find that the majority are inherently ambiguous, co-occur, or involve fine-grained distinctions, while DA controls the model's bias towards one of the closely related classes. While many of the previously reported performance drops are explained by multi-label annotations, we identify other sources of accuracy degradations by analyzing class confusions. We show that simple class-conditional augmentation strategies informed by our framework improve performance on the negatively affected classes.
tl;dr: We propose Polyner, an unsupervised polychromatic neural representation, that can recover high-quality CT images from metal-corrupted measurements without the need for any extra data.
Emerging neural reconstruction techniques based on tomography (e.g., NeRF, NeAT, and NeRP) have started showing unique capabilities in medical imaging. In this work, we present a novel Polychromatic neural representation (Polyner) to tackle the challenging problem of CT imaging when metallic implants exist within the human body. CT metal artifacts arise from the drastic variation of metal's attenuation coefficients at various energy levels of the X-ray spectrum, leading to a nonlinear metal effect in CT measurements. Recovering CT images from metal-affected measurements hence poses a complicated nonlinear inverse problem where empirical models adopted in previous metal artifact reduction (MAR) approaches lead to signal loss and strongly aliased reconstructions. Polyner instead models the MAR problem from a nonlinear inverse problem perspective. Specifically, we first derive a polychromatic forward model to accurately simulate the nonlinear CT acquisition process. Then, we incorporate our forward model into the implicit neural representation to accomplish reconstruction. Lastly, we adopt a regularizer to preserve the physical properties of the CT images across different energy levels while effectively constraining the solution space. Our Polyner is an unsupervised method and does not require any external training data. Experimenting with multiple datasets shows that our Polyner achieves comparable or better performance than supervised methods on in-domain datasets while demonstrating significant performance improvements on out-of-domain datasets. To the best of our knowledge, our Polyner is the first unsupervised MAR method that outperforms its supervised counterparts. The code for this work is available at: https://github.com/iwuqing/Polyner.
tl;dr: Different tasks might prefer different directions in the weight space and this can lead to conflicts when merging models. We identify this problem and propose an extremely lightweight dataless merging method.
Transfer learning – i.e., further fine-tuning a pre-trained model on a downstream task – can confer significant advantages, including improved downstream performance, faster convergence, and better sample efficiency. These advantages have led to a proliferation of task-specific fine-tuned models, which typically can only perform a single task and do not benefit from one another. Recently, model merging techniques have emerged as a solution to combine multiple task-specific models into a single multitask model without performing additional training. However, existing merging methods often ignore the interference between parameters of different models, resulting in large performance drops when merging multiple models. In this paper, we demonstrate that prior merging techniques inadvertently lose valuable information due to two major sources of interference: (a) interference due to redundant parameter values and (b) disagreement on the sign of a given parameter’s values across models. To address this, we propose our method, TrIm, Elect Sign & Merge (TIES-Merging), which introduces three novel steps when merging models: (1) resetting parameters that only changed a small amount during fine-tuning, (2) resolving sign conflicts, and (3) merging only the parameters that are in alignment with the final agreed-upon sign. We find that TIES-Merging outperforms existing methods in diverse settings covering a range of modalities, domains, number of tasks, model sizes, architectures, and fine-tuning settings. We further analyze the impact of different types of interference on model parameters, highlight the importance of signs, and show that estimating the signs using the validation data could further improve performance.
Uncertainty estimation is an important research area to make deep neural networks (DNNs) more trustworthy. While extensive research on uncertainty estimation has been conducted with unimodal data, uncertainty estimation for multimodal data remains a challenge. Neural processes (NPs) have been demonstrated to be an effective uncertainty estimation method for unimodal data by providing the reliability of Gaussian processes with efficient and powerful DNNs. While NPs hold significant potential for multimodal uncertainty estimation, the adaptation of NPs for multimodal data has not been carefully studied. To bridge this gap, we propose Multimodal Neural Processes (MNPs) by generalising NPs for multimodal uncertainty estimation. Based on the framework of NPs, MNPs consist of several novel and principled mechanisms tailored to the characteristics of multimodal data. In extensive empirical evaluation, our method achieves state-of-the-art multimodal uncertainty estimation performance, showing its appealing robustness against noisy samples and reliability in out-of-distribution detection with faster computation time compared to the current state-of-the-art multimodal uncertainty estimation method.
tl;dr: We propose a novel physics-informed kernel and a new acquisition function for the optimization of variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs).
In this paper, we propose a novel and powerful method to harness Bayesian optimization for variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) - a hybrid quantum-classical protocol used to approximate the ground state of a quantum Hamiltonian. Specifically, we derive a *VQE-kernel* which incorporates important prior information about quantum circuits: the kernel feature map of the VQE-kernel exactly matches the known functional form of the VQE's objective function and thereby significantly reduces the posterior uncertainty.
Moreover, we propose a novel acquisition function for Bayesian optimization called \emph{Expected Maximum Improvement over Confident Regions} (EMICoRe) which can actively exploit the inductive bias of the VQE-kernel by treating regions with low predictive uncertainty as indirectly "observed". As a result, observations at as few as three points in the search domain are sufficient to determine the complete objective function along an entire one-dimensional subspace of the optimization landscape.
Our numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach improves over state-of-the-art baselines.
tl;dr: To get a BBP transition in the spike model with Inhomogeneous noise, you should do PCA on *this* matrix, not the original one!
We study a spiked Wigner problem with an inhomogeneous noise profile. Our aim in this problem is to recover the signal passed through an inhomogeneous low-rank matrix channel. While the information-theoretic performances are well-known, we focus on the algorithmic problem. First, we derive an approximate message-passing algorithm (AMP) for the inhomogeneous problem and show that its rigorous state evolution coincides with the information-theoretic optimal Bayes fixed-point equations. Second, we deduce a simple and efficient spectral method that outperforms PCA and is shown to match the information-theoretic transition.
1918. Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks
tl;dr: reasoning distillation with knowledge augmentation for small language models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks that require a compound understanding of knowledge.
However, deployment of the LLMs in real-world applications can be challenging due to their high computational requirements and concerns on data privacy.
Previous studies have focused on building task-specific small Language Models (LMs) by fine-tuning them with labeled data or distilling LLMs. However, these approaches are ill-suited for knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks due to the limited capacity of small LMs in memorizing the knowledge required.
Motivated by our theoretical analysis on memorization, we propose Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation (KARD), a novel method that fine-tunes small LMs to generate rationales obtained from LLMs with augmented knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge base. Moreover, we further propose a neural reranker to obtain documents relevant to rationale generation. We empirically show that KARD significantly improves the performance of small T5 and GPT models on the challenging knowledge-intensive reasoning datasets, namely MedQA-USMLE, StrategyQA, and OpenbookQA.
Notably, our method makes the 250M T5 models achieve superior performance against the fine-tuned 3B models, having 12 times larger parameters, on both MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA benchmarks.
The success of meta-learning on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks in the wild has proved to be hit-and-miss.
To safeguard the generalization capability of the meta-learned prior knowledge to OOD tasks, in particularly safety-critical applications, necessitates detection of an OOD task followed by adaptation of the task towards the prior.
Nonetheless, the reliability of estimated uncertainty on OOD tasks by existing Bayesian meta-learning methods is restricted by incomplete coverage of the feature distribution shift and insufficient expressiveness of the meta-learned prior.
Besides, they struggle to adapt an OOD task, running parallel to the line of cross-domain task adaptation solutions which are vulnerable to overfitting.
To this end, we build a single coherent framework that supports both detection and adaptation of OOD tasks, while remaining compatible with off-the-shelf meta-learning backbones.
The proposed Energy-Based Meta-Learning (EBML) framework learns to characterize any arbitrary meta-training task distribution with the composition of two expressive neural-network-based energy functions. We deploy the sum of the two energy functions, being proportional to the joint distribution of a task, as a reliable score for detecting OOD tasks; during meta-testing, we adapt the OOD task to in-distribution tasks by energy minimization.
Experiments on four regression and classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.
Utilizing auxiliary outlier datasets to regularize the machine learning model has demonstrated promise for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and safe prediction. Due to the labor intensity in data collection and cleaning, automating outlier data generation has been a long-desired alternative. Despite the appeal, generating photo-realistic outliers in the high dimensional pixel space has been an open challenge for the field. To tackle the problem, this paper proposes a new framework Dream-OOD, which enables imagining photo-realistic outliers by way of diffusion models, provided with only the in-distribution (ID) data and classes. Specifically, Dream-OOD learns a text-conditioned latent space based on ID data, and then samples outliers in the low-likelihood region via the latent, which can be decoded into images by the diffusion model. Different from prior works [16, 95], Dream-OOD enables visualizing and understanding the imagined outliers, directly in the pixel space. We conduct comprehensive quantitative and qualitative studies to understand the efficacy of Dream-OOD, and show that training with the samples generated by Dream-OOD can significantly benefit OOD detection performance.
Neural network in the mean-field regime is known to be capable of \textit{feature learning}, unlike the kernel (NTK) counterpart. Recent works have shown that mean-field neural networks can be globally optimized by a noisy gradient descent update termed the \textit{mean-field Langevin dynamics} (MFLD). However, all existing guarantees for MFLD only considered the \textit{optimization} efficiency, and it is unclear if this algorithm leads to improved \textit{generalization} performance and sample complexity due to the presence of feature learning. To fill this gap, in this work we study the statistical and computational complexity of MFLD in learning a class of binary classification problems. Unlike existing margin bounds for neural networks, we avoid the typical norm control by utilizing the perspective that MFLD optimizes the \textit{distribution} of parameters rather than the parameter itself; this leads to an improved analysis of the sample complexity and convergence rate. We apply our general framework to the learning of $k$-sparse parity functions, where we prove that unlike kernel methods, two-layer neural networks optimized by MFLD achieves a sample complexity where the degree $k$ is ``decoupled'' from the exponent in the dimension dependence.
1922. No Train No Gain: Revisiting Efficient Training Algorithms For Transformer-based Language Models
tl;dr: We investigate efficient training algorithms for Transformer Language models and find many situations in which they have only marginal improvements over standard training.
The computation necessary for training Transformer-based language models has skyrocketed in recent years.
This trend has motivated research on efficient training algorithms designed to improve training, validation, and downstream performance faster than standard training. In this work, we revisit three categories of such algorithms: dynamic architectures (layer stacking, layer dropping), batch selection (selective backprop., RHO-loss), and efficient optimizers (Lion, Sophia). When pre-training BERT and T5 with a fixed computation budget using such methods, we find that their training, validation, and downstream gains vanish compared to a baseline with a fully-decayed learning rate. We define an evaluation protocol that enables computation to be done on arbitrary machines by mapping all computation time to a reference machine which we call reference system time. We discuss the limitations of our proposed protocol and release our code to encourage rigorous research in efficient training procedures: https://github.com/JeanKaddour/NoTrainNoGain.
tl;dr: We present an additive PTAS for learning random constant-depth neural networks
We present a PTAS for learning random constant-depth networks. We show that for any fixed $\epsilon>0$ and depth $i$, there is a poly-time algorithm that for any distribution on $\sqrt{d} \cdot \mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ learns random Xavier networks of depth $i$, up to an additive error of $\epsilon$. The algorithm runs in time and sample complexity of $(\bar{d})^{\mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1})}$, where $\bar d$ is the size of the network. For some cases of sigmoid and ReLU-like activations the bound can be improved to $(\bar{d})^{\mathrm{polylog}(\epsilon^{-1})}$, resulting in a quasi-poly-time algorithm for learning constant depth random networks.
tl;dr: We significantly improve the regret bounds for kernelized RL using a domain partitioning technique.
Modern reinforcement learning (RL) has shown empirical success in various real world settings with complex models and large state-action spaces. The existing analytical results, however, typically focus on settings with a small number of state-actions or simple models such as linearly modeled state-action value functions. To derive RL policies that efficiently handle large state-action spaces with more general value functions, some recent works have considered nonlinear function approximation using kernel ridge regression. We propose $\pi$-KRVI, an optimistic modification of least-squares value iteration, when the action-value function is represented by an RKHS. We prove the first order-optimal regret guarantees under a general setting. Our results show a significant polynomial in the number of episodes improvement over the state of the art. In particular, with highly non-smooth kernels (such as Neural Tangent kernel or some Matérn kernels) the existing results lead to trivial (superlinear in the number of episodes) regret bounds. We show a sublinear regret bound that is order optimal in the cases where a lower bound on regret is known (which includes the kernels mentioned above).
tl;dr: A framework for equivariant learning with non-equivariant architectures, e.g., vision transformer for graph recognition.
We present a novel framework to overcome the limitations of equivariant architectures in learning functions with group symmetries. In contrary to equivariant architectures, the framework uses an arbitrary backbone (such as an MLP or a transformer) and symmetrizes it to be equivariant to given group by employing a small equivariant network that parameterizes the probabilistic distribution underlying the symmetrization. The distribution is end-to-end trained with the backbone which can maximize performance while reducing sample complexity of symmetrization. We show that this approach ensures not only equivariance to the given group but also universal approximation ability in expectation. We implement our method on a simple patch-based transformer backbone initialized from pretrained vision transformer, and test it for a wide range of symmetry groups including permutation and Euclidean groups and their combinations. Empirical tests show competitive results against tailored equivariant architectures, suggesting the potential for learning equivariant functions for diverse groups using a non-equivariant universal backbone. We further show evidence of enhanced learning in symmetric modalities, like graphs, when pretrained from non-symmetric modalities, like vision.
1926. Reducing Blackwell and Average Optimality to Discounted MDPs via the Blackwell Discount Factor
We introduce the Blackwell discount factor for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Classical objectives for MDPs include discounted, average, and Blackwell optimality. Many existing approaches to computing average-optimal policies solve for discount-optimal policies with a discount factor close to $1$, but they only work under strong or hard-to-verify assumptions on the MDP structure such as unichain or ergodicity. We are the first to highlight the shortcomings of the classical definition of Blackwell optimality, which does not lead to simple algorithms for computing Blackwell-optimal policies and overlooks the pathological behaviors of optimal policies as regards the discount factors. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we show that when the discount factor is larger than the Blackwell discount factor $\gamma_{\sf bw}$, all discount-optimal policies become Blackwell- and average-optimal, and we derive a general upper bound on $\gamma_{\sf bw}$. Our upper bound on $\gamma_{\sf bw}$, parametrized by the bit-size of the rewards and transition probabilities of the MDP instance, provides the first reduction from average and Blackwell optimality to discounted optimality, without any assumptions, along with new polynomial-time algorithms. Our work brings new ideas from polynomials and algebraic numbers to the analysis of MDPs. Our results also apply to robust MDPs, enabling the first algorithms to compute robust Blackwell-optimal policies.
tl;dr: This work introduces Free-Bloom, a zero-shot, training-free, semantic-coherent text-to-video generator that is capable of generating high-quality, temporally consistent, and semantically aligned videos.
Text-to-video is a rapidly growing research area that aims to generate a semantic, identical, and temporal coherence sequence of frames that accurately align with the input text prompt. This study focuses on zero-shot text-to-video generation considering the data- and cost-efficient. To generate a semantic-coherent video, exhibiting a rich portrayal of temporal semantics such as the whole process of flower blooming rather than a set of ``moving images'', we propose a novel Free-Bloom pipeline that harnesses large language models (LLMs) as the director to generate a semantic-coherence prompt sequence, while pre-trained latent diffusion models (LDMs) as the animator to generate the high fidelity frames. Furthermore, to ensure temporal and identical coherence while maintaining semantic coherence, we propose a series of annotative modifications to adapting LDMs in the reverse process, including joint noise sampling, step-aware attention shift, and dual-path interpolation. Without any video data and training requirements, Free-Bloom generates vivid and high-quality videos, awe-inspiring in generating complex scenes with semantic meaningful frame sequences. In addition, Free-Bloom is naturally compatible with LDMs-based extensions.
tl;dr: Smooth fictitious play achieves both consensus and convergence to equilibrium in diverse population network games
Reaching consensus and convergence to equilibrium are two major challenges of multi-agent systems. Although each has attracted significant attention, relatively few studies address both challenges at the same time. This paper examines the connection between the notions of consensus and equilibrium in a multi-agent system where multiple interacting sub-populations coexist. We argue that consensus can be seen as an intricate component of intra-population stability, whereas equilibrium can be seen as encoding inter-population stability. We show that smooth fictitious play, a well-known learning model in game theory, can achieve both consensus and convergence to equilibrium in diverse multi-agent settings. Moreover, we show that the consensus formation process plays a crucial role in the seminal thorny problem of equilibrium selection in multi-agent learning.
tl;dr: A novel temporal network representation framework aims to capture the evolution states adaptively by approximate von Neumann entropy.
Temporal networks are widely used as abstract graph representations for real-world dynamic systems. Indeed, recognizing the network evolution states is crucial in understanding and analyzing temporal networks. For instance, social networks will generate the clustering and formation of tightly-knit groups or communities over time, relying on the triadic closure theory. However, the existing methods often struggle to account for the time-varying nature of these network structures, hindering their performance when applied to networks with complex evolution states. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel framework called ESSEN, an Evolution StateS awarE Network, to measure temporal network evolution using von Neumann entropy and thermodynamic temperature. The developed framework utilizes a von Neumann entropy aware attention mechanism and network evolution state contrastive learning in the graph encoding. In addition, it employs a unique decoder the so-called Mixture of Thermodynamic Experts (MoTE) for decoding. ESSEN extracts local and global network evolution information using thermodynamic features and adaptively recognizes the network evolution states. Moreover, the proposed method is evaluated on link prediction tasks under both transductive and inductive settings, with the corresponding results demonstrating its effectiveness compared to various state-of-the-art baselines.
This paper investigates new families of compositional optimization problems, called non-smooth weakly-convex finite-sum coupled compositional optimization (NSWC FCCO). There has been a growing interest in FCCO due to its wide-ranging applications in machine learning and AI, as well as its ability to address the shortcomings of stochastic algorithms based on empirical risk minimization. However, current research on FCCO presumes that both the inner and outer functions are smooth, limiting their potential to tackle a more diverse set of problems. Our research expands on this area by examining non-smooth weakly-convex FCCO, where the outer function is weakly convex and non-decreasing, and the inner function is weakly-convex. We analyze a single-loop algorithm and establish its complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the Moreau envelop of the objective function. Additionally, we also extend the algorithm for solving novel non-smooth weakly-convex tri-level finite-sum coupled compositional optimization problems, which feature a nested arrangement of three functions. Lastly, we explore the applications of our algorithms in deep learning for two-way partial AUC maximization and multi-instance two-way partial AUC maximization, using empirical studies to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
tl;dr: We prove that adversarial examples exist on trained 2-layer ReLU networks, when the data lies on a low dimensional linear subspace, and suggest two ways to mitigate it.
Despite a great deal of research, it is still not well-understood why trained neural networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples.
In this work we focus on two-layer neural networks trained using data which lie on a low dimensional linear subspace.
We show that standard gradient methods lead to non-robust neural networks, namely, networks which have large gradients in directions orthogonal to the data subspace, and are susceptible to small adversarial $L_2$-perturbations in these directions.
Moreover, we show that decreasing the initialization scale of the training algorithm, or adding $L_2$ regularization, can make the trained network more robust to adversarial perturbations orthogonal to the data.
1932. MIMONets: Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Neural Networks Exploiting Computation in Superposition
tl;dr: We present Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Neural Networks (MIMONets) that can handle many inputs at once by performing computation in superposition.
With the advent of deep learning, progressively larger neural networks have been designed to solve complex tasks. We take advantage of these capacity-rich models to lower the cost of inference by exploiting computation in superposition. To reduce the computational burden per input, we propose Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Neural Networks (MIMONets) capable of handling many inputs at once. MIMONets augment various deep neural network architectures with variable binding mechanisms to represent an arbitrary number of inputs in a compositional data structure via fixed-width distributed representations. Accordingly, MIMONets adapt nonlinear neural transformations to process the data structure holistically, leading to a speedup nearly proportional to the number of superposed input items in the data structure. After processing in superposition, an unbinding mechanism recovers each transformed input of interest. MIMONets also provide a dynamic trade-off between accuracy and throughput by an instantaneous on-demand switching between a set of accuracy-throughput operating points, yet within a single set of fixed parameters. We apply the concept of MIMONets to both CNN and Transformer architectures resulting in MIMOConv and MIMOFormer, respectively. Empirical evaluations show that MIMOConv achieves $\approx 2$–$4\times$ speedup at an accuracy delta within [+0.68, -3.18]% compared to WideResNet CNNs on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100.
Similarly, MIMOFormer can handle $2$–$4$ inputs at once while maintaining a high average accuracy within a [-1.07, -3.43]% delta on the long range arena benchmark.
Finally, we provide mathematical bounds on the interference between superposition channels in MIMOFormer. Our code is available at https://github.com/IBM/multiple-input-multiple-output-nets.
tl;dr: We present a novel framework for in-context learning applied to 3D point cloud understanding, a learning paradigm that has demonstrated significant potential in various domains such as large language model inference and multi-task image processing.
With the rise of large-scale models trained on broad data, in-context learning has become a new learning paradigm that has demonstrated significant potential in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. Meanwhile, in-context learning is still largely unexplored in the 3D point cloud domain. Although masked modeling has been successfully applied for in-context learning in 2D vision, directly extending it to 3D point clouds remains a formidable challenge. In the case of point clouds, the tokens themselves are the point cloud positions (coordinates) that are masked during inference. Moreover, position embedding in previous works may inadvertently introduce information leakage. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, named Point-In-Context, designed especially for in-context learning in 3D point clouds, where both inputs and outputs are modeled as coordinates for each task. Additionally, we propose the Joint Sampling module, carefully designed to work in tandem with the general point sampling operator, effectively resolving the aforementioned technical issues. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the versatility and adaptability of our proposed methods in handling a wide range of tasks. Furthermore, with a more effective prompt selection strategy, our framework surpasses the results of individually trained models.
tl;dr: We give nearly tight SQ lower bounds for learning mixtures of linear classifiers under Gaussian covariates.
We study the problem of learning mixtures of linear classifiers under Gaussian covariates.
Given sample access to a mixture of $r$ distributions on $\mathbb{R}^n$ of the form $(\mathbf{x},y_{\ell})$, $\ell \in [r]$,
where $\mathbf{x}\sim\mathcal{N}(0,\mathbf{I}_n)$ and
$y_\ell=\mathrm{sign}(\langle\mathbf{v}_{\ell},\mathbf{x}\rangle)$
for an unknown unit vector $\mathbf{v}_{\ell}$,
the goal is to learn the underlying distribution in total variation distance. Our main result is a Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound suggesting that known algorithms for this problem are essentially best possible,
even for the special case of uniform mixtures.
In particular, we show that the complexity of any SQ algorithm for the problem is $n^{\mathrm{poly}(1/\Delta) \log(r)}$,
where $\Delta$ is a lower bound on the pairwise $\ell_2$-separation between the $\mathbf{v}_{\ell}$'s.
The key technical ingredient underlying our result is a new construction of spherical designs on the unit sphere that may be of independent interest.
1935. Softmax Output Approximation for Activation Memory-Efficient Training of Attention-based Networks
tl;dr: Memory efficient softmax output approximation method.
In this paper, we propose to approximate the softmax output, which is the key product of the attention mechanism, to reduce its activation memory usage when training attention-based networks (aka Transformers). During the forward pass of the network, the proposed softmax output approximation method stores only a small fraction of the entire softmax output required for back-propagation and evicts the rest of the softmax output from memory. Then, during the backward pass, the evicted softmax activation output is approximated to compose the gradient to perform back-propagation for model training. Considering most attention-based models heavily rely on the softmax-based attention module that usually takes one of the biggest portions of the network, approximating the softmax activation output can be a simple yet effective way to decrease the training memory requirement of many attention-based networks. The experiment with various attention-based models and relevant tasks, i.e., machine translation, text classification, and sentiment analysis, shows that it curtails the activation memory usage of the softmax-based attention module by up to 84% (6.2× less memory) in model training while achieving comparable or better performance, e.g., up to 5.4% higher classification accuracy.
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in diverse domains such as image synthesis, super-resolution, and 3D molecule generation. Surprisingly, the application of diffusion models in graph learning has garnered little attention. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by exploring the use of diffusion models for unsupervised graph representation learning. Our investigation commences with the identification of anisotropic structures within graphs and the recognition of a crucial limitation in the vanilla forward diffusion process when dealing with these anisotropic structures. The original forward diffusion process continually adds isotropic Gaussian noise to the data, which may excessively dilute anisotropic signals, leading to rapid signal-to-noise conversion. This rapid conversion poses challenges for training denoising neural networks and obstructs the acquisition of semantically meaningful representations during the reverse process. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel class of models termed {\it directional diffusion models}. These models adopt data-dependent, anisotropic, and directional noises in the forward diffusion process. In order to assess the effectiveness of our proposed models, we conduct extensive experiments on 12 publicly available datasets, with a particular focus on two distinct graph representation learning tasks. The experimental results unequivocally establish the superiority of our models over state-of-the-art baselines, underscoring their effectiveness in capturing meaningful graph representations. Our research not only sheds light on the intricacies of the forward process in diffusion models but also underscores the vast potential of these models in addressing a wide spectrum of graph-related tasks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/statsle/DDM}.
tl;dr: An algorithm to recover large clusters in the SBM model in presence of small cluster, improving on the state-of-the art by removing restrictive assumptions
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a fundamental model for studying graph clustering or community detection in networks. It has received great attention in the last decade and the balanced case, i.e., assuming all clusters have large size, has been well studied.
However, our understanding of SBM with unbalanced communities (arguably, more relevant in practice) is still limited. In this paper, we provide a simple SVD-based algorithm for recovering the communities in the SBM with communities of varying sizes.
We improve upon a result of Ailon, Chen and Xu [ICML 2013; JMLR 2015] by removing the assumption that there is a large interval such that the sizes of clusters do not fall in, and also remove the dependency of the size of the recoverable clusters on the number of underlying clusters. We further complement our theoretical improvements with experimental comparisons.
Under the planted clique conjecture, the size of the clusters that can be recovered by our algorithm is nearly optimal (up to poly-logarithmic factors) when the probability parameters are constant.
As a byproduct, we obtain an efficient clustering algorithm with sublinear query complexity in a faulty oracle model, which is capable of detecting all clusters larger than $\tilde{\Omega}({\sqrt{n}})$, even in the presence of $\Omega(n)$ small clusters in the graph. In contrast, previous efficient algorithms that use a sublinear number of queries are incapable of recovering any large clusters if there are more than $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{2/5})$ small clusters.
tl;dr: We propose a deep feature selector that simultaneously learns useful features and differential k-NN graphs based on the Dirichlet energy.
Feature selection (FS) plays an important role in machine learning, which extracts important features and accelerates the learning process. In this paper, we propose a deep FS method that simultaneously conducts feature selection and differentiable $ k $-NN graph learning based on the Dirichlet Energy. The Dirichlet Energy identifies important features by measuring their smoothness on the graph structure, and facilitates the learning of a new graph that reflects the inherent structure in new feature subspace. We employ Optimal Transport theory to address the non-differentiability issue of learning $ k $-NN graphs in neural networks, which theoretically makes our method applicable to other graph neural networks for dynamic graph learning. Furthermore, the proposed framework is interpretable, since all modules are designed algorithmically. We validate the effectiveness of our model with extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and target tasks, we also introduce program selection and simplification strategies.
Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, $\textbf{Lion}$ ($\textit{Evo$\textbf{L}$ved S$\textbf{i}$gn M$\textbf{o}$me$\textbf{n}$tum}$). It is more memory-efficient than Adam as it only keeps track of the momentum. Different from adaptive optimizers, its update has the same magnitude for each parameter calculated through the sign operation.
We compare Lion with widely used optimizers, such as Adam and Adafactor, for training a variety of models on different tasks. On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by up to 2\% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT. On vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3\% $\textit{zero-shot}$ and 91.1\% $\textit{fine-tuning}$ accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best results by 2\% and 0.1\%, respectively. On diffusion models, Lion outperforms Adam by achieving a better FID score and reducing the training compute by up to 2.3x. For autoregressive, masked language modeling, and fine-tuning, Lion exhibits a similar or better performance compared to Adam. Our analysis of Lion reveals that its performance gain grows with the training batch size. It also requires a smaller learning rate than Adam due to the larger norm of the update produced by the sign function. Additionally, we examine the limitations of Lion and identify scenarios where its improvements are small or not statistically significant.
tl;dr: We apply a more robust framework known as the semi-random model to the popular machine learning problem of matrix sensing, and provide a descent-style algorithm that iteratively reweights the input to recover the ground-truth matrix.
Low-rank matrix recovery is a fundamental problem in machine learning with numerous applications. In practice, the problem can be solved by convex optimization namely nuclear norm minimization, or by non-convex optimization as it is well-known that for low-rank matrix problems like matrix sensing and matrix completion, all local optima of the natural non-convex objectives are also globally optimal under certain ideal assumptions.
In this paper, we study new approaches for matrix sensing in a semi-random model where an adversary can add any number of arbitrary sensing matrices. More precisely, the problem is to recover a low-rank matrix $X^\star$ from linear measurements $b_i = \langle A_i, X^\star \rangle$, where an unknown subset of the sensing matrices satisfies the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) and the rest of the $A_i$'s are chosen adversarially.
It is known that in the semi-random model, existing non-convex objectives can have bad local optima. To fix this, we present a descent-style algorithm that provably recovers the ground-truth matrix $X^\star$. For the closely-related problem of semi-random matrix completion, prior work [CG18] showed that all bad local optima can be eliminated by reweighting the input data. However, the analogous approach for matrix sensing requires reweighting a set of matrices to satisfy RIP, which is a condition that is NP-hard to check. Instead, we build on the framework proposed in [KLL$^+$23] for semi-random sparse linear regression, where the algorithm in each iteration reweights the input based on the current solution, and then takes a weighted gradient step that is guaranteed to work well locally. Our analysis crucially exploits the connection between sparsity in vector problems and low-rankness in matrix problems, which may have other applications in obtaining robust algorithms for sparse and low-rank problems.
tl;dr: We propose a new method based on the theory of causal abstraction to find representations that play a given causal role in LLMs.
Obtaining human-interpretable explanations of large, general-purpose language models is an urgent goal for AI safety. However, it is just as important that our interpretability methods are faithful to the causal dynamics underlying model behavior and able to robustly generalize to unseen inputs. Distributed Alignment Search (DAS) is a powerful gradient descent method grounded in a theory of causal abstraction that uncovered perfect alignments between interpretable symbolic algorithms and small deep learning models fine-tuned for specific tasks. In the present paper, we scale DAS significantly by replacing the remaining brute-force search steps with learned parameters -- an approach we call Boundless DAS. This enables us to efficiently search for interpretable causal structure in large language models while they follow instructions. We apply Boundless DAS to the Alpaca model (7B parameters), which, off the shelf, solves a simple numerical reasoning problem. With Boundless DAS, we discover that Alpaca does this by implementing a causal model with two interpretable boolean variables. Furthermore, we find that the alignment of neural representations with these variables is robust to changes in inputs and instructions. These findings mark a first step toward deeply understanding the inner-workings of our largest and most widely deployed language models.
tl;dr: We propose a general approach for inducing structural distributional shifts that can be applied to any graph dataset and allows for evaluating robustness and uncertainty of graph models in node-level problems.
In reliable decision-making systems based on machine learning, models have to be robust to distributional shifts or provide the uncertainty of their predictions. In node-level problems of graph learning, distributional shifts can be especially complex since the samples are interdependent. To evaluate the performance of graph models, it is important to test them on diverse and meaningful distributional shifts. However, most graph benchmarks considering distributional shifts for node-level problems focus mainly on node features, while structural properties are also essential for graph problems. In this work, we propose a general approach for inducing diverse distributional shifts based on graph structure. We use this approach to create data splits according to several structural node properties: popularity, locality, and density. In our experiments, we thoroughly evaluate the proposed distributional shifts and show that they can be quite challenging for existing graph models. We also reveal that simple models often outperform more sophisticated methods on the considered structural shifts. Finally, our experiments provide evidence that there is a trade-off between the quality of learned representations for the base classification task under structural distributional shift and the ability to separate the nodes from different distributions using these representations.
tl;dr: We develop a novel method for reliable off-policy learning for dosage combinations
Decision-making in personalized medicine such as cancer therapy or critical care must often make choices for dosage combinations, i.e., multiple continuous treatments. Existing work for this task has modeled the effect of multiple treatments independently, while estimating the joint effect has received little attention but comes with non-trivial challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel method for reliable off-policy learning for dosage combinations. Our method proceeds along three steps: (1) We develop a tailored neural network that estimates the individualized dose-response function while accounting for the joint effect of multiple dependent dosages. (2) We estimate the generalized propensity score using conditional normalizing flows in order to detect regions with limited overlap in the shared covariate-treatment space. (3) We present a gradient-based learning algorithm to find the optimal, individualized dosage combinations. Here, we ensure reliable estimation of the policy value by avoiding regions with limited overlap. We finally perform an extensive evaluation of our method to show its effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to provide a method for reliable off-policy learning for optimal dosage combinations.
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to address the challenge of distribution shift between the dataset and the learned policy, where the value of out-of-distribution (OOD) data may be erroneously estimated due to overgeneralization. It has been observed that a considerable portion of the benefits derived from the conservative terms designed by existing offline RL approaches originates from their impact on the learned representation. This observation prompts us to scrutinize the learning dynamics of offline RL, formalize the process of generalization, and delve into the prevalent overgeneralization issue in offline RL. We then investigate the potential to rein the generalization from the representation perspective to enhance offline RL. Finally, we present Representation Distinction (RD), an innovative plug-in method for improving offline RL algorithm performance by explicitly differentiating between the representations of in-sample and OOD state-action pairs generated by the learning policy. Considering scenarios in which the learning policy mirrors the behavioral policy and similar samples may be erroneously distinguished, we suggest a dynamic adjustment mechanism for RD based on an OOD data generator to prevent data representation collapse and further enhance policy performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by applying RD to specially-designed backbone algorithms and widely-used offline RL algorithms. The proposed RD method significantly improves their performance across various continuous control tasks on D4RL datasets, surpassing several state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms.
1945. Slimmed Asymmetrical Contrastive Learning and Cross Distillation for Lightweight Model Training
tl;dr: A novel contrastive learning algorithm designed for lightweight model training from scratch.
Contrastive learning (CL) has been widely investigated with various learning mechanisms and achieves strong capability in learning representations of data in a self-supervised manner using unlabeled data. A common fashion of contrastive learning on this line is employing mega-sized encoders to achieve comparable performance as the supervised learning counterpart. Despite the success of the labelless training, current contrastive learning algorithms *failed* to achieve good performance with lightweight (compact) models, e.g., MobileNet, while the requirements of the heavy encoders impede the energy-efficient computation, especially for resource-constrained AI applications. Motivated by this, we propose a new self-supervised CL scheme, named SACL-XD, consisting of two technical components, **S**limmed **A**symmetrical **C**ontrastive **L**earning (SACL) and **Cross**-**D**istillation (XD), which collectively enable efficient CL with compact models. While relevant prior works employed a strong pre-trained model as the teacher of unsupervised knowledge distillation to a lightweight encoder, our proposed method trains CL models from scratch and outperforms them even without such an expensive requirement. Compared to the SoTA lightweight CL training (distillation) algorithms, SACL-XD achieves 1.79% ImageNet-1K accuracy improvement on MobileNet-V3 with 64$\times$ training FLOPs reduction.
As hyper-parameters are ubiquitous and can significantly affect the model performance, hyper-parameter optimization is extremely important in machine learning. In this paper, we consider a sub-class of hyper-parameter optimization problems, where the hyper-gradients are not available. Such problems frequently appear when the performance metric is non-differentiable or the hyper-parameter is not continuous. However, existing algorithms, like Bayesian optimization and reinforcement learning, often get trapped in local optimals with poor performance. To address the above limitations, we propose to use cubic regularization to accelerate convergence and avoid saddle points. First, we adopt stochastic relaxation, which allows obtaining gradient and Hessian information without hyper-gradients. Then, we exploit the rich curvature information by cubic regularization. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed method can converge to approximate second-order stationary points, and the convergence is also guaranteed when the lower-level problem is inexactly solved. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
tl;dr: Local Sampling Based CIT
Conditional independence (CI) testing is a fundamental task in statistics and machine learning, but its effectiveness is hindered by the challenges posed by high-dimensional conditioning variables and limited data samples. This article introduces a novel testing approach to address these challenges and enhance control of the type I error while achieving high power under alternative hypotheses. The proposed approach incorporates a computationally efficient classifier-based conditional mutual information (CMI) estimator, capable of capturing intricate dependence structures among variables. To approximate a distribution encoding the null hypothesis, a $k$-nearest-neighbor local sampling strategy is employed. An important advantage of this approach is its ability to operate without assumptions about distribution forms or feature dependencies. Furthermore, it eliminates the need to derive asymptotic null distributions for the estimated CMI and avoids dataset splitting, making it particularly suitable for small datasets. The method presented in this article demonstrates asymptotic control of the type I error and consistency against all alternative hypotheses. Extensive analyses using both synthetic and real data highlight the computational efficiency of the proposed test. Moreover, it outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of type I and II errors, even in scenarios with high-dimensional conditioning sets. Additionally, the proposed approach exhibits robustness in the presence of heavy-tailed data.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a novel method of explaining the decision-making process of a deep reinforcement learning policy.
Despite the promising performance of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents in many challenging scenarios, the black-box nature of these agents greatly limits their applications in critical domains. Prior research has proposed several explanation techniques to understand the deep learning-based policies in RL. Most existing methods explain why an agent takes individual actions rather than pinpointing the critical steps to its final reward. To fill this gap, we propose StateMask, a novel method to identify the states most critical to the agent's final reward. The high-level idea of StateMask is to learn a mask net that blinds a target agent and forces it to take random actions at some steps without compromising the agent's performance. Through careful design, we can theoretically ensure that the masked agent performs similarly to the original agent. We evaluate StateMask in various popular RL environments and show its superiority over existing explainers in explanation fidelity. We also show that StateMask has better utilities, such as launching adversarial attacks and patching policy errors.
1949. Learning to Search Feasible and Infeasible Regions of Routing Problems with Flexible Neural k-Opt
tl;dr: We present a novel and flexible Neural k-Opt (NeuOpt) solver for routing problems that enables autonomous exploration of both feasible and infeasible regions.
In this paper, we present Neural k-Opt (NeuOpt), a novel learning-to-search (L2S) solver for routing problems. It learns to perform flexible k-opt exchanges based on a tailored action factorization method and a customized recurrent dual-stream decoder. As a pioneering work to circumvent the pure feasibility masking scheme and enable the autonomous exploration of both feasible and infeasible regions, we then propose the Guided Infeasible Region Exploration (GIRE) scheme, which supplements the NeuOpt policy network with feasibility-related features and leverages reward shaping to steer reinforcement learning more effectively. Additionally, we equip NeuOpt with Dynamic Data Augmentation (D2A) for more diverse searches during inference. Extensive experiments on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) demonstrate that our NeuOpt not only significantly outstrips existing (masking-based) L2S solvers, but also showcases superiority over the learning-to-construct (L2C) and learning-to-predict (L2P) solvers. Notably, we offer fresh perspectives on how neural solvers can handle VRP constraints. Our code is available: https://github.com/yining043/NeuOpt.
tl;dr: We propose a safe reinforcement learning method based on the trust region method and distributional critics for multiple constraints.
In safety-critical robotic tasks, potential failures must be reduced, and multiple constraints must be met, such as avoiding collisions, limiting energy consumption, and maintaining balance.
Thus, applying safe reinforcement learning (RL) in such robotic tasks requires to handle multiple constraints and use risk-averse constraints rather than risk-neutral constraints.
To this end, we propose a trust region-based safe RL algorithm for multiple constraints called a safe distributional actor-critic (SDAC).
Our main contributions are as follows: 1) introducing a gradient integration method to manage infeasibility issues in multi-constrained problems, ensuring theoretical convergence, and 2) developing a TD($\lambda$) target distribution to estimate risk-averse constraints with low biases.
We evaluate SDAC through extensive experiments involving multi- and single-constrained robotic tasks.
While maintaining high scores, SDAC shows 1.93 times fewer steps to satisfy all constraints in multi-constrained tasks and 1.78 times fewer constraint violations in single-constrained tasks compared to safe RL baselines.
Code is available at: https://github.com/rllab-snu/Safe-Distributional-Actor-Critic.
tl;dr: Accurate protein side-chain packing via an autoregressive diffusion model in torsion space
Proteins play a critical role in carrying out biological functions, and their 3D structures are essential in determining their functions.
Accurately predicting the conformation of protein side-chains given their backbones is important for applications in protein structure prediction, design and protein-protein interactions. Traditional methods are computationally intensive and have limited accuracy, while existing machine learning methods treat the problem as a regression task and overlook the restrictions imposed by the constant covalent bond lengths and angles. In this work, we present DiffPack, a torsional diffusion model that learns the joint distribution of side-chain torsional angles, the only degrees of freedom in side-chain packing, by diffusing and denoising on the torsional space. To avoid issues arising from simultaneous perturbation of all four torsional angles, we propose autoregressively generating the four torsional angles from $\chi_1$ to $\chi_4$ and training diffusion models for each torsional angle. We evaluate the method on several benchmarks for protein side-chain packing and show that our method achieves improvements of 11.9% and 13.5% in angle accuracy on CASP13 and CASP14, respectively, with a significantly smaller model size ($60\times$ fewer parameters). Additionally, we show the effectiveness of our method in enhancing side-chain predictions in the AlphaFold2 model. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/DiffPack.
tl;dr: Learning to gate information (in the input space) in accordance with any given downstream loss
Informational parsimony provides a useful inductive bias for learning representations that achieve better generalization by being robust to noise and spurious correlations. We propose *information gating* as a way to learn parsimonious representations that identify the minimal information required for a task. When gating information, we can learn to reveal as little information as possible so that a task remains solvable, or hide as little information as possible so that a task becomes unsolvable. We gate information using a differentiable parameterization of the signal-to-noise ratio, which can be applied to arbitrary values in a network, e.g., erasing pixels at the input layer or activations in some intermediate layer. When gating at the input layer, our models learn which visual cues matter for a given task. When gating intermediate layers, our models learn which activations are needed for subsequent stages of computation. We call our approach *InfoGating*. We apply InfoGating to various objectives such as multi-step forward and inverse dynamics models, Q-learning, and behavior cloning, highlighting how InfoGating can naturally help in discarding information not relevant for control. Results show that learning to identify and use minimal information can improve generalization in downstream tasks. Policies based on InfoGating are considerably more robust to irrelevant visual features, leading to improved pretraining and finetuning of RL models.
tl;dr: We propose a simple and novel method called parallel-mentoring to improve the ensemble robustness by facilitating the exchange of weak ranking supervision signals among proxies.
We study offline model-based optimization to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset of designs and scores. These designs encompass a variety of domains, including materials, robots, DNA sequences, and proteins. A common approach trains a proxy on the static dataset and performs gradient ascent to obtain new designs. However, this often results in poor designs due to the proxy inaccuracies for out-of-distribution designs. Recent studies indicate that (a) gradient ascent with a mean ensemble of proxies generally outperforms simple gradient ascent, and (b) a trained proxy provides weak ranking supervision signals for design selection. Motivated by (a) and (b), we propose $\textit{parallel-mentoring}$ as an effective and novel method that facilitates mentoring among proxies, creating a more robust ensemble to mitigate the out-of-distribution issue. We focus on the three-proxy case in the main paper and our method consists of two modules. The first module, $\textit{voting-based pairwise supervision}$, operates on three parallel proxies and captures their ranking supervision signals as pairwise comparison labels. These labels are combined through majority voting to generate consensus labels, which incorporates ranking supervision signals from all proxies and enables mutual mentoring. Yet, label noise arises due to possible incorrect consensus. To alleviate this, we introduce an $\textit{adaptive soft-labeling}$ module with soft-labels initialized as consensus labels. Based on bi-level optimization, this module fine-tunes proxies in the inner level and learns more accurate labels in the outer level to adaptively mentor proxies, resulting in a more robust ensemble. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available here.
tl;dr: Model evaluation in tabular data settings using synthetic data
Evaluating the performance of machine learning models on diverse and underrepresented subgroups is essential for ensuring fairness and reliability in real-world applications. However, accurately assessing model performance becomes challenging due to two main issues: (1) a scarcity of test data, especially for small subgroups, and (2) possible distributional shifts in the model's deployment setting, which may not align with the available test data. In this work, we introduce 3S Testing, a deep generative modeling framework to facilitate model evaluation by generating synthetic test sets for small subgroups and simulating distributional shifts. Our experiments demonstrate that 3S-Testing outperforms traditional baselines---including real test data alone---in estimating model performance on minority subgroups and under plausible distributional shifts. In addition, 3S offers intervals around its performance estimates, exhibiting superior coverage of the ground truth compared to existing approaches. Overall, these results raise the question of whether we need a paradigm shift away from limited real test data towards synthetic test data.
In this paper, we consider the uncertainty quantification problem for regression models. Specifically, we consider an individual calibration objective for characterizing the quantiles of the prediction model. While such an objective is well-motivated from downstream tasks such as newsvendor cost, the existing methods have been largely heuristic and lack of statistical guarantee in terms of individual calibration. We show via simple examples that the existing methods focusing on population-level calibration guarantees such as average calibration or sharpness can lead to harmful and unexpected results. We propose simple nonparametric calibration methods that are agnostic of the underlying prediction model and enjoy both computational efficiency and statistical consistency. Our approach enables a better understanding of the possibility of individual calibration, and we establish matching upper and lower bounds for the calibration error of our proposed methods. Technically, our analysis combines the nonparametric analysis with a covering number argument for parametric analysis, which advances the existing theoretical analyses in the literature of nonparametric density estimation and quantile bandit problems. Importantly, the nonparametric perspective sheds new theoretical insights into regression calibration in terms of the curse of dimensionality and reconciles the existing results on the impossibility of individual calibration. To our knowledge, we make the first effort to reach both individual calibration and finite-sample guarantee with minimal assumptions in terms of conformal prediction. Numerical experiments show the advantage of such a simple approach under various metrics, and also under covariates shift. We hope our work provides a simple benchmark and a starting point of theoretical ground for future research on regression calibration.
tl;dr: Many different fairness notions have been introduced in fair clustering in a disjoint manner. We show the first algorithm that can satisfy two specific fairness constraints simultaneously and prove their incompatibly with other constraints.
The remarkable attention which fair clustering has received in the last few years has resulted in a significant number of different notions of fairness. Despite the fact that these notions are well-justified, they are often motivated and studied in a disjoint manner where one fairness desideratum is considered exclusively in isolation from the others. This leaves the understanding of the relations between different fairness notions as an important open problem in fair clustering. In this paper, we take the first step in this direction. Specifically, we consider the two most prominent demographic representation fairness notions in clustering: (1) Group Fairness ($\textbf{GF}$), where the different demographic groups are supposed to have close to population-level representation in each cluster and (2) Diversity in Center Selection ($\textbf{DS}$), where the selected centers are supposed to have close to population-level representation of each group. We show that given a constant approximation algorithm for one constraint ($\textbf{GF}$ or $\textbf{DS}$ only) we can obtain a constant approximation solution that satisfies both constraints simultaneously. Interestingly, we prove that any given solution that satisfies the $\textbf{GF}$ constraint can always be post-processed at a bounded degradation to the clustering cost to additionally satisfy the $\textbf{DS}$ constraint while the same statement is not true given a solution that satisfies $\textbf{DS}$ instead. Furthermore, we show that both $\textbf{GF}$ and $\textbf{DS}$ are incompatible (having an empty feasibility set in the worst case) with a collection of other distance-based fairness notions. Finally, we carry experiments to validate our theoretical findings.
1957. Uncertainty Estimation for Safety-critical Scene Segmentation via Fine-grained Reward Maximization
Uncertainty estimation plays an important role for future reliable deployment of deep segmentation models in safety-critical scenarios such as medical applications. However, existing methods for uncertainty estimation have been limited by the lack of explicit guidance for calibrating the prediction risk and model confidence. In this work, we propose a novel fine-grained reward maximization (FGRM) framework, to address uncertainty estimation by directly utilizing an uncertainty metric related reward function with a reinforcement learning based model tuning algorithm. This would benefit the model uncertainty estimation with direct optimization guidance for model calibration. Specifically, our method designs a new uncertainty estimation reward function using the calibration metric, which is maximized to fine-tune an evidential learning pre-trained segmentation model for calibrating prediction risk. Importantly, we innovate an effective fine-grained parameter update scheme, which imposes fine-grained reward-weighting of each network parameter according to the parameter importance quantified by the fisher information matrix. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work exploring reward optimization for model uncertainty estimation in safety-critical vision tasks. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on two large safety-critical surgical scene segmentation datasets under two different uncertainty estimation settings. With real-time one forward pass at inference, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on all the calibration metrics of uncertainty estimation, while maintaining a high task accuracy for the segmentation results. Code is available at https://github.com/med-air/FGRM.
This paper introduces a novel task called Cross Modal Generalization (CMG), which addresses the challenge of learning a unified discrete representation from paired multimodal data during pre-training. Then in downstream tasks, the model can achieve zero-shot generalization ability in other modalities when only one modal is labeled. Existing approaches in multimodal representation learning focus more on coarse-grained alignment or rely on the assumption that
information from different modalities is completely aligned, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{Uni-Code}, which contains two key contributions: the Dual Cross-modal Information Disentangling (DCID) module and the Multi-Modal Exponential Moving Average (MM-EMA). These methods facilitate bidirectional supervision between modalities and align semantically equivalent information in a shared discrete latent space, enabling fine-grained unified representation of multimodal sequences. During pre-training, we investigate various modality combinations, including audio-visual, audio-text, and the tri-modal combination of audio-visual-text. Extensive experiments on various downstream tasks, i.e., cross-modal event classification, localization, cross-modal retrieval, query-based video segmentation, and cross-dataset event localization, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The code is available at https://github.com/haihuangcode/CMG.
tl;dr: We design an efficient multi-hop graph attention mechanism based on rooted subtrees.
Attention mechanisms have made significant strides in graph learning, yet they still exhibit notable limitations: local attention faces challenges in capturing long-range information due to the inherent problems of the message-passing scheme, while global attention cannot reflect the hierarchical neighborhood structure and fails to capture fine-grained local information. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-hop graph attention mechanism, named Subtree Attention (STA), to address the aforementioned issues. STA seamlessly bridges the fully-attentional structure and the rooted subtree, with theoretical proof that STA approximates the global attention under extreme settings. By allowing direct computation of attention weights among multi-hop neighbors, STA mitigates the inherent problems in existing graph attention mechanisms. Further we devise an efficient form for STA by employing kernelized softmax, which yields a linear time complexity. Our resulting GNN architecture, the STAGNN, presents a simple yet performant STA-based graph neural network leveraging a hop-aware attention strategy. Comprehensive evaluations on ten node classification datasets demonstrate that STA-based models outperform existing graph transformers and mainstream GNNs. The code
is available at https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/SubTree-Attention.
tl;dr: A unified concept learning and reasoning framework that integrates LLMs with learnable grounding modules across domains.
Recent works such as VisProg and ViperGPT have smartly composed foundation models for visual reasoning—using large language models (LLMs) to produce programs that can be executed by pre-trained vision-language models. However, they operate in limited domains, such as 2D images, not fully exploiting the generalization of language: abstract concepts like “*left*” can also be grounded in 3D, temporal, and action data, as in moving to your *left*. This limited generalization stems from these inference-only methods’ inability to learn or adapt pre-trained models to a new domain. We propose the **L**ogic-**E**nhanced **F**ounda**T**ion Model (**LEFT**), a unified framework that *learns* to ground and reason with concepts across domains with a differentiable, domain-independent, first-order logic-based program executor. LEFT has an LLM interpreter that outputs a program represented in a general, logic-based reasoning language, which is shared across all domains and tasks. LEFT’s executor then executes the program with trainable domain-specific grounding modules. We show that LEFT flexibly learns concepts in four domains: 2D images, 3D scenes, human motions, and robotic manipulation. It exhibits strong reasoning ability in a wide variety of tasks, including those that are complex and not seen during training, and can be easily applied to new domains.
Can machines recording an audio-visual scene produce realistic, matching audio-visual experiences at novel positions and novel view directions? We answer it by studying a new task---real-world audio-visual scene synthesis---and a first-of-its-kind NeRF-based approach for multimodal learning. Concretely, given a video recording of an audio-visual scene, the task is to synthesize new videos with spatial audios along arbitrary novel camera trajectories in that scene. We propose an acoustic-aware audio generation module that integrates prior knowledge of audio propagation into NeRF, in which we implicitly associate audio generation with the 3D geometry and material properties of a visual environment. Furthermore, we present a coordinate transformation module that expresses a view direction relative to the sound source, enabling the model to learn sound source-centric acoustic fields. To facilitate the study of this new task, we collect a high-quality Real-World Audio-Visual Scene (RWAVS) dataset. We demonstrate the advantages of our method on this real-world dataset and the simulation-based SoundSpaces dataset. Notably, we refer readers to view our demo videos for convincing comparisons.
tl;dr: A novel deep hashing framework based on product quantization (PQ) for Large-Scale Image Retrieval
Due to its promising performance, deep hashing has become a prevalent method for approximate nearest neighbors search (ANNs). However, most of current deep hashing methods are validated on relatively small-scale datasets, leaving potential threats when are applied to large-scale real-world scenarios. Specifically, they can be constrained either by the computational cost due to the large number of training categories and samples, or unsatisfactory accuracy. To tackle those issues, we propose a novel deep hashing framework based on product quantization (PQ). It uses a softmax-based differentiable PQ branch to learn a set of predefined PQ codes of the classes. Our method is easy to implement, does not involve large-scale matrix operations, and learns highly discriminate compact codes. We validate our method on multiple large-scaled datasets, including ImageNet100, ImageNet1K, and Glint360K, where the category size scales from 100 to 360K and sample number scales from 10K to 17 million, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/yuleung/FPPQ.
tl;dr: We challenge "continued pre-training typically improves fine-tuning performance" and propose a new approach. It consistently improves the performance of prompt-based fine-tuning (up to 20.1% absolute) and outperforms SOTA semi-supervised methods.
Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on task-related texts improves the performance of fine-tuning (FT) in downstream tasks. Through experiments on eight single-sentence tasks and eight sentence-pair tasks in both semi-supervised and fully-supervised settings, we find that conventional continued pre-training does not consistently provide benefits and can even be detrimental for sentence-pair tasks or when prompt-based FT is used. To tackle these issues, we propose Prompt-based Continued Pre-training (PCP), which combines the idea of instruction tuning with conventional continued pre-training. Our approach aims to improve the performance of prompt-based FT by presenting both task-related texts and prompt templates to LMs through unsupervised pre-training objectives before fine-tuning for the target task. Our empirical evaluations on 21 benchmarks demonstrate that the PCP consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art prompt-based FT approaches (up to 20.1% absolute) in both semi-supervised and fully-supervised settings, even with only hundreds of unlabelled examples. Additionally, prompt-based FT with PCP outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised approaches with greater simplicity, eliminating the need for an iterative process and extra data augmentation. Our further analysis explores the performance lower bound of the PCP and reveals that the advantages of PCP persist across different sizes of models and datasets.
tl;dr: PTAS and streaming algorithms for dictionary learning and clustering via sketching
Sketching algorithms have recently proven to be a powerful approach both for designing low-space streaming algorithms as well as fast polynomial time approximation schemes (PTAS). In this work, we develop new techniques to extend the applicability of sketching-based approaches to the sparse dictionary learning and the Euclidean $k$-means clustering problems. In particular, we initiate the study of the challenging setting where the dictionary/clustering assignment for each of the $n$ input points must be output, which has surprisingly received little attention in prior work. On the fast algorithms front, we obtain a new approach for designing PTAS's for the $k$-means clustering problem, which generalizes to the first PTAS for the sparse dictionary learning problem. On the streaming algorithms front, we obtain new upper bounds and lower bounds for dictionary learning and $k$-means clustering. In particular, given a design matrix $\mathbf A\in\mathbb R^{n\times d}$ in a turnstile stream, we show an $\tilde O(nr/\epsilon^2 + dk/\epsilon)$ space upper bound for $r$-sparse dictionary learning of size $k$, an $\tilde O(n/\epsilon^2 + dk/\epsilon)$ space upper bound for $k$-means clustering, as well as an $\tilde O(n)$ space upper bound for $k$-means clustering on random order row insertion streams with a natural "bounded sensitivity" assumption. On the lower bounds side, we obtain a general $\tilde\Omega(n/\epsilon + dk/\epsilon)$ lower bound for $k$-means clustering, as well as an $\tilde\Omega(n/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound for algorithms which can estimate the cost of a single fixed set of candidate centers.
In structured prediction, target objects have rich internal structure which does not factorize into independent components and violates common i.i.d. assumptions. This challenge becomes apparent through the exponentially large output space in applications such as image segmentation or scene graph generation.
We present a novel PAC-Bayesian risk bound for structured prediction wherein the rate of generalization scales not only with the number of structured examples but also with their size.
The underlying assumption, conforming to ongoing research on generative models, is that data are generated by the Knothe-Rosenblatt rearrangement of a factorizing reference measure. This allows to explicitly distill the structure between random output variables into a Wasserstein dependency matrix.
Our work makes a preliminary step towards leveraging powerful generative models to establish generalization bounds for discriminative downstream tasks in the challenging setting of structured prediction.
tl;dr: We prove that the sample complexity of PAC learning noisy recurrent neural networks is logarithmic in the sequence length T while for the non-noisy networks the sample complexity grows at least linearly with T.
We consider the class of noisy multi-layered sigmoid recurrent neural networks with $w$ (unbounded) weights for classification of sequences of length $T$, where independent noise distributed according to $\mathcal{N}(0,\sigma^2)$ is added to the output of each neuron in the network. Our main result shows that the sample complexity of PAC learning this class can be bounded by $O (w\log(T/\sigma))$. For the non-noisy version of the same class (i.e., $\sigma=0$), we prove a lower bound of $\Omega (wT)$ for the sample complexity.
Our results indicate an exponential gap in the dependence of sample complexity on $T$ for noisy versus non-noisy networks. Moreover, given the mild logarithmic dependence of the upper bound on $1/\sigma$, this gap still holds even for numerically negligible values of $\sigma$.
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated the potential in acting as autonomous agents for sequential decision-making tasks. However, most existing methods either take actions greedily without planning or rely on static plans that are not adaptable to environmental feedback. Consequently, the sequential decision-making performance of LLM agents degenerates with problem complexity and plan horizons increase. We propose a closed-loop approach, AdaPlanner, which allows the LLM agent to refine its self-generated plan adaptively in response to environmental feedback. In AdaPlanner, the LLM agent adaptively refines its plan from feedback with both in-plan and out-of-plan refinement strategies. To mitigate hallucination, we develop a code-style LLM prompt structure that facilitates plan generation across a variety of tasks, environments, and agent capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a skill discovery mechanism that leverages successful plans as few-shot exemplars, enabling the agent to plan and refine with fewer task demonstrations. Our experiments in the ALFWorld and MiniWoB++ environments demonstrate that AdaPlanner outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 3.73% and 4.11% while utilizing 2x and 600x fewer samples, respectively. The implementation of AdaPlanner is available at https://github.com/haotiansun14/AdaPlanner.
Controlled variable selection is an important analytical step in various scientific fields, such as brain imaging or genomics. In these high-dimensional data settings, considering too many variables leads to poor models and high costs, hence the need for statistical guarantees on false positives. Knockoffs are a popular statistical tool for conditional variable selection in high dimension. However, they control for the expected proportion of false discoveries (FDR) and not the actual proportion of false discoveries (FDP). We present a new method, KOPI, that controls the proportion of false discoveries for Knockoff-based inference. The proposed method also relies on a new type of aggregation to address the undesirable randomness associated with classical Knockoff inference. We demonstrate FDP control and substantial power gains over existing Knockoff-based methods in various simulation settings and achieve good sensitivity/specificity tradeoffs on brain imaging data.
tl;dr: Introducing LANCER, a versatile framework designed to tackle challenging optimization problems, such as those found in nonlinear combinatorial problems, smart predict+optimize framework, etc.
Recent works in learning-integrated optimization have shown promise in settings where the optimization problem is only partially observed or where general-purpose optimizers perform poorly without expert tuning. By learning an optimizer $\mathbf{g}$ to tackle these challenging problems with $f$ as the objective, the optimization process can be substantially accelerated by leveraging past experience. The optimizer can be trained with supervision from known optimal solutions or implicitly by optimizing the compound function $f\circ \mathbf{g}$. The implicit approach may not require optimal solutions as labels and is capable of handling problem uncertainty; however, it is slow to train and deploy due to frequent calls to optimizer $\mathbf{g}$ during both training and testing. The training is further challenged by sparse gradients of $\mathbf{g}$, especially for combinatorial solvers. To address these challenges, we propose using a smooth and learnable **Landscape Surrogate** $\mathcal{M}$ as a replacement for $f\circ \mathbf{g}$. This surrogate, learnable by neural networks, can be computed faster than the solver $\mathbf{g}$, provides dense and smooth gradients during training, can generalize to unseen optimization problems, and is efficiently learned via alternating optimization. We test our approach on both synthetic problems, including shortest path and multidimensional knapsack, and real-world problems such as portfolio optimization, achieving comparable or superior objective values compared to state-of-the-art baselines while reducing the number of calls to $\mathbf{g}$. Notably, our approach outperforms existing methods for computationally expensive high-dimensional problems.
In reinforcement learning (RL), simplicity is typically quantified on an action-by-action basis -- but this timescale ignores temporal regularities, like repetitions, often present in sequential strategies. We therefore propose an RL algorithm that learns to solve tasks with sequences of actions that are compressible. We explore two possible sources of simple action sequences: Sequences that can be learned by autoregressive models, and sequences that are compressible with off-the-shelf data compression algorithms. Distilling these preferences into sequence priors, we derive a novel information-theoretic objective that incentivizes agents to learn policies that maximize rewards while conforming to these priors. We show that the resulting RL algorithm leads to faster learning, and attains higher returns than state-of-the-art model-free approaches in a series of continuous control tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite. These priors also produce a powerful information-regularized agent that is robust to noisy observations and can perform open-loop control.
tl;dr: Use attention and features from the denoising forward pass to guide diffusion sampling - change object size, position, and appearance without affecting the rest of the scene, and much more!
Large-scale generative models are capable of producing high-quality images from detailed prompts. However, many aspects of an image are difficult or impossible to convey through text. We introduce self-guidance, a method that provides precise control over properties of the generated image by guiding the internal representations of diffusion models. We demonstrate that the size, location, and appearance of objects can be extracted from these representations, and show how to use them to steer the sampling process. Self-guidance operates similarly to standard classifier guidance, but uses signals present in the pretrained model itself, requiring no additional models or training. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of self-guided generation through a wide range of challenging image manipulations, such as modifying the position or size of a single object (keeping the rest of the image unchanged), merging the appearance of objects in one image with the layout of another, composing objects from multiple images into one, and more. We also propose a new method for reconstruction using self-guidance, which allows extending our approach to editing real images.
Successful graph generation depends on the accurate estimation of the joint distribution of graph components such as nodes and edges from training data. While recent deep neural networks have demonstrated sampling of realistic graphs together with diffusion models, however, they still suffer from oversmoothing problems which are inherited from conventional graph convolution and thus high-frequency characteristics of nodes and edges become intractable. To overcome such issues and generate graphs with high fidelity, this paper introduces a novel approach that captures the dependency between nodes and edges at multiple resolutions in the spectral space. By modeling the joint distribution of node and edge signals in a shared graph wavelet space, together with a score-based diffusion model, we propose a Wavelet Graph Diffusion Model (Wave-GD) which lets us sample synthetic graphs with real-like frequency characteristics of nodes and edges. Experimental results on four representative benchmark datasets validate the superiority of the Wave-GD over existing approaches, highlighting its potential for a wide range of applications that involve graph data.
Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types, functionality or APIs defined elsewhere in the repository or a linked library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating.
Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers in understanding repository context using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to LMs. We propose monitor-guided decoding (MGD) where a monitor uses static analysis to guide the decoding. We construct a repository-level dataset PragmaticCode for method-completion in Java and evaluate MGD on it. On models of varying parameter scale, by monitoring for type-consistent object dereferences, MGD consistently improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. Further, LMs with fewer parameters, when augmented with MGD, can outperform larger LMs. With MGD, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model.
We also conduct a generalizability study to evaluate the ability of MGD to generalize to multiple programming languages (Java, C# and Rust), coding scenarios (e.g., correct number of arguments to method calls), and to enforce richer semantic constraints (e.g., stateful API protocols). Our data and implementation are available at https://github.com/microsoft/monitors4codegen.
tl;dr: A novel approach to continual learning that leverages task-based neuron saliency to selectively retain and revise important information while actively promoting the learning of less active neurons through rewinding and relearning.
Continual learning (CL) has remained a persistent challenge for deep neural networks due to catastrophic forgetting (CF) of previously learned tasks. Several techniques such as weight regularization, experience rehearsal, and parameter isolation have been proposed to alleviate CF. Despite their relative success, these research directions have predominantly remained orthogonal and suffer from several shortcomings, while missing out on the advantages of competing strategies. On the contrary, the brain continually learns, accommodates, and transfers knowledge across tasks by simultaneously leveraging several neurophysiological processes, including neurogenesis, active forgetting, neuromodulation, metaplasticity, experience rehearsal, and context-dependent gating, rarely resulting in CF. Inspired by how the brain exploits multiple mechanisms concurrently, we propose TriRE, a novel CL paradigm that encompasses retaining the most prominent neurons for each task, revising and solidifying the extracted knowledge of current and past tasks, and actively promoting less active neurons for subsequent tasks through rewinding and relearning. Across CL settings, TriRE significantly reduces task interference and surpasses different CL approaches considered in isolation.
1975. Is Heterogeneity Notorious? Taming Heterogeneity to Handle Test-Time Shift in Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) is an effective machine learning paradigm where multiple clients can train models based on heterogeneous data in a decentralized manner without accessing their private data. However, existing FL systems undergo performance deterioration due to feature-level test-time shifts, which are well investigated in centralized settings but rarely studied in FL. The common non-IID issue in FL usually refers to inter-client heterogeneity during training phase, while the test-time shift refers to the intra-client heterogeneity during test phase. Although the former is always deemed to be notorious for FL, there is still a wealth of useful information delivered by heterogeneous data sources, which may potentially help alleviate the latter issue. To explore the possibility of using inter-client heterogeneity in handling intra-client heterogeneity, we firstly propose a contrastive learning-based FL framework, namely FedICON, to capture invariant knowledge among heterogeneous clients and consistently tune the model to adapt to test data. In FedICON, each client performs sample-wise supervised contrastive learning during the local training phase, which enhances sample-wise invariance encoding ability. Through global aggregation, the invariance extraction ability can be mutually boosted among inter-client heterogeneity. During the test phase, our test-time adaptation procedure leverages unsupervised contrastive learning to guide the model to smoothly generalize to test data under intra-client heterogeneity. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed FedICON in taming heterogeneity to handle test-time shift problems.
tl;dr: Towards understanding modern generative data augmentation techniques.
Generative data augmentation, which scales datasets by obtaining fake labeled examples from a trained conditional generative model, boosts classification performance in various learning tasks including (semi-)supervised learning, few-shot learning, and adversarially robust learning. However, little work has theoretically investigated the effect of generative data augmentation. To fill this gap, we establish a general stability bound in this not independently and identically
distributed (non-i.i.d.) setting, where the learned distribution is dependent on the original train set and generally not the same as the true distribution. Our theoretical result includes the divergence between the learned distribution and the true distribution. It shows that generative data augmentation can enjoy a faster learning rate when the order of divergence term is $o(\max\left( \log(m)\beta_m, 1 / \sqrt{m})\right)$, where $m$ is the train set size and $\beta_m$ is the corresponding stability constant. We further specify the learning setup to the Gaussian mixture model and generative adversarial nets. We prove that in both cases, though generative data augmentation does not enjoy a faster learning rate, it can improve the learning guarantees at a constant level when the train set is small, which is significant when the awful overfitting occurs. Simulation results on the Gaussian mixture model and empirical results on generative adversarial nets support our theoretical conclusions.
Neural network (NN) denoisers are an essential building block in many common tasks, ranging from image reconstruction to image generation. However, the success of these models is not well understood from a theoretical perspective. In this paper, we aim to characterize the functions realized by shallow ReLU NN denoisers --- in the common theoretical setting of interpolation (i.e., zero training loss) with a minimal representation cost (i.e., minimal $\ell^2$ norm weights). First, for univariate data, we derive a closed form for the NN denoiser function, find it is contractive toward the clean data points, and prove it generalizes better than the empirical MMSE estimator at a low noise level. Next, for multivariate data, we find the NN denoiser functions in a closed form under various geometric assumptions on the training data: data contained in a low-dimensional subspace, data contained in a union of one-sided rays, or several types of simplexes. These functions decompose into a sum of simple rank-one piecewise linear interpolations aligned with edges and/or faces connecting training samples.
We empirically verify this alignment phenomenon on synthetic data and real images.
tl;dr: We propose a bandit algorithm that leverages prior data from different environments to learn more efficiently.
A unifying theme in the design of intelligent agents is to efficiently optimize a policy based on what prior knowledge of the problem is available and what actions can be taken to learn more about it. Bandits are a canonical instance of this task that has been intensely studied in the literature. Most methods, however, typically rely solely on an agent's experimentation in a single environment (or multiple closely related environments). In this paper, we relax this assumption and consider the design of bandit algorithms from a combination of batch data and qualitative assumptions about the relatedness across different environments, represented in the form of causal models. In particular, we show that it is possible to exploit invariances across environments, wherever they may occur in the underlying causal model, to consistently improve learning. The resulting bandit algorithm has a sub-linear regret bound with an explicit dependency on a term that captures how informative related environments are for the task at hand; and may have substantially lower regret than experimentation-only bandit instances.
tl;dr: We present DropPos, a novel self-supervised pretext task that enhances the location awareness of ViTs.
As it is empirically observed that Vision Transformers (ViTs) are quite insensitive to the order of input tokens, the need for an appropriate self-supervised pretext task that enhances the location awareness of ViTs is becoming evident. To address this, we present DropPos, a novel pretext task designed to reconstruct Dropped Positions. The formulation of DropPos is simple: we first drop a large random subset of positional embeddings and then the model classifies the actual position for each non-overlapping patch among all possible positions solely based on their visual appearance. To avoid trivial solutions, we increase the difficulty of this task by keeping only a subset of patches visible. Additionally, considering there may be different patches with similar visual appearances, we propose position smoothing and attentive reconstruction strategies to relax this classification problem, since it is not necessary to reconstruct their exact positions in these cases. Empirical evaluations of DropPos show strong capabilities. DropPos outperforms supervised pre-training and achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art self-supervised alternatives on a wide range of downstream benchmarks. This suggests that explicitly encouraging spatial reasoning abilities, as DropPos does, indeed contributes to the improved location awareness of ViTs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/DropPos.
tl;dr: This paper studies the context shift problem in offline meta-reinforcement learning and proposes a novel to address this problem.
Offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) utilizes pre-collected offline datasets to enhance the agent's generalization ability on unseen tasks. However, the context shift problem arises due to the distribution discrepancy between the contexts used for training (from the behavior policy) and testing (from the exploration policy). The context shift problem leads to incorrect task inference and further deteriorates the generalization ability of the meta-policy. Existing OMRL methods either overlook this problem or attempt to mitigate it with additional information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Context Shift Reduction for OMRL (CSRO) to address the context shift problem with only offline datasets. The key insight of CSRO is to minimize the influence of policy in context during both the meta-training and meta-test phases. During meta-training, we design a max-min mutual information representation learning mechanism to diminish the impact of the behavior policy on task representation. In the meta-test phase, we introduce the non-prior context collection strategy to reduce the effect of the exploration policy. Experimental results demonstrate that CSRO significantly reduces the context shift and improves the generalization ability, surpassing previous methods across various challenging domains.
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has shown superior performance in representation learning in graph-structured data. Despite their success, most existing GCL methods rely on prefabricated graph augmentation and homophily assumptions. Thus, they fail to generalize well to heterophilic graphs where connected nodes may have different class labels and dissimilar features. In this paper, we study the problem of conducting contrastive learning on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. We find that we can achieve promising performance simply by considering an asymmetric view of the neighboring nodes. The resulting simple algorithm, Asymmetric Contrastive Learning for Graphs (GraphACL), is easy to implement and does not rely on graph augmentations and homophily assumptions. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that GraphACL can capture one-hop local neighborhood information and two-hop monophily similarity, which are both important for modeling heterophilic graphs. Experimental results show that the simple GraphACL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art graph contrastive learning and self-supervised learning methods on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. The code of GraphACL is available at https://github.com/tengxiao1/GraphACL.
Graph learning from signals is a core task in graph signal processing (GSP). A significant subclass of graph signals called the stationary graph signals that broadens the concept of stationarity of data defined on regular domains to signals on graphs is gaining increasing popularity in the GSP community. The most commonly used model to learn graphs from these stationary signals is SpecT, which forms the foundation for nearly all the subsequent, more advanced models. Despite its strengths, the practical formulation of the model, known as rSpecT, has been identified to be susceptible to the choice of hyperparameters. More critically, it may suffer from infeasibility as an optimization problem. In this paper, we introduce the first condition that ensures the infeasibility of rSpecT and design a novel model called LogSpecT, along with its practical formulation rLogSpecT to overcome this issue. Contrary to rSpecT, our novel practical model rLogSpecT is always feasible. Furthermore, we provide recovery guarantees of rLogSpecT from modern optimization tools related to epi-convergence, which could be of independent interest and significant for various learning problems. To demonstrate the practical advantages of rLogSpecT, a highly efficient algorithm based on the linearized alternating direction method of multipliers (L-ADMM) that allows closed-form solutions for each subproblem is proposed with convergence guarantees. Extensive numerical results on both synthetic and real networks not only corroborate the stability of our proposed methods, but also highlight their comparable and even superior performance than existing models.
tl;dr: We propose TWIST, a method for training SpeechLMs using a warm-start from a pretrained textual language model.
Speech language models (SpeechLMs) process and generate acoustic data only, without textual supervision. In this work, we propose TWIST, a method for training SpeechLMs using a warm-start from a pretrained textual language models. We show using both automatic and human evaluations that TWIST outperforms a cold-start SpeechLM across the board. We empirically analyze the effect of different model design choices such as the speech tokenizer, the pretrained textual model, and the dataset size. We find that model and dataset scale both play an important role in constructing better-performing SpeechLMs. Based on our observations, we present the largest (to the best of our knowledge) SpeechLM both in terms of number of parameters and training data. We additionally introduce two spoken versions of the StoryCloze textual benchmark to further improve model evaluation and advance future research in the field. We make speech samples, code and models publicly available.
tl;dr: Communication efficient sparsification based distributed vector mean estimation leveraging cross-client correlation information through random projection.
We study the problem of communication-efficient distributed vector mean estimation, which is a commonly used subroutine in distributed optimization and Federated Learning (FL). Rand-$k$ sparsification is a commonly used technique to reduce communication cost, where each client sends $k < d$ of its coordinates to the server. However, Rand-$k$ is agnostic to any correlations, that might exist between clients in practical scenarios. The recently proposed Rand-$k$-Spatial estimator leverages the cross-client correlation information at the server to improve Rand-$k$'s performance. Yet, the performance of Rand-$k$-Spatial is suboptimal, and improving mean estimation is key to a faster convergence in distributed optimization. We propose the Rand-Proj-Spatial estimator with a more flexible encoding-decoding procedure, which generalizes the encoding of Rand-$k$ by projecting the client vectors to a random $k$-dimensional subspace. We utilize Subsampled Randomized Hadamard Transform (SRHT) as the projection matrix, and show that Rand-Proj-Spatial with SRHT outperforms Rand-$k$-Spatial, using the correlation information more efficiently. Furthermore, we propose an approach to incorporate varying degrees of correlation, and suggest a practical variant of Rand-Proj-Spatial when the correlation information is not available to the server. Finally, experiments on real-world distributed optimization tasks showcase the superior performance of Rand-Proj-Spatial compared to Rand-$k$-Spatial and other more sophisticated sparsification techniques.
tl;dr: We show that the computational savings provided by multi-exit language models aren't robust to adversarial slowdown.
In this paper, we systematically evaluate the robustness of multi-exit language models against adversarial slowdown. To audit their robustness, we design a slowdown attack that generates natural adversarial text bypassing early-exit points. We use the resulting WAFFLE attack as a vehicle to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of three multi-exit mechanisms with the GLUE benchmark against adversarial slowdown. We then show our attack significantly reduces the computational savings provided by the three methods in both white-box and black-box settings. The more complex a mechanism is, the more vulnerable it is to adversarial slowdown. We also perform a linguistic analysis of the perturbed text inputs, identifying common perturbation patterns that our attack generates, and comparing them with standard adversarial text attacks. Moreover, we show that adversarial training is ineffective in defeating our slowdown attack, but input sanitization with a conversational model, e.g., ChatGPT, can remove perturbations effectively. This result suggests that future work is needed for developing efficient yet robust multi-exit models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ztcoalson/WAFFLE
In neural network binarization, BinaryConnect (BC) and its variants are considered the standard. These methods apply the sign function in their forward pass and their respective gradients are backpropagated to update the weights. However, the derivative of the sign function is zero whenever defined, which consequently freezes training. Therefore, implementations of BC (e.g., BNN) usually replace the derivative of sign in the backward computation with identity or other approximate gradient alternatives. Although such practice works well empirically, it is largely a heuristic or ``training trick.'' We aim at shedding some light on these training tricks from the optimization perspective. Building from existing theory on ProxConnect (PC, a generalization of BC), we (1) equip PC with different forward-backward quantizers and obtain ProxConnect++ (PC++) that includes existing binarization techniques as special cases; (2) derive a principled way to synthesize forward-backward quantizers with automatic theoretical guarantees; (3) illustrate our theory by proposing an enhanced binarization algorithm BNN++; (4) conduct image classification experiments on CNNs and vision transformers, and empirically verify that BNN++ generally achieves competitive results on binarizing these models.
tl;dr: Zeroth order descent with structured directions for non-smooth optimization
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is particularly relevant since, in practice, differentiability and smoothness assumptions cannot be verified. To cope with nonsmoothness, several authors use a smooth approximation of the target function and show that finite difference methods approximate its gradient. Recently, it has been proved that imposing a structure in the directions allows improving performance. However, only the smooth setting was considered. To close this gap, we introduce and analyze O-ZD, the first structured finite-difference algorithm for non-smooth black-box optimization. Our method exploits a smooth approximation of the target function and we prove that it approximates its gradient on a subset of random {\em orthogonal} directions. We analyze the convergence of O-ZD under different assumptions.
For non-smooth convex functions, we obtain the optimal complexity. In the non-smooth non-convex setting, we characterize the number of iterations needed to bound the expected norm of the smoothed gradient. For smooth functions, our analysis recovers existing results for structured zeroth-order methods for the convex case and extends them to the non-convex setting. We conclude with numerical simulations where assumptions are satisfied, observing that our algorithm has very good practical performances.
tl;dr: KOSMOS-1 is a multimodal large language model that is capable of perceiving multimodal input, following instructions, and performing in-context learning for not only language tasks but also multimodal tasks
A big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. In this work, we introduce KOSMOS-1, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that can perceive general modalities, learn in context (i.e., few-shot), and follow instructions (i.e., zero-shot). Specifically, we train KOSMOS-1 from scratch on web-scale multi-modal corpora, including arbitrarily interleaved text and images, image-caption pairs, and text data. We evaluate various settings, including zero-shot, few-shot, and multimodal chain-of-thought prompting, on a wide range of tasks without any gradient updates or finetuning. Experimental results show that KOSMOS-1 achieves impressive performance on (i) language understanding, generation, and even OCR-free NLP (directly fed with document images), (ii) perception-language tasks, including multimodal dialogue, image captioning, visual question answering, and (iii) vision tasks, such as image recognition with descriptions (specifying classification via text instructions). We also show that MLLMs can benefit from cross-modal transfer, i.e., transfer knowledge from language to multimodal, and from multimodal to language. In addition, we introduce a dataset of Raven IQ test, which diagnoses the nonverbal reasoning capability of MLLMs.
This paper studies the problem of learning the large-scale Gaussian graphical models that are multivariate totally positive of order two ($\text{MTP}_2$). By introducing the concept of bridge, which commonly exists in large-scale sparse graphs, we show that the entire problem can be equivalently optimized through (1) several smaller-scaled sub-problems induced by a \emph{bridge-block decomposition} on the thresholded sample covariance graph and (2) a set of explicit solutions on entries corresponding to \emph{bridges}. From practical aspect, this simple and provable discipline can be applied to break down a large problem into small tractable ones, leading to enormous reduction on the computational complexity and substantial improvements for all existing algorithms. The synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrate that our proposed method presents a significant speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Text-to-Image diffusion models have made tremendous progress over the past two years, enabling the generation of highly realistic images based on open-domain text descriptions. However, despite their success, text descriptions often struggle to adequately convey detailed controls, even when composed of long and complex texts. Moreover, recent studies have also shown that these models face challenges in understanding such complex texts and generating the corresponding images. Therefore, there is a growing need to enable more control modes beyond text description. In this paper, we introduce Uni-ControlNet, a unified framework that allows for the simultaneous utilization of different local controls (e.g., edge maps, depth map, segmentation masks) and global controls (e.g., CLIP image embeddings) in a flexible and composable manner within one single model. Unlike existing methods, Uni-ControlNet only requires the fine-tuning of two additional adapters upon frozen pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, eliminating the huge cost of training from scratch. Moreover, thanks to some dedicated adapter designs, Uni-ControlNet only necessitates a constant number (i.e., 2) of adapters, regardless of the number of local or global controls used. This not only reduces the fine-tuning costs and model size, making it more suitable for real-world deployment, but also facilitate composability of different conditions. Through both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, Uni-ControlNet demonstrates its superiority over existing methods in terms of controllability, generation quality and composability. Code is available at https://github.com/ShihaoZhaoZSH/Uni-ControlNet.
1991. Temporal Conditioning Spiking Latent Variable Models of the Neural Response to Natural Visual Scenes
Developing computational models of neural response is crucial for understanding sensory processing and neural computations. Current state-of-the-art neural network methods use temporal filters to handle temporal dependencies, resulting in an **unrealistic and inflexible processing paradigm**. Meanwhile, these methods target **trial-averaged firing rates** and fail to capture important features in spike trains. This work presents the temporal conditioning spiking latent variable models (***TeCoS-LVM***) to simulate the neural response to natural visual stimuli. We use spiking neurons to produce spike outputs that directly match the recorded trains. This approach helps to avoid losing information embedded in the original spike trains. We exclude the temporal dimension from the model parameter space and introduce a temporal conditioning operation to allow the model to adaptively explore and exploit temporal dependencies in stimuli sequences in a **natural paradigm**. We show that TeCoS-LVM models can produce more realistic spike activities and accurately fit spike statistics than powerful alternatives. Additionally, learned TeCoS-LVM models can generalize well to longer time scales. Overall, while remaining computationally tractable, our model effectively captures key features of neural coding systems. It thus provides a useful tool for building accurate predictive computational accounts for various sensory perception circuits.
tl;dr: A novel Bayesian sparse fine-tuning algorithm for Foundation models for NLP and vision tasks, with hierarchical Laplace priors and SG-MCMC posterior inference to enable automatic estimation of the sparsity level for good accuracy-memory trade-off.
Deep learning practice is increasingly driven by powerful foundation models (FM), pre-trained at scale and then fine-tuned for specific tasks of interest. A key property of this workflow is the efficacy of performing sparse or parameter-efficient fine-tuning, meaning that by updating only a tiny fraction of the whole FM parameters on a downstream task can lead to surprisingly good performance, often even superior to a full model update. However, it is not clear what is the optimal and principled way to select which parameters to update. Although a growing number of sparse fine-tuning ideas have been proposed, they are mostly not satisfactory, relying on hand-crafted heuristics or heavy approximation. In this paper we propose a novel Bayesian sparse fine-tuning algorithm: we place a (sparse) Laplace prior for each parameter of the FM, with the mean equal to the initial value and the scale parameter having a hyper-prior that encourages small scale. Roughly speaking, the posterior means of the scale parameters indicate how important it is to update the corresponding parameter away from its initial value when solving the downstream task. Given the sparse prior, most scale parameters are small a posteriori, and the few large-valued scale parameters identify those FM parameters that crucially need to be updated away from their initial values. Based on this, we can threshold the scale parameters to decide which parameters to update or freeze, leading to a principled sparse fine-tuning strategy. To efficiently infer the posterior distribution of the scale parameters, we adopt the Langevin MCMC sampler, requiring only two times the complexity of the vanilla SGD. Tested on popular NLP benchmarks as well as the VTAB vision tasks, our approach shows significant improvement over the state-of-the-arts (e.g., 1% point higher than the best SOTA when fine-tuning RoBERTa for GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks).
Dataset distillation (DD) aims to synthesize a small dataset whose test performance is comparable to a full dataset using the same model. State-of-the-art (SoTA) methods optimize synthetic datasets primarily by matching heuristic indicators extracted from two networks: one from real data and one from synthetic data (see Fig.1, Left), such as gradients and training trajectories. DD is essentially a compression problem that emphasizes on maximizing the preservation of information contained in the data. We argue that well-defined metrics which measure the amount of shared information between variables in information theory are necessary for success measurement, but are never considered by previous works. Thus, we introduce mutual information (MI) as the metric to quantify the shared information between the synthetic and the real datasets, and devise MIM4DD numerically maximizing the MI via a newly designed optimizable objective within a contrastive learning framework to update the synthetic dataset. Specifically, we designate the samples in different datasets who share the same labels as positive pairs, and vice versa negative pairs. Then we respectively pull and push those samples in positive and negative pairs into contrastive space via minimizing NCE loss. As a result, the targeted MI can be transformed into a lower bound represented by feature maps of samples, which is numerically feasible. Experiment results show that MIM4DD can be implemented as an add-on module to existing SoTA DD methods.
tl;dr: Hopfield Networks are extended to store sequences of memories that are polynomially or even exponentially long relative to network size.
Sequence memory is an essential attribute of natural and artificial intelligence that enables agents to encode, store, and retrieve complex sequences of stimuli and actions. Computational models of sequence memory have been proposed where recurrent Hopfield-like neural networks are trained with temporally asymmetric Hebbian rules. However, these networks suffer from limited sequence capacity (maximal length of the stored sequence) due to interference between the memories. Inspired by recent work on Dense Associative Memories, we expand the sequence capacity of these models by introducing a nonlinear interaction term, enhancing separation between the patterns. We derive novel scaling laws for sequence capacity with respect to network size, significantly outperforming existing scaling laws for models based on traditional Hopfield networks, and verify these theoretical results with numerical simulation. Moreover, we introduce a generalized pseudoinverse rule to recall sequences of highly correlated patterns. Finally, we extend this model to store sequences with variable timing between states' transitions and describe a biologically-plausible implementation, with connections to motor neuroscience.
The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that randomly-initialised neural networks likely contain subnetworks that perform well without any training. Although unstructured pruning has been extensively studied in this context, its structured counterpart, which can deliver significant computational and memory efficiency gains, has been largely unexplored. One of the main reasons for this gap is the limitations of the underlying mathematical tools used in formal analyses of the SLTH.
In this paper, we overcome these limitations: we leverage recent advances in the multidimensional generalisation of the Random Subset-Sum Problem and obtain a variant that admits the stochastic dependencies that arise when addressing structured pruning in the SLTH. We apply this result to prove, for a wide class of random Convolutional Neural Networks, the existence of structured subnetworks that can approximate any sufficiently smaller network.
This result provides the first sub-exponential bound around the SLTH for structured pruning, opening up new avenues for further research on the hypothesis and contributing to the understanding of the role of over-parameterization in deep learning.
tl;dr: We propose a randomized algorithm to compress a matrix by quantizing its low rank factorization.
Matrices are exceptionally useful in various fields of study as they provide a convenient framework to organize and manipulate data in a structured manner. However, modern matrices can involve billions of elements, making their storage and processing quite demanding in terms of computational resources and memory usage. Although prohibitively large, such matrices are often approximately low rank. We propose an algorithm that exploits this structure to obtain a low rank decomposition of any matrix $\mathbf{A}$ as $\mathbf{A} \approx \mathbf{L}\mathbf{R}$, where $\mathbf{L}$ and $\mathbf{R}$ are the low rank factors. The total number of elements in $\mathbf{L}$ and $\mathbf{R}$ can be significantly less than that in $\mathbf{A}$. Furthermore, the entries of $\mathbf{L}$ and $\mathbf{R}$ are quantized to low precision formats -- compressing $\mathbf{A}$ by giving us a low rank and low precision factorization. Our algorithm first computes an approximate basis of the range space of $\mathbf{A}$ by randomly sketching its columns, followed by a quantization of the vectors constituting this basis. It then computes approximate projections of the columns of $\mathbf{A}$ onto this quantized basis. We derive upper bounds on the approximation error of our algorithm, and analyze the impact of target rank and quantization bit-budget. The tradeoff between compression ratio and approximation accuracy allows for flexibility in choosing these parameters based on specific application requirements. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm in image compression, nearest neighbor classification of image and text embeddings, and compressing the layers of LlaMa-$7$b. Our results illustrate that we can achieve compression ratios as aggressive as one bit per matrix coordinate, all while surpassing or maintaining the performance of traditional compression techniques.
The adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has drawn great attention due to the security risk of applying these models in real-world applications. Based on transferability of adversarial examples, an increasing number of transfer-based methods have been developed to fool black-box DNN models whose architecture and parameters are inaccessible. Although tremendous effort has been exerted, there still lacks a standardized benchmark that could be taken advantage of to compare these methods systematically, fairly, and practically. Our investigation shows that the evaluation of some methods needs to be more reasonable and more thorough to verify their effectiveness, to avoid, for example, unfair comparison and insufficient consideration of possible substitute/victim models. Therefore, we establish a transfer-based attack benchmark (TA-Bench) which implements 30+ methods. In this paper, we evaluate and compare them comprehensively on 10 popular substitute/victim models on ImageNet. New insights about the effectiveness of these methods are gained and guidelines for future evaluations are provided.
1998. Online Adaptive Policy Selection in Time-Varying Systems: No-Regret via Contractive Perturbations
We study online adaptive policy selection in systems with time-varying costs and dynamics. We develop the Gradient-based Adaptive Policy Selection (GAPS) algorithm together with a general analytical framework for online policy selection via online optimization. Under our proposed notion of contractive policy classes, we show that GAPS approximates the behavior of an ideal online gradient descent algorithm on the policy parameters while requiring less information and computation. When convexity holds, our algorithm is the first to achieve optimal policy regret. When convexity does not hold, we provide the first local regret bound for online policy selection. Our numerical experiments show that GAPS can adapt to changing environments more quickly than existing benchmarks.
Coordinate descent methods are popular in machine learning and optimization for their simple sparse updates and excellent practical performance.
In the context of large-scale sequential game solving, these same properties would be attractive, but until now no such methods were known, because the strategy spaces do not satisfy the typical separable block structure exploited by such methods.
We present the first cyclic coordinate-descent-like method for the polytope of sequence-form strategies, which form the strategy spaces for the players in an extensive-form game (EFG).
Our method exploits the recursive structure of the proximal update induced by what are known as dilated regularizers, in order to allow for a pseudo block-wise update.
We show that our method enjoys a O(1/T) convergence rate to a two-player zero-sum Nash equilibrium, while avoiding the worst-case polynomial scaling with the number of blocks common to cyclic methods. We empirically show that our algorithm usually performs better than other state-of-the-art first-order methods (i.e., mirror prox), and occasionally can even beat CFR$^+$, a state-of-the-art algorithm for numerical equilibrium computation in zero-sum EFGs.
We then introduce a restarting heuristic for EFG solving. We show empirically that restarting can lead to speedups, sometimes huge, both for our cyclic method, as well as for existing methods such as mirror prox and predictive CFR$^+$.
Graph condensation, which reduces the size of a large-scale graph by synthesizing a small-scale condensed graph as its substitution, has immediate benefits for various graph learning tasks.
However, existing graph condensation methods rely on the joint optimization of nodes and structures in the condensed graph, and overlook critical issues in effectiveness and generalization ability.
In this paper, we advocate a new Structure-Free Graph Condensation paradigm, named SFGC, to distill a large-scale graph into a small-scale graph node set without explicit graph structures, i.e., graph-free data.
Our idea is to implicitly encode topology structure information into the node attributes in the synthesized graph-free data, whose topology is reduced to an identity matrix.
Specifically, SFGC contains two collaborative components:
(1) a training trajectory meta-matching scheme for effectively synthesizing small-scale graph-free data;
(2) a graph neural feature score metric for dynamically evaluating the quality of the condensed data.
Through training trajectory meta-matching, SFGC aligns the long-term GNN learning behaviors between the large-scale graph and the condensed small-scale graph-free data, ensuring comprehensive and compact transfer of informative knowledge to the graph-free data.
Afterward, the underlying condensed graph-free data would be dynamically evaluated with the graph neural feature score, which is a closed-form metric for ensuring the excellent expressiveness of the condensed graph-free data.
Extensive experiments verify the superiority of SFGC across different condensation ratios.
Humans learn powerful representations of objects and scenes by observing how they evolve over time. Yet, outside of specific tasks that require explicit temporal understanding, static image pretraining remains the dominant paradigm for learning visual foundation models. We question this mismatch, and ask whether video pretraining can yield visual representations that bear the hallmarks of human perception: generalisation across tasks, robustness to perturbations, and consistency with human judgements. To that end we propose a novel procedure for curating videos, and develop a contrastive framework which learns from the complex transformations therein. This simple paradigm for distilling knowledge from videos, called VITO, yields general representations that far outperform prior video pretraining methods on image understanding tasks, and image pretraining methods on video understanding tasks. Moreover, VITO representations are significantly more robust to natural and synthetic deformations than image-, video-, and adversarially-trained
ones. Finally, VITO’s predictions are strongly aligned with human judgements, surpassing models that were specifically trained for that purpose. Together, these results suggest that video pretraining could be a simple way of learning unified, robust, and human-aligned representations of the visual world.
tl;dr: We provide conditions and learning algorithms by which we can infer the outcome of an unseen choice of experimental condition given a database of past experiments.
One of the goals of causal inference is to generalize from past experiments and observational data to novel conditions. While it is in principle possible to eventually learn a mapping from a novel experimental condition to an outcome of interest, provided a sufficient variety of experiments is available in the training data, coping with a large combinatorial space of possible interventions is hard. Under a typical sparse experimental design, this mapping is ill-posed without relying on heavy regularization or prior distributions. Such assumptions may or may not be reliable, and can be hard to defend or test. In this paper, we take a close look at how to warrant a leap from past experiments to novel conditions based on minimal assumptions about the factorization of the distribution of the manipulated system, communicated in the well-understood language of factor graph models. A postulated interventional factor model (IFM) may not always be informative, but it conveniently abstracts away a need for explicitly modeling unmeasured confounding and feedback mechanisms, leading to directly testable claims. Given an IFM and datasets from a collection of experimental regimes, we derive conditions for identifiability of the expected outcomes of new regimes never observed in these training data. We implement our framework using several efficient algorithms, and apply them on a range of semi-synthetic experiments.
tl;dr: We provide unified theoretical guarantees for disentanglement for a broader family of contrastive methods and prove identifiability of the true latents for four contrastive losses, without imposing common independence assumptions.
Contrastive learning has recently emerged as a promising approach for learning data representations that discover and disentangle the explanatory factors of the data.
Previous analyses of such approaches have largely focused on individual contrastive losses, such as noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) and InfoNCE, and rely on specific assumptions about the data generating process.
This paper extends the theoretical guarantees for disentanglement to a broader family of contrastive methods, while also relaxing the assumptions about the data distribution.
Specifically, we prove identifiability of the true latents for four contrastive losses studied in this paper, without imposing common independence assumptions.
The theoretical findings are validated on several benchmark datasets.
Finally, practical limitations of these methods are also investigated.
tl;dr: Better align pre-trained models to NLU tasks with a Pre-trained Machine Reader.
We present Pre-trained Machine Reader (PMR), a novel method for retrofitting pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) to pre-trained machine reading comprehension (MRC) models without acquiring labeled data.
PMR can resolve the discrepancy between model pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of existing MLMs.
To build the proposed PMR, we constructed a large volume of general-purpose and high-quality MRC-style training data by using Wikipedia hyperlinks and designed a Wiki Anchor Extraction task to guide the MRC-style pre-training.
Apart from its simplicity, PMR effectively solves extraction tasks, such as Extractive Question Answering and Named Entity Recognition. PMR shows tremendous improvements over existing approaches, especially in low-resource scenarios.
When applied to the sequence classification task in the MRC formulation, PMR enables the extraction of high-quality rationales to explain the classification process, thereby providing greater prediction explainability. PMR also has the potential to serve as a unified model for tackling various extraction and classification tasks in the MRC formulation.
We show that raw degradation features can effectively guide deep restoration models, providing accurate degradation priors to facilitate better restoration. While networks that do not consider them for restoration forget gradually degradation during the learning process, model capacity is severely hindered. To address this, we propose a Prompt}ing image Restorer, termed as PromptRestorer. Specifically, PromptRestorer contains two branches: a restoration branch and a prompting branch. The former is used to restore images, while the latter perceives degradation priors to prompt the restoration branch with reliable perceived content to guide the restoration process for better recovery. To better perceive the degradation which is extracted by a pre-trained model from given degradation observations, we propose a prompting degradation perception modulator, which adequately considers the characters of the self-attention mechanism and pixel-wise modulation, to better perceive the degradation priors from global and local perspectives. To control the propagation of the perceived content for the restoration branch, we propose gated degradation perception propagation, enabling the restoration branch to adaptively learn more useful features for better recovery. Extensive experimental results show that our PromptRestorer achieves state-of-the-art results on 4 image restoration tasks, including image deraining, deblurring, dehazing, and desnowing.
tl;dr: We present a framework for accelerating M-convex function minimization with predictions, thus complementing previous research and extending the range of optimization algorithms that can benefit from predictions.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in accelerating optimization algorithms with machine-learned predictions. Sakaue and Oki (NeurIPS 2022) have developed a general framework that warm-starts the *L-convex function minimization* method with predictions, revealing the idea's usefulness for various discrete optimization problems. In this paper, we present a framework for using predictions to accelerate *M-convex function minimization*, thus complementing previous research and extending the range of discrete optimization algorithms that can benefit from predictions. Our framework is particularly effective for an important subclass called *laminar convex minimization*, which appears in many operations research applications. Our methods can improve time complexity bounds upon the best worst-case results by using predictions and even have potential to go beyond a lower-bound result.
tl;dr: We propose a novel regularizer based on the intra-class correlation coefficient to enforce deep architectures to learn repeatable embeddings.
A good supervised embedding for a specific machine learning task is only sensitive to changes in the label of interest and is invariant to other confounding factors. We leverage the concept of repeatability from measurement theory to describe this property and propose to use the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) to evaluate the repeatability of embeddings. We then propose a novel regularizer, the ICC regularizer, as a complementary component for contrastive losses to guide deep neural networks to produce embeddings with higher repeatability. We use simulated data to explain why the ICC regularizer works better on minimizing the intra-class variance than the contrastive loss alone. We implement the ICC regularizer and apply it to three speech tasks: speaker verification, voice style conversion, and a clinical application for detecting dysphonic voice. The experimental results demonstrate that adding an ICC regularizer can improve the repeatability of learned embeddings compared to only using the contrastive loss; further, these embeddings lead to improved performance in these downstream tasks.
tl;dr: Bisimulation-based state representation learning has shown to be inefficient in Offline RL settings,
While bisimulation-based approaches hold promise for learning robust state representations for Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks, their efficacy in offline RL tasks has not been up to par. In some instances, their performance has even significantly underperformed alternative methods. We aim to understand why bisimulation methods succeed in online settings, but falter in offline tasks. Our analysis reveals that missing transitions in the dataset are particularly harmful to the bisimulation principle, leading to ineffective estimation. We also shed light on the critical role of reward scaling in bounding the scale of bisimulation measurements and of the value error they induce. Based on these findings, we propose to apply the expectile operator for representation learning to our offline RL setting, which helps to prevent overfitting to incomplete data. Meanwhile, by introducing an appropriate reward scaling strategy, we avoid the risk of feature collapse in representation space. We implement these recommendations on two state-of-the-art bisimulation-based algorithms, MICo and SimSR, and demonstrate performance gains on two benchmark suites: D4RL and Visual D4RL. Codes are provided at \url{https://github.com/zanghyu/Offline_Bisimulation}.
tl;dr: We analyze the implicit bias of gradient flow on linear equivariant steerable networks and demonstrate their implications in margin and generalization.
We study the implicit bias of gradient flow on linear equivariant steerable networks in group-invariant binary classification. Our findings reveal that the parameterized predictor converges in direction to the unique group-invariant classifier with a maximum margin defined by the input group action. Under a unitary assumption on the input representation, we establish the equivalence between steerable networks and data augmentation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the improved margin and generalization bound of steerable networks over their non-invariant counterparts.
tl;dr: We study the low-dimensional estimation and inference problem in adaptive linear models.
Estimation and inference in statistics pose significant challenges when data are collected adaptively. Even in linear models, the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimator may fail to exhibit asymptotic normality for single coordinate estimation and have inflated error. This issue is highlighted by a recent minimax lower bound, which shows that the error of estimating a single coordinate can be enlarged by a multiple of $\sqrt{d}$ when data are allowed to be arbitrarily adaptive, compared with the case when they are i.i.d. Our work explores this striking difference in estimation performance between utilizing i.i.d. and adaptive data. We investigate how the degree of adaptivity in data collection impacts the performance of estimating a low-dimensional parameter component in high-dimensional linear models. We identify conditions on the data collection mechanism under which the estimation error for a low-dimensional parameter component matches its counterpart in the i.i.d. setting, up to a factor that depends on the degree of adaptivity. We show that OLS or OLS on centered data can achieve this matching error. In addition, we propose a novel estimator for single coordinate inference via solving a Two-stage Adaptive Linear Estimating equation (TALE). Under a weaker form of adaptivity in data collection, we establish an asymptotic normality property of the proposed estimator.
tl;dr: We study the convergence of encoder-only shallow Transformers, and provide theoretical insight on the choice of initializations as well as scalings.
In this paper, we aim to build the global convergence theory of encoder-only shallow Transformers under a realistic setting from the perspective of architectures, initialization, and scaling under a finite width regime. The difficulty lies in how to tackle the softmax in self-attention mechanism, the core ingredient of Transformer. In particular, we diagnose the scaling scheme, carefully tackle the input/output of softmax, and prove that quadratic overparameterization is sufficient for global convergence of our shallow Transformers under commonly-used He/LeCun initialization in practice. Besides, neural tangent kernel (NTK) based analysis is also given, which facilitates a comprehensive comparison. Our theory demonstrates the separation on the importance of different scaling schemes and initialization. We believe our results can pave the way for a better understanding of modern Transformers, particularly on training dynamics.
tl;dr: We train and study diffusion language models from a likelihood perspective.
Despite a growing interest in diffusion-based language models, existing work has not shown that these models can attain nontrivial likelihoods on standard language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we take the first steps towards closing the likelihood gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based language models, with the goal of building and releasing a diffusion model which outperforms a small but widely-known autoregressive model. We pursue this goal through algorithmic improvements, scaling laws, and increased compute. On the algorithmic front, we introduce several methodological improvements for the maximum-likelihood training of diffusion language models. We then study scaling laws for our diffusion models and find compute-optimal training regimes which differ substantially from autoregressive models. Using our methods and scaling analysis, we train and release Plaid 1B, a large diffusion language model which outperforms GPT-2 124M in likelihood on benchmark datasets and generates fluent samples in unconditional and zero-shot control settings.
A series of recent publications by Awasthi et al. have introduced the key notion of *$H$-consistency bounds* for surrogate loss functions. These are upper bounds on the zero-one estimation error of any predictor in a hypothesis set, expressed in terms of its surrogate loss estimation error. They are both non-asymptotic and hypothesis set-specific and thus stronger and more informative than Bayes-consistency. However, determining if they hold and deriving these bounds have required a specific proof and analysis for each surrogate loss. Can we derive more general tools and characterizations? This paper provides both a general characterization and an extension of $H$-consistency bounds for multi-class classification. We present new and tight $H$-consistency bounds for both the family of constrained losses and that of comp-sum losses, which covers the familiar cross-entropy, or logistic loss applied to the outputs of a neural network. We further extend our analysis beyond the completeness assumptions adopted in previous studies and cover more realistic bounded hypothesis sets. Our characterizations are based on error transformations, which are explicitly defined for each formulation. We illustrate the application of our general results through several special examples. A by-product of our analysis is the observation that a recently derived multi-class $H$-consistency bound for cross-entropy reduces to an excess bound and is not significant. Instead, we prove a much stronger and more significant guarantee.
Energy-based models (EBMs) are generative models inspired by statistical physics with a wide range of applications in unsupervised learning. Their performance is well measured by the cross-entropy (CE) of the model distribution relative to the data distribution. Using the CE as the objective for training is however challenging because the computation of its gradient with respect to the model parameters requires sampling the model distribution. Here we show how results for nonequilibrium thermodynamics based on Jarzynski equality together with tools from sequential Monte-Carlo sampling can be used to perform this computation efficiently and avoid the uncontrolled approximations made using the standard contrastive divergence algorithm. Specifically, we introduce a modification of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) in which each walker acquires a weight that enables the estimation of the gradient of the cross-entropy at any step during GD, thereby bypassing sampling biases induced by slow mixing of ULA. We illustrate these results with numerical experiments on Gaussian mixture distributions as well as the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. We show that the proposed approach outperforms methods based on the contrastive divergence algorithm in all the considered situations.
Video Question Answering (VideoQA) has emerged as a vital tool to evaluate agents’ ability to understand human daily behaviors. Despite the recent success of large vision language models in many multi-modal tasks, complex situation reasoning over videos involving multiple human-object interaction events still remains challenging. In contrast, humans can easily tackle it by using a series of episode memories as anchors to quickly locate question-related key moments for reasoning. To mimic this effective reasoning strategy, we propose the Glance- Focus model. One simple way is to apply an action detection model to predict a set of actions as key memories. However, these actions within a closed set vocabulary are hard to generalize to various video domains. Instead of that, we train an Encoder-Decoder to generate a set of dynamic event memories at the glancing stage. Apart from using supervised bipartite matching to obtain the event memories, we further design an unsupervised memory generation method to get rid of dependence on event annotations. Next, at the focusing stage, these event memories act as a bridge to establish the correlation between the questions with high-level event concepts and low-level lengthy video content. Given the question, the model first focuses on the generated key event memory, then focuses on the most relevant moment for reasoning through our designed multi-level cross- attention mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on four Multi-Event VideoQA benchmarks including STAR, EgoTaskQA, AGQA, and NExT-QA. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing current large models in various challenging reasoning tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ByZ0e/Glance-Focus.
tl;dr: Mathematical theory for in-context learning.
In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters.
Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various downstream natural language tasks simply by including concatenated training examples of these tasks in its input.
Though disruptive for many practical applications of large language models, this emergent learning paradigm is not well understood from a theoretical perspective. In this paper, we propose a first-of-its-kind PAC based framework for in-context learnability, and use it to provide the first finite sample complexity results for the in-context learning setup.
Our framework includes an initial pretraining phase, which fits a function to the pretraining distribution, and then a second in-context learning phase, which keeps this function constant and concatenates training examples of the downstream task in its input.
We use our framework in order to prove that, under mild assumptions, when the pretraining distribution is a mixture of latent tasks (a model often considered for natural language pretraining), these tasks can be efficiently learned via in-context learning, even though the model's weights are unchanged and the input significantly diverges from the pretraining distribution.
Our theoretical analysis reveals that in this setting, in-context learning is more about identifying the task than about learning it, a result which is in line with a series of recent empirical findings.
We hope that the in-context learnability framework presented in this paper will facilitate future progress towards a deeper understanding of this important new learning paradigm.
Weight Average (WA) is an active research topic due to its simplicity in ensembling deep networks and the effectiveness in promoting generalization. Existing weight average approaches, however, are often carried out along only one training trajectory in a post-hoc manner (i.e., the weights are averaged after the entire training process is finished), which significantly degrades the diversity between networks and thus impairs the effectiveness. In this paper, inspired by weight average, we propose Lookaround, a straightforward yet effective SGD-based optimizer leading to flatter minima with better generalization. Specifically, Lookaround iterates two steps during the whole training period: the around step and the average step. In each iteration, 1) the around step starts from a common point and trains multiple networks simultaneously, each on transformed data by a different data augmentation, and 2) the average step averages these trained networks to get the averaged network, which serves as the starting point for the next iteration. The around step improves the functionality diversity while the average step guarantees the weight locality of these networks during the whole training, which is essential for WA to work. We theoretically explain the superiority of Lookaround by convergence analysis, and make extensive experiments to evaluate Lookaround on popular benchmarks including CIFAR and ImageNet with both CNNs and ViTs, demonstrating clear superiority over state-of-the-arts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ardcy/Lookaround.
Adaptive methods with non-diagonal preconditioning have shown state-of-the-art results on various tasks. However, their computational complexity and memory requirement makes it challenging to scale these methods to modern neural network architectures. To address this challenge, some previous works have adopted block-diagonal preconditioners. However, the memory cost of storing the block-diagonal matrix remains substantial, leading to the use of smaller block sizes and ultimately resulting in suboptimal performance. To reduce the time and memory complexity without sacrificing performance, we propose approximating each diagonal block of the second moment matrix by low-rank matrices and enforcing the same basis for the blocks within each layer. We provide theoretical justification for such sharing and design an algorithm to efficiently maintain this shared-basis block low-rank approximation during training. Our results on a deep autoencoder and a transformer benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms first-order methods with slightly more time and memory usage, while also achieving competitive or superior performance compared to other second-order methods with less time and memory usage.
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with a large number of items $m$ for sale to $n$ strategic bidders, whose valuations are drawn independently from high-dimensional, unknown prior distributions. It is well-known that optimal and even approximately-optimal mechanisms for this setting are notoriously difficult to characterize or compute, and, even when they can be found, are often rife with various counter-intuitive properties. In this paper, following a model introduced recently by Cai and Daskalakis [CD22], we consider the case that bidders' prior distributions can be well-approximated by a topic model. We design an active learning component, responsible for interacting with the bidders and outputting low-dimensional approximations of their types, and a mechanism design component, responsible for robustifying mechanisms for the low-dimensional model to work for the approximate types of the former component. On the active learning front, we cast our problem in the framework of Randomized Linear Algebra (RLA) for regression problems, allowing us to import several breakthrough results from that line of research, and adapt them to our setting. On the mechanism design front, we remove many restrictive assumptions of prior work on the type of access needed to the underlying distributions and the associated mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to formulate connections between mechanism design, and RLA for active learning of regression problems, opening the door for further applications of randomized linear algebra primitives to mechanism design.
tl;dr: A collaborative implicit neural point-based localization and mapping (SLAM) system for monocular RGB-D image, including loop detection and pose graph optimization.
This paper presents a collaborative implicit neural simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system with RGB-D image sequences, which consists of complete front-end and back-end modules including odometry, loop detection, sub-map fusion, and global refinement. In order to enable all these modules in a unified framework, we propose a novel neural point based 3D scene representation in which each point maintains a learnable neural feature for scene encoding and is associated with a certain keyframe. Moreover, a distributed-to-centralized learning strategy is proposed for the collaborative implicit SLAM to improve consistency and cooperation. A novel global optimization framework is also proposed to improve the system accuracy like traditional bundle adjustment. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in both camera tracking and mapping.
2021. Joint Bayesian Inference of Graphical Structure and Parameters with a Single Generative Flow Network
tl;dr: We propose to approximate the joint posterior distribution over the graphical structure of a Bayesian Network and the parameters of its conditionals using a GFlowNet.
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a class of generative models over discrete and structured sample spaces, have been previously applied to the problem of inferring the marginal posterior distribution over the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a Bayesian Network, given a dataset of observations. Based on recent advances extending this framework to non-discrete sample spaces, we propose in this paper to approximate the joint posterior over not only the structure of a Bayesian Network, but also the parameters of its conditional probability distributions. We use a single GFlowNet whose sampling policy follows a two-phase process: the DAG is first generated sequentially one edge at a time, and then the corresponding parameters are picked once the full structure is known. Since the parameters are included in the posterior distribution, this leaves more flexibility for the local probability models of the Bayesian Network, making our approach applicable even to non-linear models parametrized by neural networks. We show that our method, called JSP-GFN, offers an accurate approximation of the joint posterior, while comparing favorably against existing methods on both simulated and real data.
tl;dr: We quantify the cost of compressing real valued test statistics such as p-values from $m$ independent trials concerning the same hypothesis into a single test.
Combining test statistics from independent trials or experiments is a popular method of meta-analysis. However, there is very limited theoretical understanding of the power of the combined test, especially in high-dimensional models considering composite hypotheses tests. We derive a mathematical framework to study standard {meta-analysis} testing approaches in the context of the many normal means model, which serves as the platform to investigate more complex models.
We introduce a natural and mild restriction on the meta-level combination functions of the local trials. This allows us to mathematically quantify the cost of compressing $m$ trials into real-valued test statistics and combining these. We then derive minimax lower and matching upper bounds for the separation rates of standard combination methods for e.g. p-values and e-values, quantifying the loss relative to using the full, pooled data. We observe an elbow effect, revealing that in certain cases combining the locally optimal tests in each trial results in a sub-optimal {meta-analysis} method and develop approaches to achieve the global optima. We also explore the possible gains of allowing limited coordination between the trial designs. Our results connect meta-analysis with bandwidth constraint distributed inference and build on recent information theoretic developments in the latter field.
Meta-Bayesian optimisation (meta-BO) aims to improve the sample efficiency of Bayesian optimisation by leveraging data from related tasks. While previous methods successfully meta-learn either a surrogate model or an acquisition function independently, joint training of both components remains an open challenge. This paper proposes the first end-to-end differentiable meta-BO framework that generalises neural processes to learn acquisition functions via transformer architectures. We enable this end-to-end framework with reinforcement learning (RL) to tackle the lack of labelled acquisition data. Early on, we notice that training transformer-based neural processes from scratch with RL is challenging due to insufficient supervision, especially when rewards are sparse. We formalise this claim with a combinatorial analysis showing that the widely used notion of regret as a reward signal exhibits a logarithmic sparsity pattern in trajectory lengths. To tackle this problem, we augment the RL objective with an auxiliary task that guides part of the architecture to learn a valid probabilistic model as an inductive bias. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art regret results against various baselines in experiments on standard hyperparameter optimisation tasks and also outperforms others in the real-world problems of mixed-integer programming tuning, antibody design, and logic synthesis for electronic design automation.
Conventional imitation learning assumes access to the actions of demonstrators, but these motor signals are often non-observable in naturalistic settings. Additionally, sequential decision-making behaviors in these settings can deviate from the assumptions of a standard Markov Decision Process (MDP). To address these challenges, we explore deep generative modeling of state-only sequences with non-Markov Decision Process (nMDP), where the policy is an energy-based prior in the latent space of the state transition generator. We develop maximum likelihood estimation to achieve model-based imitation, which involves short-run MCMC sampling from the prior and importance sampling for the posterior. The learned model enables $\textit{decision-making as inference}$: model-free policy execution is equivalent to prior sampling, model-based planning is posterior sampling initialized from the policy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in a prototypical path planning task with non-Markovian constraints and show that the learned model exhibits strong performances in challenging domains from the MuJoCo suite.
tl;dr: We tackle distributionally robust bayesian optimization where uncertainty sets are constructed with phi-divergences and derive a tractable algorithm with regret bounds.
The study of robustness has received much attention due to its inevitability in data-driven settings where many systems face uncertainty. One such example of concern is Bayesian Optimization (BO), where uncertainty is multi-faceted, yet there only exists a limited number of works dedicated to this direction. In particular, there is the work of Kirschner et al., which bridges the existing literature of Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) by casting the BO problem from the lens of DRO. While this work is pioneering, it admittedly suffers from various practical shortcomings such as finite contexts assumptions, leaving behind the main question \textit{Can one devise a computationally tractable algorithm for solving this DRO-BO problem}? In this work, we tackle this question to a large degree of generality by considering robustness against data-shift in $\varphi$-divergences, which subsumes many popular choices, such as the $\chi^2$-divergence, Total Variation, and the extant Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. We show that the DRO-BO problem in this setting is equivalent to a finite-dimensional optimization problem which, even in the continuous context setting, can be easily implemented with provable sublinear regret bounds. We then show experimentally that our method surpasses existing methods, attesting to the theoretical results.
tl;dr: This paper proposes a document tokenization learning method based on discrete auto-encoding to improve generative retrieval.
As a new paradigm in information retrieval, generative retrieval directly generates a ranked list of document identifiers (docids) for a given query using generative language models (LMs).
How to assign each document a unique docid (denoted as document tokenization) is a critical problem, because it determines whether the generative retrieval model can precisely retrieve any document by simply decoding its docid.
Most existing methods adopt rule-based tokenization, which is ad-hoc and does not generalize well.
In contrast, in this paper we propose a novel document tokenization learning method, GenRet, which learns to encode the complete document semantics into docids.
GenRet learns to tokenize documents into short discrete representations (i.e., docids) via a discrete auto-encoding approach.
We develop a progressive training scheme to capture the autoregressive nature of docids and diverse clustering techniques to stabilize the training process.
Based on the semantic-embedded docids of any set of documents, the generative retrieval model can learn to generate the most relevant docid only according to the docids' semantic relevance to the queries.
We conduct experiments on the NQ320K, MS MARCO, and BEIR datasets.
GenRet establishes the new state-of-the-art on the NQ320K dataset.
Compared to generative retrieval baselines, GenRet can achieve significant improvements on unseen documents.
Moreover, GenRet can also outperform comparable baselines on MS MARCO and BEIR, demonstrating the method's generalizability.
tl;dr: We propose a principal component regression framework for non-Euclidean response variables and provide a theoretical analysis for the consistency and the rate of convergence for the proposed estimator.
Fr\'echet regression has emerged as a promising approach for regression analysis involving non-Euclidean response variables. However, its practical applicability has been hindered by its reliance on ideal scenarios with abundant and noiseless covariate data. In this paper, we present a novel estimation method that tackles these limitations by leveraging the low-rank structure inherent in the covariate matrix. Our proposed framework combines the concepts of global Fr\'echet regression and principal component regression, aiming to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the regression estimator. By incorporating the low-rank structure, our method enables more effective modeling and estimation, particularly in high-dimensional and errors-in-variables regression settings. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed estimator's large-sample properties, including a comprehensive rate analysis of bias, variance, and additional variations due to measurement errors. Furthermore, our numerical experiments provide empirical evidence that supports the theoretical findings, demonstrating the superior performance of our approach. Overall, this work introduces a promising framework for regression analysis of non-Euclidean variables, effectively addressing the challenges associated with limited and noisy covariate data, with potential applications in diverse fields.
tl;dr: A single-view 3D reconstruction method leveraging large-scale training data
Remarkable progress has been made in 3D reconstruction from single-view RGB-D inputs. MCC is the current state-of-the-art method in this field, which achieves unprecedented success by combining vision Transformers with large-scale training. However, we identified two key limitations of MCC: 1) The Transformer decoder is inefficient in handling large number of query points; 2) The 3D representation struggles to recover high-fidelity details. In this paper, we propose a new approach called NU-MCC that addresses these limitations. NU-MCC includes two key innovations: a Neighborhood decoder and a Repulsive Unsigned Distance Function (Repulsive UDF). First, our Neighborhood decoder introduces center points as an efficient proxy of input visual features, allowing each query point to only attend to a small neighborhood. This design not only results in much faster inference speed but also enables the exploitation of finer-scale visual features for improved recovery of 3D textures. Second, our Repulsive UDF is a novel alternative to the occupancy field used in MCC, significantly improving the quality of 3D object reconstruction. Compared to standard UDFs that suffer from holes in results, our proposed Repulsive UDF can achieve more complete surface reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that NU-MCC is able to learn a strong 3D representation, significantly advancing the state of the art in single-view 3D reconstruction. Particularly, it outperforms MCC by 9.7% in terms of the F1-score on the CO3D-v2 dataset with more than 5x faster running speed.
tl;dr: Systematic analysis on how random walk on different orders of simplicial complexes facilitates graph neural networks.
Node-level random walk has been widely used to improve Graph Neural Networks. However, there is limited attention to random walk on edge and, more generally, on $k$-simplices. This paper systematically analyzes how random walk on different orders of simplicial complexes (SC) facilitates GNNs in their theoretical expressivity. First, on $0$-simplices or node level, we establish a connection between existing positional encoding (PE) and structure encoding (SE) methods through the bridge of random walk. Second, on $1$-simplices or edge level, we bridge edge-level random walk and Hodge $1$-Laplacians and design corresponding edge PE respectively. In spatial domain, we directly make use of edge level random walk to construct EdgeRWSE. Based on spectral analysis of Hodge $1$-Laplcians, we propose Hodge1Lap, a permutation equivariant and expressive edge-level positional encoding. Third, we generalize our theory to random walk on higher-order simplices and propose the general principle to design PE on simplices based on random walk and Hodge Laplacians. Inter-level random walk is also introduced to unify a wide range of simplicial networks. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our random walk-based methods.
tl;dr: We develop a multi-task learning framework for integrating summary statistics from distinct sources to form genetic risk predictions.
Multi-task learning has emerged as a powerful machine learning paradigm for integrating data from multiple sources, leveraging similarities between tasks to improve overall model performance. However, the application of multi-task learning to real-world settings is hindered by data-sharing constraints, especially in healthcare settings. To address this challenge, we propose a flexible multi-task learning framework utilizing summary statistics from various sources. Additionally, we present an adaptive parameter selection approach based on a variant of Lepski's method, allowing for data-driven tuning parameter selection when only summary statistics are accessible. Our systematic non-asymptotic analysis characterizes the performance of the proposed methods under various regimes of the source datasets' sample complexity and overlap. We demonstrate our theoretical findings and the performance of the method through extensive simulations. This work offers a more flexible tool for training related models across various domains, with practical implications in genetic risk prediction and many other fields.
2031. Strategic Apple Tasting
tl;dr: We study the problem of online classification when data is generated by strategic agents, and the learner only receives apple tasting (or bandit) feedback.
Algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes domains often involves assigning decisions to agents with incentives to strategically modify their input to the algorithm. In addition to dealing with incentives, in many domains of interest (e.g. lending and hiring) the decision-maker only observes feedback regarding their policy for rounds in which they assign a positive decision to the agent; this type of feedback is often referred to as apple tasting (or one-sided) feedback. We formalize this setting as an online learning problem with apple-tasting feedback where a principal makes decisions about a sequence of $T$ agents, each of which is represented by a context that may be strategically modified. Our goal is to achieve sublinear strategic regret, which compares the performance of the principal to that of the best fixed policy in hindsight, if the agents were truthful when revealing their contexts. Our main result is a learning algorithm which incurs $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ strategic regret when the sequence of agents is chosen stochastically. We also give an algorithm capable of handling adversarially-chosen agents, albeit at the cost of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{(d+1)/(d+2)})$ strategic regret (where $d$ is the dimension of the context). Our algorithms can be easily adapted to the setting where the principal receives bandit feedback---this setting generalizes both the linear contextual bandit problem (by considering agents with incentives) and the strategic classification problem (by allowing for partial feedback).
tl;dr: We propose computationally efficient variants of some optimal non-parametric bandit algorithms.
We consider the problem of regret minimization in non-parametric stochastic bandits. When the rewards are known to be bounded from above, there exists asymptotically optimal algorithms, with asymptotic regret depending on an infimum of Kullback-Leibler divergences (KL). These algorithms are computationally expensive and require storing all past rewards, thus simpler but non-optimal algorithms are often used instead. We introduce several methods to approximate the infimum KL which reduce drastically the computational and memory costs of existing optimal algorithms, while keeping their regret guaranties. We apply our findings to design new variants of the MED and IMED algorithms, and demonstrate their interest with extensive numerical simulations.
The minimax problems arise throughout machine learning applications, ranging from adversarial training and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning to AUROC maximization. To address the large-scale distributed data challenges across multiple clients with communication-efficient distributed training, federated learning (FL) is gaining popularity. Many optimization algorithms for minimax problems have been developed in the centralized setting (\emph{i.e.}, single-machine). Nonetheless, the algorithm for minimax problems under FL is still underexplored. In this paper, we study a class of federated nonconvex minimax optimization problems. We propose FL algorithms (FedSGDA+ and FedSGDA-M) and reduce existing complexity results for the most common minimax problems. For nonconvex-concave problems, we propose FedSGDA+ and reduce the communication complexity to $O(\varepsilon^{-6})$. Under nonconvex-strongly-concave and nonconvex-PL minimax settings, we prove that FedSGDA-M has the best-known sample complexity of $O(\kappa^{3} N^{-1}\varepsilon^{-3})$ and the best-known communication complexity of $O(\kappa^{2}\varepsilon^{-2})$. FedSGDA-M is the first algorithm to match the best sample complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ achieved by the single-machine method under the nonconvex-strongly-concave setting. Extensive experimental results on fair classification and AUROC maximization show the efficiency of our algorithms.
Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to trace students' knowledge states by predicting whether students answer correctly on exercises. Despite the excellent performance of existing Transformer-based KT approaches, they are criticized for the manually selected input features for fusion and the defect of single global context modelling to directly capture students' forgetting behavior in KT, when the related records are distant from the current record in terms of time. To address the issues, this paper first considers adding convolution operations to the Transformer to enhance its local context modelling ability used for students' forgetting behavior, then proposes an evolutionary neural architecture search approach to automate the input feature selection and automatically determine where to apply which operation for achieving the balancing of the local/global context modelling. In the search space, the original global path containing the attention module in Transformer is replaced with the sum of a global path and a local path that could contain different convolutions, and the selection of input features is also considered. To search the best architecture, we employ an effective evolutionary algorithm to explore the search space and also suggest a search space reduction strategy to accelerate the convergence of the algorithm. Experimental results on the two largest and most challenging education datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture found by the proposed approach.
tl;dr: We analyze the 1-layer transformer with next token prediction loss, and rigorously prove its training process and reveal how the token is combined via self-attention layer and the nature of its inductive bias.
Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple predictive loss, how the representation emerges from the gradient \emph{training dynamics} remains a mystery. In this paper, for 1-layer transformer with one self-attention layer plus one decoder layer, we analyze its SGD training dynamics for the task of next token prediction in a mathematically rigorous manner. We open the black box of the dynamic process of how the self-attention layer combines input tokens, and reveal the nature of underlying inductive bias. More specifically, with the assumption (a) no positional encoding, (b) long input sequence, and (c) the decoder layer learns faster than the self-attention layer, we prove that self-attention acts as a \emph{discriminative scanning algorithm}:
starting from uniform attention, it gradually attends more to distinct key tokens for a specific next token to be predicted, and pays less attention to common key tokens that occur across different next tokens. Among distinct tokens, it progressively drops attention weights, following the order of low to high co-occurrence between the key and the query token in the training set. Interestingly, this procedure does not lead to winner-takes-all, but stops due to a \emph{phase transition} that is controllable by the learning rate of the decoder layer, leaving (almost) fixed token combination. We verify this \textbf{\emph{scan and snap}} dynamics on synthetic and real-world data (WikiText-103).
tl;dr: Our work study induced sparse patterns across multiple large pre-trained vision and language transformers, and preposes the existence of essential sparsity.
Large pre-trained transformers are $\textit{show-stealer}$ in modern-day deep learning, and it becomes crucial to comprehend the parsimonious patterns that exist within them as they grow in scale. With exploding parameter counts, Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and its variants, have lost their pragmatism in sparsifying them due to high computation and memory bottleneck of repetitive $\textit{train-prune-retrain}$ routine of iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) which worsens with increasing model size. In this paper, we comprehensively study $\textit{induced sparse patterns}$ across multiple large pre-trained vision and language transformers. We propose the existence of -- $\textbf{essential sparsity}$ defined with a $\textbf{sharp dropping point}$ beyond which the performance declines much faster w.r.t the rise of sparsity level, when we directly remove weights with the smallest magnitudes in $\textbf{one-shot}$. We also present an intriguing emerging phenomenon of $\textbf{abrupt sparsification}$ during the pre-training of BERT, i.e., BERT suddenly becomes heavily sparse in pre-training after certain iterations. Moreover, our observations also indicate a $\textbf{counter-intuitive}$ finding that BERT trained with a larger amount of pre-training data tends to have a better ability to condense knowledge in comparatively relatively fewer parameters. Lastly, we investigate the effect of the pre-training loss on essential sparsity and discover that self-supervised learning (SSL) objectives trigger stronger emergent sparsification properties than supervised learning (SL). All our codes will be publicly available.
We propose eXtensible Prompt (X-Prompt) for prompting a large language model (LLM) beyond natural language (NL). X-Prompt instructs an LLM with not only NL but also an extensible vocabulary of imaginary words. Registering new imaginary words allows us to instruct the LLM to comprehend concepts that are difficult to describe with NL words, thereby making a prompt more descriptive. Also, these imaginary words are designed to be out-of-distribution (OOD) robust so that they can be (re)used like NL words in various prompts, distinguishing X-Prompt from soft prompt that is for fitting in-distribution data. We propose context-augmented learning (CAL) to learn imaginary words for general usability, enabling them to work properly in OOD (unseen) prompts. We experiment X-Prompt for zero-shot language style customization as a case study. The promising results of X-Prompt demonstrate its potential to facilitate advanced interaction beyond the natural language interface, bridging the communication gap between humans and LLMs.
tl;dr: The paper defines the concept of data minimization at inference time and introduces an efficient sequential algorithm to achieve data minimization.
In high-stakes domains such as legal, banking, hiring, and healthcare, learning models frequently rely on sensitive user information for inference, necessitating the complete set of features. This not only poses significant privacy risks for individuals but also demands substantial human effort from organizations to verify information accuracy.
This study asks whether it is necessary to use all input features for accurate predictions at inference time. The paper demonstrates that, in a personalized setting, individuals may only need to disclose a small subset of features without compromising decision-making accuracy. The paper also provides an efficient sequential algorithm to determine the appropriate attributes for each individual to provide. Evaluations across various learning tasks show that individuals can potentially report as little as 10\% of their information while maintaining the same accuracy level as a model that employs the full set of user information.
tl;dr: An alternate training process that iterates between grounding preference into token-level training guidance and improving the language model with the learned guidance.
Aligning language models (LMs) with preferences is an important problem in natural language generation. A key challenge is that preferences are typically provided at the *sequence level* while LM training and generation both occur at the *token level*. There is, therefore, a *granularity mismatch* between the preference and the LM training losses, which may complicate the learning problem. In this paper, we address this issue by developing an alternate training process, where we iterate between grounding the sequence-level preference into token-level training guidance, and improving the LM with the learned guidance. For guidance learning, we design a framework that extends the pairwise-preference learning in imitation learning to both variable-length LM generation and the utilization of the preference among multiple generations. For LM training, based on the amount of supervised data, we present two *minimalist* learning objectives that utilize the learned guidance. In experiments, our method performs competitively on two distinct representative LM tasks --- discrete-prompt generation and text summarization.
tl;dr: We analyze exploration failures when myopic agents collectively face a simple multi-armed bandit problem and act in a(ny) way consistent with confidence intervals.
We study social learning dynamics motivated by reviews on online platforms. The
agents collectively follow a simple multi-armed bandit protocol, but each agent
acts myopically, without regards to exploration. We allow a wide range of myopic
behaviors that are consistent with (parameterized) confidence intervals for the arms’
expected rewards. We derive stark exploration failures for any such behavior, and
provide matching positive results. As a special case, we obtain the first general
results on failure of the greedy algorithm in bandits, thus providing a theoretical
foundation for why bandit algorithms should explore.
tl;dr: Our paper gives new perspectives on pruning at initialization from the configuration of subnetwork (particularly effective paths and nodes) to better design pruning algorithms.
Pruning at initialization (PaI) aims to remove weights of neural networks before training in pursuit of training efficiency besides the inference. While off-the-shelf PaI methods manage to find trainable subnetworks that outperform random pruning, their performance in terms of both accuracy and computational reduction is far from satisfactory compared to post-training pruning and the understanding of PaI is missing. For instance, recent studies show that existing PaI methods only able to find good layerwise sparsities not weights, as the discovered subnetworks are surprisingly resilient against layerwise random mask shuffling and weight re-initialization.
In this paper, we study PaI from a brand-new perspective -- the topology of subnetworks. In particular, we propose a principled framework for analyzing the performance of Pruning and Initialization (PaI) methods with two quantities, namely, the number of effective paths and effective nodes. These quantities allow for a more comprehensive understanding of PaI methods, giving us an accurate assessment of different subnetworks at initialization. We systematically analyze the behavior of various PaI methods through our framework and observe a guiding principle for constructing effective subnetworks: *at a specific sparsity, the top-performing subnetwork always presents a good balance between the number of effective nodes and the number of effective paths.*
Inspired by this observation, we present a novel data-agnostic pruning method by solving a multi-objective optimization problem. By conducting extensive experiments across different architectures and datasets, our results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art PaI methods while it is able to discover subnetworks that have much lower inference FLOPs (up to 3.4$\times$). Code will be fully released.
While contextual bandit has a mature theory, effectively leveraging different feedback patterns to enhance the pace of learning remains unclear. Bandits with feedback graphs, which interpolates between the full information and bandit regimes, provides a promising framework to mitigate the statistical complexity of learning. In this paper, we propose and analyze an approach to contextual bandits with feedback graphs based upon reduction to regression. The resulting algorithms are computationally practical and achieve established minimax rates, thereby reducing the statistical complexity in real-world applications.
Sparse high-dimensional functions have arisen as a rich framework to study the behavior of gradient-descent methods using shallow neural networks, and showcasing its ability to perform feature learning beyond linear models.
Amongst those functions, the simplest are single-index models $f(x) = \phi( x \cdot \theta^*)$, where the labels are generated by an arbitrary non-linear link function $\phi$ of an unknown one-dimensional projection $\theta^*$ of the input data. By focusing on Gaussian data, several recent works have built a remarkable picture, where the so-called information exponent (related to the regularity of the link function) controls the required sample complexity. In essence, these tools exploit the stability and spherical symmetry of Gaussian distributions.
In this work, we explore extensions of this picture beyond the Gaussian setting, where both stability or symmetry might be violated. Focusing on the planted setting where $\phi$ is known, our main results establish that Stochastic Gradient Descent recovers the unknown direction $\theta^*$ with constant probability in the high-dimensional regime, under mild assumptions that significantly extend ~[Yehudai and Shamir,20].
tl;dr: This paper uncovers spontaneous symmetry breaking in diffusion models, indicating the existence of a phase transition in their generative dynamics.
Generative diffusion models have recently emerged as a leading approach for generating high-dimensional data. In this paper, we show that the dynamics of these models exhibit a spontaneous symmetry breaking that divides the generative dynamics into two distinct phases: 1) A linear steady-state dynamics around a central fixed-point and 2) an attractor dynamics directed towards the data manifold. These two "phases'' are separated by the change in stability of the central fixed-point, with the resulting window of instability being responsible for the diversity of the generated samples. Using both theoretical and empirical evidence, we show that an accurate simulation of the early dynamics does not significantly contribute to the final generation, since early fluctuations are reverted to the central fixed point. To leverage this insight, we propose a Gaussian late initialization scheme, which significantly improves model performance, achieving up to 3x FID improvements on fast samplers, while also increasing sample diversity (e.g., racial composition of generated CelebA images). Our work offers a new way to understand the generative dynamics of diffusion models that has the potential to bring about higher performance and less biased fast-samplers.
tl;dr: In this paper, we introduce a novel policy learning approach that leverages analytical gradients, which may exhibit high variance or bias, in order to improve the performance of the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm.
We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we introduce the concept of an α-policy that stands as a locally superior policy. By adaptively modifying the α value, we can effectively manage the influence of analytical policy gradients during learning. To this end, we suggest metrics for assessing the variance and bias of analytical gradients, reducing dependence on these gradients when high variance or bias is detected. Our proposed approach outperforms baseline algorithms in various scenarios, such as function optimization, physics simulations, and traffic control environments. Our code can be found online: https://github.com/SonSang/gippo.
tl;dr: This paper optimizes question selection in CAT to achieve an upper-bounded ability estimation error.
Computerized adaptive testing (CAT), as a tool that can efficiently measure student's ability, has been widely used in various standardized tests (e.g., GMAT and GRE). The adaptivity of CAT refers to the selection of the most informative questions for each student, reducing test length. Existing CAT methods do not explicitly target ability estimation accuracy since there is no student's true ability as ground truth; therefore, these methods cannot be guaranteed to make the estimate converge to the true with such limited responses. In this paper, we analyze the statistical properties of estimation and find a theoretical approximation of the true ability: the ability estimated by full responses to question bank. Based on this, a Bounded Ability Estimation framework for CAT (BECAT) is proposed in a data-summary manner, which selects a question subset that closely matches the gradient of the full responses. Thus, we develop an expected gradient difference approximation to design a simple greedy selection algorithm, and show the rigorous theoretical and error upper-bound guarantees of its ability estimate. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets, show that it can reach the same estimation accuracy using 15\% less questions on average, significantly reducing test length.
tl;dr: We propose a variance-reduced unbiased online evolutionary strategies method for gradient estimation in unrolled computation graphs.
Unrolled computation graphs are prevalent throughout machine learning but present challenges to automatic differentiation (AD) gradient estimation methods when their loss functions exhibit extreme local sensitivtiy, discontinuity, or blackbox characteristics. In such scenarios, online evolution strategies methods are a more capable alternative, while being more parallelizable than vanilla evolution strategies (ES) by interleaving partial unrolls and gradient updates. In this work, we propose a general class of unbiased online evolution strategies methods. We analytically and empirically characterize the variance of this class of gradient estimators and identify the one with the least variance, which we term Noise-Reuse Evolution Strategies (NRES). Experimentally, we show NRES results in faster convergence than existing AD and ES methods in terms of wall-clock time and number of unroll steps across a variety of applications, including learning dynamical systems, meta-training learned optimizers, and reinforcement learning.
tl;dr: This paper specifically designs an efficient diffusion model for image super-resolution that significantly reduces the sampling steps.
Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) methods are mainly limited by the low inference speed due to the requirements of hundreds or even thousands of sampling steps. Existing acceleration sampling techniques inevitably sacrifice performance to some extent, leading to over-blurry SR results. To address this issue, we propose a novel and efficient diffusion model for SR that significantly reduces the number of diffusion steps, thereby eliminating the need for post-acceleration during inference and its associated performance deterioration. Our method constructs a Markov chain that transfers between the high-resolution image and the low-resolution image by shifting the residual between them, substantially improving the transition efficiency. Additionally, an elaborate noise schedule is developed to flexibly control the shifting speed and the noise strength during the diffusion process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method obtains superior or at least comparable performance to current state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, \textit{\textbf{even only with 20 sampling steps}}. Our code and model will be made publicly.
tl;dr: In this paper, we introduce and analyze novel algorithms that exhibit adaptability to the unknown covariance between arms in the context of the fixed confidence best arm identification problem.
We consider the problem of best arm identification in the multi-armed bandit model, under fixed confidence. Given a confidence input $\delta$, the goal is to identify the arm with the highest mean reward with a probability of at least $1 - \delta$, while minimizing the number of arm pulls. While the literature provides solutions to this problem under the assumption of independent arms distributions, we propose a more flexible scenario where arms can be dependent and rewards can be sampled simultaneously. This framework allows the learner to estimate the covariance among the arms distributions, enabling a more efficient identification of the best arm. The relaxed setting we propose is relevant in various applications, such as clinical trials, where similarities between patients or drugs suggest underlying correlations in the outcomes. We introduce new algorithms that adapt to the unknown covariance of the arms and demonstrate through theoretical guarantees that substantial improvement can be achieved over the standard setting. Additionally, we provide new lower bounds for the relaxed setting and present numerical simulations that support their theoretical findings.
In recent years, significant attention in deep learning theory has been devoted to analyzing when models that interpolate their training data can still generalize well to unseen examples. Many insights have been gained from studying models with multiple layers of Gaussian random features, for which one can compute precise generalization asymptotics. However, few works have considered the effect of weight anisotropy; most assume that the random features are generated using independent and identically distributed Gaussian weights, and allow only for structure in the input data. Here, we use the replica trick from statistical physics to derive learning curves for models with many layers of structured Gaussian features. We show that allowing correlations between the rows of the first layer of features can aid generalization, while structure in later layers is generally detrimental. Our results shed light on how weight structure affects generalization in a simple class of solvable models.
2051. Aggregating Capacity in FL through Successive Layer Training for Computationally-Constrained Devices
tl;dr: layerwise training works better than training model subsets for memory-constrained devices in federated learning.
Federated learning (FL) is usually performed on resource-constrained edge devices, e.g., with limited memory for the computation. If the required memory to train a model exceeds this limit, the device will be excluded from the training. This can lead to a lower accuracy as valuable data and computation resources are excluded from training, also causing bias and unfairness. The FL training process should be adjusted to such constraints. The state-of-the-art techniques propose training subsets of the FL model at constrained devices, reducing their resource requirements for training. However, these techniques largely limit the co-adaptation among parameters of the model and are highly inefficient, as we show: it is actually better to train a smaller (less accurate) model by the system where all the devices can train the model end-to-end than applying such techniques. We propose a new method that enables successive freezing and training of the parameters of the FL model at devices, reducing the training’s resource requirements at the devices while still allowing enough co-adaptation between parameters. We show through extensive experimental evaluation that our technique greatly improves the accuracy of the trained model (by 52.4 p.p. ) compared with the state of the art, efficiently aggregating the computation capacity available on distributed devices.
Generalizable neural surface reconstruction techniques have attracted great attention in recent years. However, they encounter limitations of low confidence depth distribution and inaccurate surface reasoning due to the oversimplified volume rendering process employed. In this paper, we present Reconstruction TRansformer (ReTR), a novel framework that leverages the transformer architecture to redesign the rendering process, enabling complex render interaction modeling. It introduces a learnable $\textit{meta-ray token}$ and utilizes the cross-attention mechanism to simulate the interaction of rendering process with sampled points and render the observed color. Meanwhile, by operating within a high-dimensional feature space rather than the color space, ReTR mitigates sensitivity to projected colors in source views. Such improvements result in accurate surface assessment with high confidence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various datasets, showcasing how our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of reconstruction quality and generalization ability. $\textit{Our code is available at }$ https://github.com/YixunLiang/ReTR.
tl;dr: We formulate a token decoding procedure applying large language model to robotics settings. Tokens are selected based on likelihood under the language model and a set of grounded models, such as affordance, safety, and preference functions.
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to learn and leverage Internet-scale knowledge through pre-training with autoregressive models. Unfortunately, applying such models to settings with embodied agents, such as robots, is challenging due to their lack of experience with the physical world, inability to parse non-language observations, and ignorance of rewards or safety constraints that robots may require. On the other hand, language-conditioned robotic policies that learn from interaction data can provide the necessary grounding that allows the agent to be correctly situated in the real world, but such policies are limited by the lack of high-level semantic understanding due to the limited breadth of the interaction data available for training them. Thus, if we want to make use of the semantic knowledge in a language model while still situating it in an embodied setting, we must construct an action sequence that is both likely according to the language model and also realizable according to grounded models of the environment. We frame this as a problem similar to probabilistic filtering: decode a sequence that both has high probability under the language model and high probability under a set of grounded model objectives. We demonstrate how such grounded models can be obtained across three simulation and real-world domains, and that the proposed decoding strategy is able to solve complex, long-horizon embodiment tasks in a robotic setting by leveraging the knowledge of both models.
A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators. This study utilizes a novel source, newly digitized articles from off-copyright, local U.S. newspapers, to assemble a massive-scale semantic similarity dataset spanning 70 years from 1920 to 1989 and containing nearly 400M positive semantic similarity pairs. Historically, around half of articles in U.S. local newspapers came from newswires like the Associated Press. While local papers reproduced articles from the newswire, they wrote their own headlines, which form abstractive summaries of the associated articles. We associate articles and their headlines by exploiting document layouts and language understanding. We then use deep neural methods to detect which articles are from the same underlying source, in the presence of substantial noise and abridgement. The headlines of reproduced articles form positive semantic similarity pairs. The resulting publicly available HEADLINES dataset is significantly larger than most existing semantic similarity datasets and covers a much longer span of time. It will facilitate the application of contrastively trained semantic similarity models to a variety of tasks, including the study of semantic change across space and time.
tl;dr: Diffusion-SS3D enhances the quality of pseudo-labels via the diffusion model for semi-supervised 3D object detection.
Semi-supervised object detection is crucial for 3D scene understanding, efficiently addressing the limitation of acquiring large-scale 3D bounding box annotations. Existing methods typically employ a teacher-student framework with pseudo-labeling to leverage unlabeled point clouds. However, producing reliable pseudo-labels in a diverse 3D space still remains challenging. In this work, we propose Diffusion-SS3D, a new perspective of enhancing the quality of pseudo-labels via the diffusion model for semi-supervised 3D object detection. Specifically, we include noises to produce corrupted 3D object size and class label distributions, and then utilize the diffusion model as a denoising process to obtain bounding box outputs. Moreover, we integrate the diffusion model into the teacher-student framework, so that the denoised bounding boxes can be used to improve pseudo-label generation, as well as the entire semi-supervised learning process. We conduct experiments on the ScanNet and SUN RGB-D benchmark datasets to demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance against existing methods. We also present extensive analysis to understand how our diffusion model design affects performance in semi-supervised learning. The source code will be available at https://github.com/luluho1208/Diffusion-SS3D.
tl;dr: Present a diffusion model over SE(3) manifold for point cloud registration-based 6D object pose estimation.
In this paper, we introduce an SE(3) diffusion model-based point cloud registration framework for 6D object pose estimation in real-world scenarios. Our approach formulates the 3D registration task as a denoising diffusion process, which progressively refines the pose of the source point cloud to obtain a precise alignment with the model point cloud. Training our framework involves two operations: An SE(3) diffusion process and an SE(3) reverse process. The SE(3) diffusion process gradually perturbs the optimal rigid transformation of a pair of point clouds by continuously injecting noise (perturbation transformation). By contrast, the SE(3) reverse process focuses on learning a denoising network that refines the noisy transformation step-by-step, bringing it closer to the optimal transformation for accurate pose estimation. Unlike standard diffusion models used in linear Euclidean spaces, our diffusion model operates on the SE(3) manifold. This requires exploiting the linear Lie algebra $\mathfrak{se}(3)$ associated with SE(3) to constrain the transformation transitions during the diffusion and reverse processes. Additionally, to effectively train our denoising network, we derive a registration-specific variational lower bound as the optimization objective for model learning. Furthermore, we show that our denoising network can be constructed with a surrogate registration model, making our approach applicable to different deep registration networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our diffusion registration framework presents outstanding pose estimation performance on the real-world TUD-L, LINEMOD, and Occluded-LINEMOD datasets.
Shape completion aims to recover the full 3D geometry of an object from a partial observation. This problem is inherently multi-modal since there can be many ways to plausibly complete the missing regions of a shape. Such diversity would be indicative of the underlying uncertainty of the shape and could be preferable for downstream tasks such as planning. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network that can produce many diverse plausible completions of a partially observed point cloud. To enable our network to produce multiple completions for the same partial input, we introduce stochasticity into our network via style modulation. By extracting style codes from complete shapes during training, and learning a distribution over them, our style codes can explicitly carry shape category information leading to better completions. We further introduce diversity penalties and discriminators at multiple scales to prevent conditional mode collapse and to train without the need for multiple ground truth completions for each partial input. Evaluations across several synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in respecting the partial observations while obtaining greater diversity in completions.
tl;dr: We develop a SE(3) denoising score matching method for unsupervised antibody-antigen binding affinity prediction.
Protein-ligand binding prediction is a fundamental problem in AI-driven drug discovery. Previous work focused on supervised learning methods for small molecules where binding affinity data is abundant, but it is hard to apply the same strategy to other ligand classes like antibodies where labelled data is limited. In this paper, we explore unsupervised approaches and reformulate binding energy prediction as a generative modeling task. Specifically, we train an energy-based model on a set of unlabelled protein-ligand complexes using SE(3) denoising score matching (DSM) and interpret its log-likelihood as binding affinity. Our key contribution is a new equivariant rotation prediction network called Neural Euler's Rotation Equations (NERE) for SE(3) DSM. It predicts a rotation by modeling the force and torque between protein and ligand atoms, where the force is defined as the gradient of an energy function with respect to atom coordinates. Using two protein-ligand and antibody-antigen binding affinity prediction benchmarks, we show that NERE outperforms all unsupervised baselines (physics-based potentials and protein language models) in both cases and surpasses supervised baselines in the antibody case.
Gaussian Process Networks (GPNs) are a class of directed graphical models which employ Gaussian processes as priors for the conditional expectation of each variable given its parents in the network. The model allows the description of continuous joint distributions in a compact but flexible manner with minimal parametric assumptions on the dependencies between variables. Bayesian structure learning of GPNs requires computing the posterior over graphs of the network and is computationally infeasible even in low dimensions. This work implements Monte Carlo and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to sample from the posterior distribution of network structures. As such, the approach follows the Bayesian paradigm, comparing models via their marginal likelihood and computing the posterior probability of the GPN features. Simulation studies show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in recovering the graphical structure of the network and provides an accurate approximation of its posterior distribution.
The decision tree is a flexible machine-learning model that finds its success in numerous applications. It is usually fitted in a recursively greedy manner using CART. In this paper, we study the convergence rate of CART under a regression setting. First, we prove an upper bound on the prediction error of CART under a sufficient impurity decrease (SID) condition \cite{chi2020asymptotic} -- our result is an improvement over the known result by \cite{chi2020asymptotic} under a similar assumption. We show via examples that this error bound cannot be further improved by more than a constant or a log factor. Second, we introduce a few easy-to-check sufficient conditions of the SID condition. In particular, we show that the SID condition can be satisfied by an additive model when the component functions satisfy a ``locally reverse Poincare inequality". We discuss a few familiar function classes in non-parametric estimation to demonstrate the usefulness of this conception.
tl;dr: Investigate the unexplored challenges of QAT on decoder models and propose a innovative KD method to overcome it
Generative Language Models (GLMs) have shown impressive performance in tasks such as text generation, understanding, and reasoning. However, the large model size poses challenges for practical deployment. To solve this problem, Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) has become increasingly popular. However, current QAT methods for generative models have resulted in a noticeable loss of accuracy. To counteract this issue, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method specifically designed for GLMs. Our method, called token-scaled logit distillation, prevents overfitting and provides superior learning from the teacher model and ground truth. This research marks the first evaluation of ternary weight quantization-aware training of large-scale GLMs with less than 1.0 degradation in perplexity and achieves enhanced accuracy in tasks like common-sense QA and arithmetic reasoning as well as natural language understanding. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/TSLD.
tl;dr: The work revisits the spatial down-sampling and proposes a new framework for learning dynamic frequency interaction from down-sampling in a unified Fourier function.
Spatial down-sampling techniques, such as strided convolution, Gaussian, and Nearest down-sampling, are essential in deep neural networks. In this study, we revisit the working mechanism of the spatial down-sampling family and analyze the biased effects caused by the static weighting strategy employed in previous approaches. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel down-sampling paradigm in the Fourier domain, abbreviated as FouriDown, which unifies existing down-sampling techniques. Drawing inspiration from the signal sampling theorem, we parameterize the non-parameter static weighting down-sampling operator as a learnable and context-adaptive operator within a unified Fourier function. Specifically, we organize the corresponding frequency positions of the 2D plane in a physically-closed manner within a single channel dimension. We then perform point-wise channel shuffling based on an indicator that determines whether a channel's signal frequency bin is susceptible to aliasing, ensuring the consistency of the weighting parameter learning. FouriDown, as a generic operator, comprises four key components: 2D discrete Fourier transform, context shuffling rules, Fourier weighting-adaptively superposing rules, and 2D inverse Fourier transform. These components can be easily integrated into existing image restoration networks. To demonstrate the efficacy of FouriDown, we conduct extensive experiments on image de-blurring and low-light image enhancement. The results consistently show that FouriDown can provide significant performance improvements. We will make the code publicly available to facilitate further exploration and application of FouriDown.
tl;dr: We propose to dynamic approaches to sparsify the attention matrix, they greatly reduce the attention runtime for large sequences.
Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention---which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t. the sequence length---becomes a central concern. While many works have proposed schemes to sparsify the attention patterns and reduce the computational overhead of self-attention, those are often limited by implementation concerns and end up imposing a simple and static structure over the attention matrix. Conversely, implementing more dynamic sparse attention often results in runtimes significantly slower than computing the full attention using the Flash implementation from Dao et al. (2022). We extend FlashAttention to accommodate a large class of attention sparsity patterns that, in particular, encompass key/query dropping and hashing-based attention. This leads to implementations with no computational complexity overhead and a multi-fold runtime speedup on top of FlashAttention. Even with relatively low degrees of sparsity, our method improves visibly upon FlashAttention as the sequence length increases. Without sacrificing perplexity, we increase the training speed of a transformer language model by $2.0\times$ and $3.3\times$ for sequences of respectively $8k$ and $16k$ tokens.
tl;dr: FactorCL is a new contrastive learning method that effectively learns both shared and unique task-relevant information across multiple modalities.
In a wide range of multimodal tasks, contrastive learning has become a particularly appealing approach since it can successfully learn representations from abundant unlabeled data with only pairing information (e.g., image-caption or video-audio pairs). Underpinning these approaches is the assumption of multi-view redundancy - that shared information between modalities is necessary and sufficient for downstream tasks. However, in many real-world settings, task-relevant information is also contained in modality-unique regions: information that is only present in one modality but still relevant to the task. How can we learn self-supervised multimodal representations to capture both shared and unique information relevant to downstream tasks? This paper proposes FactorCL, a new multimodal representation learning method to go beyond multi-view redundancy. FactorCL is built from three new contributions: (1) factorizing task-relevant information into shared and unique representations, (2) capturing task-relevant information via maximizing MI lower bounds and removing task-irrelevant information via minimizing MI upper bounds, and (3) multimodal data augmentations to approximate task relevance without labels. On large-scale real-world datasets, FactorCL captures both shared and unique information and achieves state-of-the-art results on six benchmarks.
Multi-modal Contrastive Representation (MCR) learning aims to encode different modalities into a semantically aligned shared space. This paradigm shows remarkable generalization ability on numerous downstream tasks across various modalities. However, the reliance on massive high-quality data pairs limits its further development on more modalities. This paper proposes a novel training-efficient method for learning MCR without paired data called Connecting Multi-modal Contrastive Representations (C-MCR). Specifically, given two existing MCRs pre-trained on $(\mathcal{A}$, $\mathcal{B})$ and $(\mathcal{B}$, $\mathcal{C})$ modality pairs, we project them to a new space and use the data from the overlapping modality $\mathcal{B}$ to aligning the two MCRs in the new space. Meanwhile, since the modality pairs $(\mathcal{A}$, $\mathcal{B})$ and $(\mathcal{B}$, $\mathcal{C})$ are already aligned within each MCR, the connection learned by overlapping modality can also be transferred to non-overlapping modality pair $(\mathcal{A}$, $\mathcal{C})$. To unleash the potential of C-MCR, we further introduce a semantic-enhanced inter- and intra-MCR connection method. We first enhance the semantic consistency and completion of embeddings across different modalities for more robust alignment. Then we utilize the inter-MCR alignment to establish the connection, and employ the intra-MCR alignment to better maintain the connection for inputs from non-overlapping modalities. To demonstrate the effectiveness of C-MCR, we take the field of audio-visual and 3D-language learning as examples. Specifically, we connect CLIP and CLAP via texts to derive audio-visual representations, and integrate CLIP and ULIP via images for 3D-language representations. Remarkably, without using any paired data, C-MCR for audio-visual achieves state-of-the-art performance on audio-image retrieval, audio-visual source localization, and counterfactual audio-image recognition tasks. Furthermore, C-MCR for 3D-language also attains advanced zero-shot 3D point cloud classification accuracy on ModelNet40. Our project page is available at \url{https://c-mcr.github.io/C-MCR/}
tl;dr: We generate 3D assets from diverse 2D multi-view datasets by training a 3D Diffusion model on the intermediate features of a Volumetric AutoDecodER.
Diffusion-based methods have shown impressive visual results in the text-to-image domain. They first learn a latent space using an autoencoder, then run a denoising process on the bottleneck to generate new samples. However, learning an autoencoder requires substantial data in the target domain. Such data is scarce for 3D generation, prohibiting the learning of large-scale diffusion models for 3D synthesis. We present a novel approach to the generation of static and articulated 3D assets that has a 3D autodecoder at its core. The 3D autodecoder framework embeds properties learned from the target dataset in the latent space, which can then be decoded into a volumetric representation for rendering view-consistent appearance and geometry. We then identify the appropriate intermediate volumetric latent space, and introduce robust normalization and de-normalization operations to learn a 3D diffusion from 2D images or monocular videos of rigid or articulated objects. Our approach is flexible enough to use either existing camera supervision or no camera information at all -- instead efficiently learning it during training. Our evaluations demonstrate that our generation results outperform state-of-the-art alternatives on various benchmark datasets and metrics, including multi-view image datasets of synthetic objects, real in-the-wild videos of moving people, and a large-scale, real video dataset of static objects.
tl;dr: This paper study the safe reinforcement learning and reward-free exploration with step-wise violation constraints
We investigate a novel safe reinforcement learning problem with step-wise violation constraints. Our problem differs from existing works in that we focus on stricter step-wise violation constraints and do not assume the existence of safe actions, making our formulation more suitable for safety-critical applications that need to ensure safety in all decision steps but may not always possess safe actions, e.g., robot control and autonomous driving.
We propose an efficient algorithm SUCBVI, which guarantees $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{ST})$ or gap-dependent $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(S/\mathcal{C}_{\mathrm{gap}} + S^2AH^2)$ step-wise violation and $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{H^3SAT})$ regret. Lower bounds are provided to validate the optimality in both violation and regret performance with respect to the number of states $S$ and the total number of steps $T$.
Moreover, we further study an innovative safe reward-free exploration problem with step-wise violation constraints. For this problem, we design algorithm SRF-UCRL to find a near-optimal safe policy, which achieves nearly state-of-the-art sample complexity $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}((\frac{S^2AH^2}{\varepsilon}+\frac{H^4SA}{\varepsilon^2})(\log(\frac{1}{\delta})+S))$, and guarantees $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{ST})$ violation during exploration. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms in safety performance and corroborate our theoretical results.
tl;dr: This paper presents an end-to-end neural architecture based on Diffusion Models for spatial puzzle solving, particularly jigsaw puzzle and room arrangement tasks.
This paper presents an end-to-end neural architecture based on Diffusion Models for spatial puzzle solving, particularly jigsaw puzzle and room arrangement tasks.
In the latter task, for instance, the proposed system ``PuzzleFusion'' takes a set of room layouts as polygonal curves in the top-down view and aligns the room layout pieces by estimating their 2D translations and rotations, akin to solving the jigsaw puzzle of room layouts. A surprising discovery of the paper is that the simple use of a Diffusion Model effectively solves these challenging spatial puzzle tasks as a conditional generation process.
To enable learning of an end-to-end neural system, the paper introduces new datasets with ground-truth arrangements: 1) 2D Voronoi Jigsaw Dataset, a synthetic one where pieces are generated by voronoi diagram of 2D pointset; and 2) MagicPlan Dataset, a real one from a production pipeline by MagicPlan, where pieces are room layouts constructed by augmented reality App by real-estate consumers.
The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the competing methods by significant margins in all three spatial puzzle tasks. We have provided code and data in https://sepidsh.github.io/puzzlefusion.
We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms; for example, when the execution of the data collection policies is required to be distributed, or a human in the loop is needed to implement these policies, producing in advance a set of policies for data collection is paramount. We study the setting where a large dataset of contexts -but not rewards- is available and may be used by the learner to design an effective data collection strategy. Although when rewards are linear this problem has been well studied, results are still missing for more complex reward models. In this work we propose two experiment planning strategies compatible with function approximation, first an eluder planning and sampling procedure that can recover optimality guarantees depending on the eluder dimension of the reward function class, and second we show the uniform sampler achieves competitive optimality rates in the setting where the number of actions is small. We finalize our results introducing a statistical gap fleshing out the fundamental differences between planning and adaptive learning and provide results for planning with model selection.
tl;dr: In this paper, we proposed Curriculum and Structure-aware Optimal Transport , a novel solution to construct robust denoising and relabeling allocator for learning with noisy labels.
Learning with noisy labels (LNL) poses a significant challenge in training a well-generalized model while avoiding overfitting to corrupted labels.
Recent advances have achieved impressive performance by identifying clean labels and correcting corrupted labels for training.
However, the current approaches rely heavily on the model’s predictions and evaluate each sample independently without considering either the global or local structure of the sample distribution.
These limitations typically result in a suboptimal solution for the identification and correction processes, which eventually leads to models overfitting to incorrect labels.
In this paper, we propose a novel optimal transport (OT) formulation, called Curriculum and Structure-aware Optimal Transport (CSOT). CSOT concurrently considers the inter- and intra-distribution structure of the samples to construct a robust denoising and relabeling allocator.
During the training process, the allocator incrementally assigns reliable labels to a fraction of the samples with the highest confidence.
These labels have both global discriminability and local coherence.
Notably, CSOT is a new OT formulation with a nonconvex objective function and curriculum constraints, so it is not directly compatible with classical OT solvers.
Here, we develop a lightspeed computational method that involves a scaling iteration within a generalized conditional gradient framework to solve CSOT efficiently.
Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over the current state-of-the-arts in LNL.
tl;dr: A new neural representation of light field that enables real-time synthesis of novel view images on mobile devices.
Real-time novel-view image synthesis on mobile devices is prohibitive due to the limited computational power and storage. Using volumetric rendering methods, such as NeRF and its derivatives, on mobile devices is not suitable due to the high computational cost of volumetric rendering. On the other hand, recent advances in neural light field representations have shown promising real-time view synthesis results on mobile devices. Neural light field methods learn a direct mapping from a ray representation to the pixel color. The current choice of ray representation is either stratified ray sampling or Plücker coordinates, overlooking the classic light slab (two-plane) representation, the preferred representation to interpolate between light field views. In this work, we find that using the light slab representation is an efficient representation for learning a neural light field. More importantly, it is a lower-dimensional ray representation enabling us to learn the 4D ray space using feature grids which are significantly faster to train and render. Although mostly designed for frontal views, we show that the light-slab representation can be further extended to non-frontal scenes using a divide-and-conquer strategy. Our method provides better rendering quality than prior light field methods and a significantly better trade-off between rendering quality and speed than prior light field methods.
This paper studies the problem of active causal discovery when the experiments can be done based on multi-fidelity oracles, where higher fidelity experiments are more precise and expensive, while the lower ones are cheaper but less accurate. In this paper, we formally define the task of multi-fidelity active causal discovery, and design a probabilistic model for solving this problem. In specific, we first introduce a mutual-information based acquisition function to determine which variable should be intervened at which fidelity, and then a cascading model is proposed to capture the correlations between different fidelity oracles. Beyond the above basic framework, we also extend it to the batch intervention scenario. We find that the theoretical foundations behind the widely used and efficient greedy method do not hold in our problem. To solve this problem, we introduce a new concept called $\epsilon$-submodular, and design a constraint based fidelity model to theoretically validate the greedy method. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
We introduce Alexa Arena, a user-centric simulation platform to facilitate research in building assistive conversational embodied agents. Alexa Arena features multi-room layouts and an abundance of interactable objects. With user-friendly graphics and control mechanisms, the platform supports the development of gamified robotic tasks readily accessible to general human users, allowing high-efficiency data collection and EAI system evaluation. Along with the platform, we introduce a dialog-enabled task completion benchmark with online human evaluations.
tl;dr: We show singificantly longer tokenized length for languages other than English and argue that this casuses unfair treatment of some language communities.
Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it.
Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages.
In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked.
The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tokenization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases.
These disparities persist even for tokenizers that are intentionally trained for multilingual support.
Character-level and byte-level models also exhibit over 4 times the difference in the encoding length for some language pairs.
This induces unfair treatment for some language communities in regard to the cost of accessing commercial language services, the processing time and latency, as well as the amount of content that can be provided as context to the models.
Therefore, we make the case that we should train future language models using multilingually fair subword tokenizers.
The widespread adoption of Transformer architectures in various data modalities has opened new avenues for the applications in molecular modeling.
Nevertheless, it remains elusive that whether the Transformer-based architecture can do molecular modeling as good as equivariant GNNs.
In this paper, by designing Interatomic Positional Encoding (IPE) that
parameterizes atomic environments as Transformer's positional encodings,
we propose Geoformer, a novel geometric Transformer
to effectively model molecular structures for various molecular property prediction.
We evaluate Geoformer on several benchmarks, including the QM9 dataset and the recently proposed Molecule3D dataset.
Compared with both Transformers and equivariant GNN models, Geoformer outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoTA) algorithms on QM9, and achieves the best performance on Molecule3D for both random and scaffold splits.
By introducing IPE,
Geoformer paves the way for molecular geometric modeling based on Transformer architecture.
tl;dr: We introduce a method for learning complex physics simulations based on mesh transformation, shape embedding and finite element interpolation.
When learning simulations for modeling physical phenomena in industrial designs, geometrical variabilities are of prime interest. While classical regression techniques prove effective for parameterized geometries, practical scenarios often involve the absence of shape parametrization during the inference stage, leaving us with only mesh discretizations as available data. Learning simulations from such mesh-based representations poses significant challenges, with recent advances relying heavily on deep graph neural networks to overcome the limitations of conventional machine learning approaches. Despite their promising results, graph neural networks exhibit certain drawbacks, including their dependency on extensive datasets and limitations in providing built-in predictive uncertainties or handling large meshes. In this work, we propose a machine learning method that do not rely on graph neural networks. Complex geometrical shapes and variations with fixed topology are dealt with using well-known mesh morphing onto a common support, combined with classical dimensionality reduction techniques and Gaussian processes. The proposed methodology can easily deal with large meshes without the need for explicit shape parameterization and provides crucial predictive uncertainties, which are essential for informed decision-making. In the considered numerical experiments, the proposed method is competitive with respect to existing graph neural networks, regarding training efficiency and accuracy of the predictions.
tl;dr: We present an algorithm for efficiently recovering spherical harmonic expansions of functions on the $d$-dimensional unit sphere, requiring a near-optimal number of function evaluations.
We propose an algorithm for robust recovery of the spherical harmonic expansion of functions defined on the $d$-dimensional unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ using a near-optimal number of function evaluations. We show that for any $f\in L^2(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$, the number of evaluations of $f$ needed to recover its degree-$q$ spherical harmonic expansion equals the dimension of the space of spherical harmonics of degree at most $q$, up to a logarithmic factor. Moreover, we develop a simple yet efficient kernel regression-based algorithm to recover degree-$q$ expansion of $f$ by only evaluating the function on uniformly sampled points on $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$. Our algorithm is built upon the connections between spherical harmonics and Gegenbauer polynomials. Unlike the prior results on fast spherical harmonic transform, our proposed algorithm works efficiently using a nearly optimal number of samples in any dimension $d$. Furthermore, we illustrate the empirical performance of our algorithm on numerical examples.
Recent advances in graph neural networks (GNNs) have enabled more comprehensive modeling of molecules and molecular systems, thereby enhancing the precision of molecular property prediction and molecular simulations. Nonetheless, as the field has been progressing to bigger and more complex architectures, state-of-the-art GNNs have become largely prohibitive for many large-scale applications. In this paper, we explore the utility of knowledge distillation (KD) for accelerating molecular GNNs. To this end, we devise KD strategies that facilitate the distillation of hidden representations in directional and equivariant GNNs, and evaluate their performance on the regression task of energy and force prediction. We validate our protocols across different teacher-student configurations and datasets, and demonstrate that they can consistently boost the predictive accuracy of student models without any modifications to their architecture. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive optimization of various components of our framework, and investigate the potential of data augmentation to further enhance performance. All in all, we manage to close the gap in predictive accuracy between teacher and student models by as much as 96.7\% and 62.5\% for energy and force prediction respectively, while fully preserving the inference throughput of the more lightweight models.
tl;dr: We enable experts/users to interact with the model and align it with their values without interfering with each other.
Despite substantial advancements, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models often require post-training adjustments to enforce business rules, rectify undesired behavior, and align with user values.
These adjustments involve operationalizing "concepts"—dictating desired model responses to certain inputs.
However, it's difficult for a single entity to enumerate and define all possible concepts, indicating a need for a multi-user, collaborative model alignment framework.
Moreover, the exhaustive delineation of a concept is challenging, and an improper approach can create shortcuts or interfere with original data or other concepts.
To address these challenges, we introduce CoAlign, a framework that enables multi-user interaction with the model, thereby mitigating individual limitations.
CoAlign aids users in operationalizing their concepts using Large Language Models, and relying on the principle that NLP models exhibit simpler behaviors in local regions.
Our main insight is learning a \emph{local} model for each concept, and a \emph{global} model to integrate the original data with all concepts.
We then steer a large language model to generate instances within concept boundaries where local and global disagree.
Our experiments show CoAlign is effective at helping multiple users operationalize concepts and avoid interference for a variety of scenarios, tasks, and models.
tl;dr: This paper firstly points out the overlooked inherent bias of zero-shot models, and present a Generalized Logit Adjustment (GLA) method together with a pretrain class distribution estimation algorithm to tackle this problem.
Foundation models like CLIP allow zero-shot transfer on various tasks without additional training data. Yet, the zero-shot performance is less competitive than a fully supervised one. Thus, to enhance the performance, fine-tuning and ensembling are also commonly adopted to better fit the downstream tasks. However, we argue that such prior work has overlooked the inherent biases in foundation models. Due to the highly imbalanced Web-scale training set, these foundation models are inevitably skewed toward frequent semantics, and thus the subsequent fine-tuning or ensembling is still biased. In this study, we systematically examine the biases in foundation models and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed Generalized Logit Adjustment (GLA) method. Note that bias estimation in foundation models is challenging, as most pre-train data cannot be explicitly assessed like in traditional long-tailed classification tasks.
To this end, GLA has an optimization-based bias estimation approach for debiasing foundation models. As our work resolves a fundamental flaw in the pre-training, the proposed GLA demonstrates significant improvements across a diverse range of tasks: it achieves 1.5 pp accuracy gains on ImageNet, an large average improvement (1.4-4.6 pp) on 11 few-shot datasets, 2.4 pp gains on long-tailed classification. Codes are in https://github.com/BeierZhu/GLA.
Autonomous agents operating in real-world scenarios frequently encounter uncertainty and make decisions based on incomplete information. Planning under uncertainty can be mathematically formalized using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, finding an optimal plan for POMDPs can be computationally expensive and is feasible only for small tasks. In recent years, approximate algorithms, such as tree search and sample-based methodologies, have emerged as state-of-the-art POMDP solvers for larger problems. Despite their effectiveness, these algorithms offer only probabilistic and often asymptotic guarantees toward the optimal solution due to their dependence on sampling. To address these limitations, we derive a deterministic relationship between a simplified solution that is
easier to obtain and the theoretically optimal one. First, we derive bounds for selecting a subset of the observations to branch from while computing a complete belief at each posterior node. Then, since a complete belief update may be computationally demanding, we extend the bounds to support reduction of both the state and the observation spaces. We demonstrate how our guarantees can be integrated with existing state-of-the-art solvers that sample a subset of states and observations. As a result, the returned solution holds deterministic bounds relative to the optimal policy. Lastly, we substantiate our findings with supporting experimental results.
tl;dr: We investigate the use of a diffusion probabilistic model for structured node classification based on its ability to learn joint dependencies and make predictions conditioned on partially known data.
This paper studies structured node classification on graphs, where the predictions should consider dependencies between the node labels. In particular, we focus on solving the problem for partially labeled graphs where it is essential to incorporate the information in the known label for predicting the unknown labels. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework leveraging the diffusion probabilistic model for structured node classification (DPM-SNC). At the heart of our framework is the extraordinary capability of DPM-SNC to (a) learn a joint distribution over the labels with an expressive reverse diffusion process and (b) make predictions conditioned on the known labels utilizing manifold-constrained sampling. Since the DPMs lack training algorithms for partially labeled data, we design a novel training algorithm to apply DPMs, maximizing a new variational lower bound. We also theoretically analyze how DPMs benefit node classification by enhancing the expressive power of GNNs based on proposing AGG-WL, which is strictly more powerful than the classic 1-WL test. We extensively verify the superiority of our DPM-SNC in diverse scenarios, which include not only the transductive setting on partially labeled graphs but also the inductive setting and unlabeled graphs.
The classical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying stepsize $\eta_t = \eta/\sqrt{t}$ relies on well-tuned $\eta$ depending on problem parameters such as Lipschitz smoothness constant, which is often unknown in practice. In this work, we prove that SGD with arbitrary $\eta > 0$, referred to as untuned SGD, still attains an order-optimal convergence rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/4})$ in terms of gradient norm for minimizing smooth objectives. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of a catastrophic exponential dependence on the smoothness constant, which we show is unavoidable for this scheme even in the noiseless setting. We then examine three families of adaptive methods — Normalized SGD (NSGD), AMSGrad, and AdaGrad — unveiling their power in preventing such exponential dependency in the absence of information about the smoothness parameter and boundedness of stochastic gradients. Our results provide theoretical justification for the advantage of adaptive methods over untuned SGD in alleviating the issue with large gradients.
tl;dr: We propose a novel model for clothed avatar reconstruction from monocular input image.
Reconstructing 3D clothed human avatars from single images is a challenging task, especially when encountering complex poses and loose clothing. Current methods exhibit limitations in performance, largely attributable to their dependence on insufficient 2D image features and inconsistent query methods. Owing to this, we present the Global-correlated 3D-decoupling Transformer for clothed Avatar reconstruction (GTA), a novel transformer-based architecture that reconstructs clothed human avatars from monocular images. Our approach leverages transformer architectures by utilizing a Vision Transformer model as an encoder for capturing global-correlated image features. Subsequently, our innovative 3D-decoupling decoder employs cross-attention to decouple tri-plane features, using learnable embeddings as queries for cross-plane generation. To effectively enhance feature fusion with the tri-plane 3D feature and human body prior, we propose a hybrid prior fusion strategy combining spatial and prior-enhanced queries, leveraging the benefits of spatial localization and human body prior knowledge. Comprehensive experiments on CAPE and THuman2.0 datasets illustrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both geometry and texture reconstruction, exhibiting high robustness to challenging poses and loose clothing, and producing higher-resolution textures. Codes are available at https://github.com/River-Zhang/GTA.
tl;dr: We demonstrate successful machine-learning based attacks against learning with errors problems with small, sparse secrets.
Learning with Errors (LWE) is a hard math problem used in post-quantum cryptography. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) schemes rely on the hardness of the LWE problem for their security, and two LWE-based cryptosystems were recently standardized by NIST for digital signatures and key exchange (KEM). Thus, it is critical to continue assessing the security of LWE and specific parameter choices. For example, HE uses secrets with small entries, and the HE community has considered standardizing small sparse secrets to improve efficiency and functionality. However, prior work, SALSA and PICANTE, showed that ML attacks can recover sparse binary secrets. Building on these, we propose VERDE, an improved ML attack that can recover sparse binary, ternary, and narrow Gaussian secrets. Using improved preprocessing and secret recovery techniques, VERDE can attack LWE with larger dimensions ($n=512$) and smaller moduli ($\log_2 q=12$ for $n=256$), using less time and power. We propose novel architectures for scaling. Finally, we develop a theory that explains the success of ML LWE attacks.
tl;dr: We propose to identify causal relations from subsampled time-series with proxy variables.
Inferring causal structures from time series data is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. A major barrier to such inference is the problem of subsampling, *i.e.*, the frequency of measurement is much lower than that of causal influence. To overcome this problem, numerous methods have been proposed, yet either was limited to the linear case or failed to achieve identifiability. In this paper, we propose a constraint-based algorithm that can identify the entire causal structure from subsampled time series, without any parametric constraint. Our observation is that the challenge of subsampling arises mainly from hidden variables at the unobserved time steps. Meanwhile, every hidden variable has an observed proxy, which is essentially itself at some observable time in the future, benefiting from the temporal structure. Based on these, we can leverage the proxies to remove the bias induced by the hidden variables and hence achieve identifiability. Following this intuition, we propose a proxy-based causal discovery algorithm. Our algorithm is nonparametric and can achieve full causal identification. Theoretical advantages are reflected in synthetic and real-world experiments.
Object detection models are vulnerable to backdoor or trojan attacks, where an attacker can inject malicious triggers into the model, leading to altered behavior during inference. As a defense mechanism, trigger inversion leverages optimization to reverse-engineer triggers and identify compromised models. While existing trigger inversion methods assume that each instance from the support set is equally affected by the injected trigger, we observe that the poison effect can vary significantly across bounding boxes in object detection models due to its dense prediction nature, leading to an undesired optimization objective misalignment issue for existing trigger reverse-engineering methods. To address this challenge, we propose the first object detection backdoor detection framework Django (Detecting Trojans in Object Detection Models via Gaussian Focus Calibration). It leverages a dynamic Gaussian weighting scheme that prioritizes more vulnerable victim boxes and assigns appropriate coefficients to calibrate the optimization objective during trigger inversion. In addition, we combine Django with a novel label proposal pre-processing technique to enhance its efficiency. We evaluate Django on 3 object detection image datasets, 3 model architectures, and 2 types of attacks, with a total of 168 models. Our experimental results show that Django outperforms 6 state-of-the-art baselines, with up to 38% accuracy improvement and 10x reduced overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/PurduePAML/DJGO.
tl;dr: We extract commonsense knowledge as QAR for images using ChatGPT and distill visual commonsense knowledge to vision language model by training on the synthetic data. Critic model is additionally trained to select high-quality generations.
Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible
interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion.
However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to
“point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is important
not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for practical
applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build Localized
Visual Commonsense model which allows users to specify (multiple) regions-
as-input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense knowledge
from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt a LLM to collect
commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a local
literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models. This
pipeline is scalable and fully automatic, as no aligned or human-authored image
and text pairs are required. With a separately trained critic model that selects
high quality examples, we find that training on the localized commonsense corpus
expanded solely from images can successfully distill existing VL models to support
a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results and human evaluations in zero-shot
settings demonstrate that our distillation method results in more precise VL models
of reasoning compared to a baseline of passing a generated referring expression.
Neural algorithmic reasoning is an emerging area of machine learning focusing on building models that can imitate the execution of classic algorithms, such as sorting, shortest paths, etc. One of the main challenges is to learn algorithms that are able to generalize to out-of-distribution data, in particular with significantly larger input sizes. Recent work on this problem has demonstrated the advantages of learning algorithms step-by-step, giving models access to all intermediate steps of the original algorithm. In this work, we instead focus on learning neural algorithmic reasoning only from the input-output pairs without appealing to the intermediate supervision. We propose simple but effective architectural improvements and also build a self-supervised objective that can regularise intermediate computations of the model without access to the algorithm trajectory. We demonstrate that our approach is competitive to its trajectory-supervised counterpart on tasks from the CLRS Algorithmic Reasoning Benchmark and achieves new state-of-the-art results for several problems, including sorting, where we obtain significant improvements. Thus, learning without intermediate supervision is a promising direction for further research on neural reasoners.
tl;dr: In this paper, we present DiffSketcher, an innovative algorithm that creates \textit{vectorized} free-hand sketches using natural language input.
Even though trained mainly on images, we discover that pretrained diffusion models show impressive power in guiding sketch synthesis. In this paper, we present DiffSketcher, an innovative algorithm that creates \textit{vectorized} free-hand sketches using natural language input. DiffSketcher is developed based on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. It performs the task by directly optimizing a set of Bézier curves with an extended version of the score distillation sampling (SDS) loss, which allows us to use a raster-level diffusion model as a prior for optimizing a parametric vectorized sketch generator. Furthermore, we explore attention maps embedded in the diffusion model for effective stroke initialization to speed up the generation process. The generated sketches demonstrate multiple levels of abstraction while maintaining recognizability, underlying structure, and essential visual details of the subject drawn. Our experiments show that DiffSketcher achieves greater quality than prior work. The code and demo of DiffSketcher can be found at https://ximinng.github.io/DiffSketcher-project/.
2091. AGD: an Auto-switchable Optimizer using Stepwise Gradient Difference for Preconditioning Matrix
tl;dr: We propose a novel optimizer, AGD, which incorporates the Hessian information into the precondition matrix and allows seamless switching between SGD and the adaptive optimizer.
Adaptive optimizers, such as Adam, have achieved remarkable success in deep learning. A key component of these optimizers is the so-called preconditioning matrix, providing enhanced gradient information and regulating the step size of each gradient direction. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to designing the preconditioning matrix by utilizing the gradient difference between two successive steps as the diagonal elements. These diagonal elements are closely related to the Hessian and can be perceived as an approximation of the inner product between the Hessian row vectors and difference of the adjacent parameter vectors. Additionally, we introduce an auto-switching function that enables the preconditioning matrix to switch dynamically between Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and the adaptive optimizer. Based on these two techniques, we develop a new optimizer named AGD that enhances the generalization performance. We evaluate AGD on public datasets of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), and Recommendation Systems (RecSys). Our experimental results demonstrate that AGD outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) optimizers, achieving highly competitive or significantly better predictive performance. Furthermore, we analyze how AGD is able to switch automatically between SGD and the adaptive optimizer and its actual effects on various scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/dlrover/tree/master/atorch/atorch/optimizers.
This paper proposes a novel strategy for estimating the heterogeneous treatment effect called the Fused and Accurate Shrinkage Tree ($\mathrm{FAST}$). Our approach utilizes both trial and observational data to improve the accuracy and robustness of the estimator. Inspired by the concept of shrinkage estimation in statistics, we develop an optimal weighting scheme and a corresponding estimator that balances the unbiased estimator based on the trial data with the potentially biased estimator based on the observational data. Specifically, combined with tree-based techniques, we introduce a new split criterion that utilizes both trial data and observational data to more accurately estimate the treatment effect. Furthermore, we confirm the consistency of our proposed tree-based estimator and demonstrate the effectiveness of our criterion in reducing prediction error through theoretical analysis. The advantageous finite sample performance of the $\mathrm{FAST}$ and its ensemble version over existing methods is demonstrated via simulations and real data analysis.
tl;dr: A method for fast learning of class-agnostic articulated models for high-quality reposing and novel view synthesis of captured 3D objects.
Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) achieve remarkable visual quality when synthesizing novel views of time-evolving 3D scenes. However, the common reliance on backward deformation fields makes reanimation of the captured object poses challenging. Moreover, the state of the art dynamic models are often limited by low visual fidelity, long reconstruction time or specificity to narrow application domains. In this paper, we present a novel method utilizing a point-based representation and Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) to jointly learn a Dynamic NeRF and an associated skeletal model from even sparse multi-view video. Our forward-warping approach achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity when synthesizing novel views and poses while significantly reducing the necessary learning time when compared to existing work. We demonstrate the versatility of our representation on a variety of articulated objects from common datasets and obtain reposable 3D reconstructions without the need of object-specific skeletal templates.
This paper presents Triangulation Residual loss (TR loss) for multiview 3D pose estimation in a data-efficient manner. Existing 3D supervised models usually require large-scale 3D annotated datasets, but the amount of existing data is still insufficient to train supervised models to achieve ideal performance, especially for animal pose estimation. To employ unlabeled multiview data for training, previous epipolar-based consistency provides a self-supervised loss that considers only the local consistency in pairwise views, resulting in limited performance and heavy calculations. In contrast, TR loss enables self-supervision with global multiview geometric consistency. Starting from initial 2D keypoint estimates, the TR loss can fine-tune the corresponding 2D detector without 3D supervision by simply minimizing the smallest singular value of the triangulation matrix in an end-to-end fashion. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art 25.8mm MPJPE and competitive 28.7mm MPJPE with only 5\% 2D labeled training data on the Human3.6M dataset. Experiments on animals such as mice demonstrate our TR loss's data-efficient training ability.
tl;dr: We propose a new prompting framework to guide black-box LLMs toward desired output by introducing directional stimulus (i.e., hints) in the prompt, which is generated by a small model optimized via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
We introduce Directional Stimulus Prompting, a novel framework for guiding black-box large language models (LLMs) towards specific desired outputs. Instead of directly adjusting LLMs, our method employs a small tunable policy model (e.g., T5) to generate an auxiliary directional stimulus prompt for each input instance. These directional stimulus prompts act as nuanced, instance-specific hints and clues to guide LLMs in generating desired outcomes, such as including specific keywords in the generated summary. Our approach sidesteps the challenges of direct LLM tuning by optimizing the policy model to explore directional stimulus prompts that align LLMs with desired behaviors. The policy model can be optimized through 1) supervised fine-tuning using labeled data and 2) reinforcement learning from offline or online rewards based on the LLM's output. We evaluate our method across various tasks, including summarization, dialogue response generation, and chain-of-thought reasoning. Our experiments indicate a consistent improvement in the performance of LLMs such as ChatGPT, Codex, and InstructGPT on these supervised tasks with minimal labeled data. Remarkably, by utilizing merely 80 dialogues from the MultiWOZ dataset, our approach boosts ChatGPT's performance by a relative 41.4%, achieving or exceeding the performance of some fully supervised state-of-the-art models. Moreover, the instance-specific chain-of-thought prompt generated through our method enhances InstructGPT's reasoning accuracy, outperforming both generalized human-crafted prompts and those generated through automatic prompt engineering. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Leezekun/Directional-Stimulus-Prompting.
tl;dr: We propose a new stochastic sampling algorithm that better balances speed and quality than previous ones
Generative processes that involve solving differential equations, such as diffusion models, frequently necessitate balancing speed and quality. ODE-based samplers are fast but plateau in performance while SDE-based samplers deliver higher sample quality at the cost of increased sampling time. We attribute this difference to sampling errors: ODE-samplers involve smaller discretization errors while stochasticity in SDE contracts accumulated errors. Based on these findings, we propose a novel sampling algorithm called \textit{Restart} in order to better balance discretization errors and contraction. The sampling method alternates between adding substantial noise in additional forward steps and strictly following a backward ODE. Empirically, Restart sampler surpasses previous SDE and ODE samplers in both speed and accuracy. Restart not only outperforms the previous best SDE results, but also accelerates the sampling speed by 10-fold / 2-fold on CIFAR-10 / ImageNet $64{\times} 64$. In addition, it attains significantly better sample quality than ODE samplers within comparable sampling times. Moreover, Restart better balances text-image alignment/visual quality versus diversity than previous samplers in the large-scale text-to-image Stable Diffusion model pre-trained on LAION $512{\times} 512$. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/diffusion_restart_sampling
tl;dr: Spectral Evolution of Linear-width Neural Networks
We investigate the spectral properties of linear-width feed-forward neural networks, where the sample size is asymptotically proportional to network width. Empirically, we show that the spectra of weight in this high dimensional regime are invariant when trained by gradient descent for small constant learning rates; we provide a theoretical justification for this observation and prove the invariance of the bulk spectra for both conjugate and neural tangent kernels. We demonstrate similar characteristics when training with stochastic gradient descent with small learning rates. When the learning rate is large, we exhibit the emergence of an outlier whose corresponding eigenvector is aligned with the training data structure. We also show that after adaptive gradient training, where a lower test error and feature learning emerge, both weight and kernel matrices exhibit heavy tail behavior. Simple examples are provided to explain when heavy tails can have better generalizations. We exhibit different spectral properties such as invariant bulk, spike, and heavy-tailed distribution from a two-layer neural network using different training strategies, and then correlate them to the feature learning. Analogous phenomena also appear when we train conventional neural networks with real-world data. We conclude that monitoring the evolution of the spectra during training is an essential step toward understanding the training dynamics and feature learning.
tl;dr: We propose to explicitly and fully preserve neighborhood context for improving diffusion-based image synthesis.
Diffusion models are a new class of generative models, and have dramatically promoted image generation with unprecedented quality and diversity. Existing diffusion models mainly try to reconstruct input image from a corrupted one with a pixel-wise or feature-wise constraint along spatial axes. However, such point-based reconstruction may fail to make each predicted pixel/feature fully preserve its neighborhood context, impairing diffusion-based image synthesis. As a powerful source of automatic supervisory signal, context has been well studied for learning representations. Inspired by this, we for the first time propose ConPreDiff to improve diffusion-based image synthesis with context prediction. We explicitly reinforce each point to predict its neighborhood context (i.e., multi-stride pixels/features) with a context decoder at the end of diffusion denoising blocks in training stage, and remove the decoder for inference. In this way, each point can better reconstruct itself by preserving its semantic connections with neighborhood context. This new paradigm of ConPreDiff can generalize to arbitrary discrete and continuous diffusion backbones without introducing extra parameters in sampling procedure. Extensive experiments are conducted on unconditional image generation, text-to-image generation and image inpainting tasks. Our ConPreDiff consistently outperforms previous methods and achieves new SOTA text-to-image generation results on MS-COCO, with a zero-shot FID score of 6.21.
Nanophotonic structures have versatile applications including solar cells, anti-reflective coatings, electromagnetic interference shielding, optical filters, and light emitting diodes. To design and understand these nanophotonic structures, electrodynamic simulations are essential. These simulations enable us to model electromagnetic fields over time and calculate optical properties. In this work, we introduce frameworks and benchmarks to evaluate nanophotonic structures in the context of parametric structure design problems. The benchmarks are instrumental in assessing the performance of optimization algorithms and identifying an optimal structure based on target optical properties. Moreover, we explore the impact of varying grid sizes in electrodynamic simulations, shedding light on how evaluation fidelity can be strategically leveraged in enhancing structure designs.
tl;dr: A software library for Gaussian processes in chemistry
We introduce GAUCHE, an open-source library for GAUssian processes in CHEmistry. Gaussian processes have long been a cornerstone of probabilistic machine learning, affording particular advantages for uncertainty quantification and Bayesian optimisation. Extending Gaussian processes to molecular representations, however, necessitates kernels defined over structured inputs such as graphs, strings and bit vectors. By providing such kernels in a modular, robust and easy-to-use framework, we seek to enable expert chemists and materials scientists to make use of state-of-the-art black-box optimization techniques. Motivated by scenarios frequently encountered in practice, we showcase applications for GAUCHE in molecular discovery, chemical reaction optimisation and protein design. The codebase is made available at https://github.com/leojklarner/gauche.
Masked graph modeling excels in the self-supervised representation learning of molecular graphs. Scrutinizing previous studies, we can reveal a common scheme consisting of three key components: (1) graph tokenizer, which breaks a molecular graph into smaller fragments (\ie subgraphs) and converts them into tokens; (2) graph masking, which corrupts the graph with masks; (3) graph autoencoder, which first applies an encoder on the masked graph to generate the representations, and then employs a decoder on the representations to recover the tokens of the original graph. However, the previous MGM studies focus extensively on graph masking and encoder, while there is limited understanding of tokenizer and decoder. To bridge the gap, we first summarize popular molecule tokenizers at the granularity of node, edge, motif, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and then examine their roles as the MGM's reconstruction targets. Further, we explore the potential of adopting an expressive decoder in MGM. Our results show that a subgraph-level tokenizer and a sufficiently expressive decoder with remask decoding have a \yuan{large impact on the encoder's representation learning}. Finally, we propose a novel MGM method SimSGT, featuring a Simple GNN-based Tokenizer (SGT) and an effective decoding strategy. We empirically validate that our method outperforms the existing molecule self-supervised learning methods. Our codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/syr-cn/SimSGT.
Human multimodal emotion recognition (MER) aims to perceive and understand human emotions via various heterogeneous modalities, such as language, vision, and acoustic. Compared with unimodality, the complementary information in the multimodalities facilitates robust emotion understanding. Nevertheless, in real-world scenarios, the missing modalities hinder multimodal understanding and result in degraded MER performance. In this paper, we propose an Incomplete Multimodality-Diffused emotion recognition (IMDer) method to mitigate the challenge of MER under incomplete multimodalities. To recover the missing modalities, IMDer exploits the score-based diffusion model that maps the input Gaussian noise into the desired distribution space of the missing modalities and recovers missing data abided by their original distributions. Specially, to reduce semantic ambiguity between the missing and the recovered modalities, the available modalities are embedded as the condition to guide and refine the diffusion-based recovering process. In contrast to previous work, the diffusion-based modality recovery mechanism in IMDer allows to simultaneously reach both distribution consistency and semantic disambiguation. Feature visualization of the recovered modalities illustrates the consistent modality-specific distribution and semantic alignment. Besides, quantitative experimental results verify that IMDer obtains state-of-the-art MER accuracy under various missing modality patterns.
tl;dr: In this research, we show drawbacks of the knowledge gradient algorithm, a popular police designed for the best arm identification problem, and propose an improved version of the algorithm that can avoid those drawbacks.
The knowledge gradient (KG) algorithm is a popular policy for the best arm identification (BAI) problem. It is built on the simple idea of always choosing the measurement that yields the greatest expected one-step improvement in the estimate of the best mean of the arms. In this research, we show that this policy has limitations, causing the algorithm not asymptotically optimal. We next provide a remedy for it, by following the manner of one-step look ahead of KG, but instead choosing the measurement that yields the greatest one-step improvement in the probability of selecting the best arm. The new policy is called improved knowledge gradient (iKG). iKG can be shown to be asymptotically optimal. In addition, we show that compared to KG, it is easier to extend iKG to variant problems of BAI, with the $\epsilon$-good arm identification and feasible arm identification as two examples. The superior performances of iKG on these problems are further demonstrated using numerical examples.
Tone mapping aims to convert high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range (LDR) representations, a critical task in the camera imaging pipeline. In recent years, 3-Dimensional LookUp Table (3D LUT) based methods have gained attention due to their ability to strike a favorable balance between enhancement performance and computational efficiency. However, these methods often fail to deliver satisfactory results in local areas since the look-up table is a global operator for tone mapping, which works based on pixel values and fails to incorporate crucial local information. To this end, this paper aims to address this issue by exploring a novel strategy that integrates global and local operators by utilizing closed-form Laplacian pyramid decomposition and reconstruction. Specifically, we employ image-adaptive 3D LUTs to manipulate the tone in the low-frequency image by leveraging the specific characteristics of the frequency information. Furthermore, we utilize local Laplacian filters to refine the edge details in the high-frequency components in an adaptive manner. Local Laplacian filters are widely used to preserve edge details in photographs, but their conventional usage involves manual tuning and fixed implementation within camera imaging pipelines or photo editing tools. We propose to learn parameter value maps progressively for local Laplacian filters from annotated data using a lightweight network. Our model achieves simultaneous global tone manipulation and local edge detail preservation in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: A new clinical predictive model for medical domain generalization
Deep learning models have been widely used to assist doctors with clinical decision-making. However, these models often encounter a significant performance drop when applied to data that differs from the distribution they were trained on. This challenge is known as the domain shift problem. Existing domain generalization algorithms attempt to address this problem by assuming the availability of domain IDs and training a single model to handle all domains. However, in healthcare settings, patients can be classified into numerous latent domains, where the actual domain categorizations are unknown. Furthermore, each patient domain exhibits distinct clinical characteristics, making it sub-optimal to train a single model for all domains. To overcome these limitations, we propose SLGD, a self-learning framework that iteratively discovers decoupled domains and trains personalized classifiers for each decoupled domain. We evaluate the generalizability of SLGD across spatial and temporal data distribution shifts on two real-world public EHR datasets: eICU and MIMIC-IV. Our results show that SLGD achieves up to 11% improvement in the AUPRC score over the best baseline.
Vision transformers have gained significant attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, instance segmentation, and object detection. However, challenges remain in addressing attention complexity and effectively capturing fine-grained information within images. Existing solutions often resort to down-sampling operations, such as pooling, to reduce computational cost. Unfortunately, such operations are non-invertible and can result in information loss. In this paper, we present a novel approach called Scattering Vision Transformer (SVT) to tackle these challenges. SVT incorporates a spectrally scattering network that enables the capture of intricate image details. SVT overcomes the invertibility issue associated with down-sampling operations by separating low-frequency and high-frequency components. Furthermore, SVT introduces a unique spectral gating network utilizing Einstein multiplication for token and channel mixing, effectively reducing complexity. We show that SVT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet dataset with a significant reduction in a number of parameters and FLOPS. SVT shows 2\% improvement over LiTv2 and iFormer. SVT-H-S reaches 84.2\% top-1 accuracy, while SVT-H-B reaches 85.2\% (state-of-art for base versions) and SVT-H-L reaches 85.7\% (again state-of-art for large versions). SVT also shows comparable results in other vision tasks such as instance segmentation. SVT also outperforms other transformers in transfer learning on standard datasets such as CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Oxford Flower, and Stanford Car datasets. The project page is available on this webpage.\url{https://badripatro.github.io/svt/}.
Predicting upcoming events is critical to our ability to effectively interact with our
environment and conspecifics. In natural language processing, transformer models,
which are trained on next-word prediction, appear to construct a general-purpose
representation of language that can support diverse downstream tasks. However, we
still lack an understanding of how a predictive objective shapes such representations.
Inspired by recent work in vision neuroscience Hénaff et al. (2019), here we test a
hypothesis about predictive representations of autoregressive transformer models.
In particular, we test whether the neural trajectory of a sequence of words in a
sentence becomes progressively more straight as it passes through the layers of the
network. The key insight behind this hypothesis is that straighter trajectories should
facilitate prediction via linear extrapolation. We quantify straightness using a 1-
dimensional curvature metric, and present four findings in support of the trajectory
straightening hypothesis: i) In trained models, the curvature progressively decreases
from the first to the middle layers of the network. ii) Models that perform better on
the next-word prediction objective, including larger models and models trained on
larger datasets, exhibit greater decreases in curvature, suggesting that this improved
ability to straighten sentence neural trajectories may be the underlying driver of
better language modeling performance. iii) Given the same linguistic context, the
sequences that are generated by the model have lower curvature than the ground
truth (the actual continuations observed in a language corpus), suggesting that
the model favors straighter trajectories for making predictions. iv) A consistent
relationship holds between the average curvature and the average surprisal of
sentences in the middle layers of models, such that sentences with straighter neural
trajectories also have lower surprisal. Importantly, untrained models don’t exhibit
these behaviors. In tandem, these results support the trajectory straightening
hypothesis and provide a possible mechanism for how the geometry of the internal
representations of autoregressive models supports next word prediction.
Distributional reinforcement learning algorithms have attempted to utilize estimated uncertainty for exploration, such as optimism in the face of uncertainty. However, using the estimated variance for optimistic exploration may cause biased data collection and hinder convergence or performance. In this paper, we present a novel distributional reinforcement learning that selects actions by randomizing risk criterion without losing the risk-neutral objective. We provide a perturbed distributional Bellman optimality operator by distorting the risk measure. Also,we prove the convergence and optimality of the proposed method with the weaker contraction property. Our theoretical results support that the proposed method does not fall into biased exploration and is guaranteed to converge to an optimal return. Finally, we empirically show that our method outperforms other existing distribution-based algorithms in various environments including Atari 55 games.
2109. The ToMCAT Dataset
tl;dr: We present a rich, multimodal dataset consisting of data from human teams conducting tasks in a Minecraft-based testbed while instrumented with a number of physiological sensors, including fNIRS and EEG.
We present a rich, multimodal dataset consisting of data from 40 teams of three humans conducting simulated urban search-and-rescue (SAR) missions in a Minecraft-based testbed, collected for the Theory of Mind-based Cognitive Architecture for Teams (ToMCAT) project. Modalities include two kinds of brain scan data---functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG), as well as skin conductance, heart rate, eye tracking, face images, spoken dialog audio data with automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions, game screenshots, gameplay data, game performance data, demographic data, and self-report questionnaires. Each team undergoes up to six consecutive phases: three behavioral tasks, one mission training session, and two collaborative SAR missions. As time-synchronized multimodal data collected under a variety of circumstances, this dataset will support studying a large variety of research questions on topics including teamwork, coordination, plan recognition, affective computing, physiological linkage, entrainment, and dialog understanding. We provide an initial public release of the de-identified data, along with analyses illustrating the utility of this dataset to both computer scientists and social scientists.
Homophily principle, i.e., nodes with the same labels are more likely to be connected, has been believed to be the main reason for the performance superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over Neural Networks on node classification tasks. Recent research suggests that, even in the absence of homophily, the advantage of GNNs still exists as long as nodes from the same class share similar neighborhood patterns. However, this argument only considers intra-class Node Distinguishability (ND) but neglects inter-class ND, which provides incomplete understanding of homophily on GNNs. In this paper, we first demonstrate such deficiency with examples and argue that an ideal situation for ND is to have smaller intra-class ND than inter-class ND. To formulate this idea and study ND deeply, we propose Contextual Stochastic Block Model for Homophily (CSBM-H) and define two metrics, Probabilistic Bayes Error (PBE) and negative generalized Jeffreys divergence, to quantify ND. With the metrics, we visualize and analyze how graph filters, node degree distributions and class variances influence ND, and investigate the combined effect of intra- and inter-class ND. Besides, we discovered the mid-homophily pitfall, which occurs widely in graph datasets. Furthermore, we verified that, in real-work tasks, the superiority of GNNs is indeed closely related to both intra- and inter-class ND regardless of homophily levels. Grounded in this observation, we propose a new hypothesis-testing based performance metric beyond homophily, which is non-linear, feature-based and can provide statistical threshold value for GNNs' the superiority. Experiments indicate that it is significantly more effective than the existing homophily metrics on revealing the advantage and disadvantage of graph-aware modes on both synthetic and benchmark real-world datasets.
As trained intelligent systems become increasingly pervasive, multiagent learning has emerged as a popular framework for studying complex interactions between autonomous agents. Yet, a formal understanding of how and when learners in heterogeneous environments benefit from sharing their respective experiences is far from complete. In this paper, we seek answers to these questions in the context of linear contextual bandits. We present a novel distributed learning algorithm based on the upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithm, which we refer to as H-LINUCB, wherein agents cooperatively minimize the group regret under the coordination of a central server. In the setting where the level of heterogeneity or dissimilarity across the environments is known to the agents, we show that H-LINUCB is provably optimal in regimes where the tasks are highly similar or highly dissimilar.
In this paper, we investigate the impact of numerical instability on the reliability of sampling, density evaluation, and evidence lower bound (ELBO) estimation in variational flows. We first empirically demonstrate that common flows can exhibit a catastrophic accumulation of error: the numerical flow map deviates significantly from the exact map---which affects sampling---and the numerical inverse flow map does not accurately recover the initial input---which affects density and ELBO computations. Surprisingly though, we find that results produced by flows are often accurate enough for applications despite the presence of serious numerical instability. In this work, we treat variational flows as chaotic dynamical systems, and leverage shadowing theory to elucidate this behavior via theoretical guarantees on the error of sampling, density evaluation, and ELBO estimation. Finally, we develop and empirically test a diagnostic procedure that can be used to validate results produced by numerically unstable flows in practice.
tl;dr: We propose a plug-and-play framework that uses small and large Transformer models together to speed up text generation by ~2x.
The recent emergence of Large Language Models based on the Transformer architecture has enabled dramatic advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing. However, these models have long inference latency, which limits their deployment and makes them prohibitively expensive for various real-time applications. The inference latency is further exacerbated by autoregressive generative tasks, as models need to run iteratively to generate tokens sequentially without leveraging token-level parallelization. To address this, we propose Big Little Decoder (BiLD), a framework that can improve inference efficiency and latency for a wide range of text generation applications. The BiLD framework contains two models with different sizes that collaboratively generate text. The small model runs autoregressively to generate text with a low inference cost, and the large model is only invoked occasionally to refine the small model’s inaccurate predictions in a non-autoregressive manner. To coordinate the small and large models, BiLD introduces two simple yet effective policies: (1) the fallback policy that determines when to hand control over to the large model; and (2) the rollback policy that determines when the large model needs to correct the small model's inaccurate predictions. To evaluate our framework across different tasks and models, we apply BiLD to various text generation scenarios encompassing machine translation on IWSLT 2017 De-En and WMT 2014 De-En, and summarization on XSUM and CNN/DailyMail. On an NVIDIA T4 GPU, our framework achieves a speedup of up to 2.12x speedup with minimal generation quality degradation. Furthermore, our framework is fully plug-and-play and can be applied without any modifications in the training process or model architecture. Our code is open-sourced.
Large language models have emerged as a promising approach towards achieving general-purpose AI agents. The thriving open-source LLM community has greatly accelerated the development of agents that support human-machine dialogue interaction through natural language processing. However, human interaction with the world extends beyond only text as a modality, and other modalities such as vision are also crucial. Recent works on multi-modal large language models, such as GPT-4V and Bard, have demonstrated their effectiveness in handling visual modalities. However, the transparency of these works is limited and insufficient to support academic research. To the best of our knowledge, we present one of the very first open-source endeavors in the field, LAMM, encompassing a Language-Assisted Multi-Modal instruction tuning dataset, framework, and benchmark. Our aim is to establish LAMM as a growing ecosystem for training and evaluating MLLMs, with a specific focus on facilitating AI agents capable of bridging the gap between ideas and execution, thereby enabling seamless human-AI interaction. Our main contribution is three-fold: 1) We present a comprehensive dataset and benchmark, which cover a wide range of vision tasks for 2D and 3D vision. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our dataset and benchmark. 2) We outline the detailed methodology of constructing multi-modal instruction tuning datasets and benchmarks for MLLMs, enabling rapid scaling and extension of MLLM research to diverse domains, tasks, and modalities. 3) We provide a primary but potential MLLM training framework optimized for modality extension. We also provide baseline models, comprehensive experimental observations, and analysis to accelerate future research. Our baseline model is trained within 24 A100 GPU hours, framework supports training with V100 and RTX3090 is available thanks to the open-source society. Codes and data are now available at https://openlamm.github.io.
Test-time adaptation (TTA) is a special and practical setting in unsupervised domain adaptation, which allows a pre-trained model in a source domain to adapt to unlabeled test data in another target domain. To avoid the computation-intensive backbone fine-tuning process, the zero-shot generalization potentials of the emerging pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP, CoOp) are leveraged to only tune the run-time prompt for unseen test domains. However, existing solutions have yet to fully exploit the representation capabilities of pre-trained models as they only focus on the entropy-based optimization and the performance is far below the supervised prompt adaptation methods, e.g., CoOp. In this paper, we propose SwapPrompt, a novel framework that can effectively leverage the self-supervised contrastive learning to facilitate the test-time prompt adaptation. SwapPrompt employs a dual prompts paradigm, i.e., an online prompt and a target prompt that averaged from the online prompt to retain historical information. In addition, SwapPrompt applies a swapped prediction mechanism, which takes advantage of the representation capabilities of pre-trained models to enhance the online prompt via contrastive learning. Specifically, we use the online prompt together with an augmented view of the input image to predict the class assignment generated by the target prompt together with an alternative augmented view of the same image. The proposed SwapPrompt can be easily deployed on vision-language models without additional requirement, and experimental results show that it achieves state-of-the-art test-time adaptation performance on ImageNet and nine other datasets. It is also shown that SwapPrompt can even achieve comparable performance with supervised prompt adaptation methods.
Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging collaborative machine learning framework where multiple clients train the global model without sharing their own datasets.
In FL, the model inconsistency caused by the local data heterogeneity across clients results in the near-orthogonality of client updates, which leads to the global update norm reduction and slows down the convergence. Most previous works focus on eliminating the difference of parameters (or gradients) between the local and global models, which may fail to reflect the model inconsistency due to the complex structure of the machine learning model and the Euclidean space's limitation in meaningful geometric representations.
In this paper, we propose FedMRUR by adopting the manifold model fusion scheme and a new global optimizer to alleviate the negative impacts.
Concretely, FedMRUR adopts a hyperbolic graph manifold regularizer enforcing the representations of the data in the local and global models are close to each other in a low-dimensional subspace.
Because the machine learning model has the graph structure, the distance in hyperbolic space can reflect the model bias better than the Euclidean distance.
In this way, FedMRUR exploits the manifold structures of the representations to significantly reduce the model inconsistency.
FedMRUR also aggregates the client updates norms as the global update norm, which can appropriately enlarge each client's contribution to the global update, thereby mitigating the norm reduction introduced by the near-orthogonality of client updates.
Furthermore, we theoretically prove that our algorithm can achieve a linear speedup property $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{SKT}})$ for non-convex setting under partial client participation, where $S$ is the participated clients number, $K$ is the local interval and $T$ is the total number of communication rounds.
Experiments demonstrate that FedMRUR can achieve a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy with less communication.
tl;dr: By adaptively setting probability of treatment assignment based on observed outcomes, we can achieve provably increased precision of effect estimators.
From clinical development of cancer therapies to investigations into partisan bias, adaptive sequential designs have become increasingly popular method for causal inference, as they offer the possibility of improved precision over their non-adaptive counterparts. However, even in simple settings (e.g. two treatments) the extent to which adaptive designs can improve precision is not sufficiently well understood. In this work, we study the problem of Adaptive Neyman Allocation in a design-based potential outcomes framework, where the experimenter seeks to construct an adaptive design which is nearly as efficient as the optimal (but infeasible) non-adaptive Neyman design, which has access to all potential outcomes. Motivated by connections to online optimization, we propose Neyman Ratio and Neyman Regret as two (equivalent) performance measures of adaptive designs for this problem. We present Clip-OGD, an adaptive design which achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ expected Neyman regret and thereby recovers the optimal Neyman variance in large samples. Finally, we construct a conservative variance estimator which facilitates the development of asymptotically valid confidence intervals. To complement our theoretical results, we conduct simulations using data from a microeconomic experiment.
tl;dr: A diffusion based approach to decoding compressed audio tokens
Deep generative models can generate high-fidelity audio conditioned on various
types of representations (e.g., mel-spectrograms, Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients
(MFCC)). Recently, such models have been used to synthesize audio
waveforms conditioned on highly compressed representations. Although such
methods produce impressive results, they are prone to generate audible artifacts
when the conditioning is flawed or imperfect. An alternative modeling approach is
to use diffusion models. However, these have mainly been used as speech vocoders
(i.e., conditioned on mel-spectrograms) or generating relatively low sampling
rate signals. In this work, we propose a high-fidelity multi-band diffusion-based
framework that generates any type of audio modality (e.g., speech, music, environmental
sounds) from low-bitrate discrete representations. At equal bit rate,
the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art generative techniques in terms
of perceptual quality. Training and evaluation code are available on the facebookresearch/
audiocraft github project. Samples are available on the following
link (https://ai.honu.io/papers/mbd/).
Intermediate-level attacks that attempt to perturb feature representations following an adversarial direction drastically have shown favorable performance in crafting transferable adversarial examples. Existing methods in this category are normally formulated with two separate stages, where a directional guide is required to be determined at first and the scalar projection of the intermediate-level perturbation onto the directional guide is enlarged thereafter. The obtained perturbation deviates from the guide inevitably in the feature space, and it is revealed in this paper that such a deviation may lead to sub-optimal attack. To address this issue, we develop a novel intermediate-level method that crafts adversarial examples within a single stage of optimization. In particular, the proposed method, named intermediate-level perturbation decay (ILPD), encourages the intermediate-level perturbation to be in an effective adversarial direction and to possess a great magnitude simultaneously. In-depth discussion verifies the effectiveness of our method. Experimental results show that it outperforms state-of-the-arts by large margins in attacking various victim models on ImageNet (+10.07% on average) and CIFAR-10 (+3.88% on average). Our code is at https://github.com/qizhangli/ILPD-attack.
2120. FLAIR : a Country-Scale Land Cover Semantic Segmentation Dataset From Multi-Source Optical Imagery
tl;dr: The FLAIR #2 dataset proposes an extensive collection of annotated high resolution images and satellite data time series for training and evaluating large-scale multimodal semantic segmentation methods.
We introduce the French Land cover from Aerospace ImageRy (FLAIR), an extensive dataset from the French National Institute of Geographical and Forest Information (IGN) that provides a unique and rich resource for large-scale geospatial analysis. FLAIR contains high-resolution aerial imagery with a ground sample distance of 20 cm and over 20 billion individually labeled pixels for precise land-cover classification. The dataset also integrates temporal and spectral data from optical satellite time series.
FLAIR thus combines data with varying spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions across over 817 km² of acquisitions representing the full landscape diversity of France. This diversity makes FLAIR a valuable resource for the development and evaluation of novel methods for large-scale land-cover semantic segmentation and raises significant challenges in terms of computer vision, data fusion, and geospatial analysis. We also provide powerful uni- and multi-sensor baseline models that can be employed to assess algorithm's performance and for downstream applications.
tl;dr: We propose novel scalable approaches for generalized additive models with interactions under structural constraints
Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) are a family of flexible and interpretable models with old roots in statistics. GAMs are often used with pairwise interactions to improve model accuracy while still retaining flexibility and interpretability but lead to computational challenges as we are dealing with order of $p^2$ terms. It is desirable to restrict the number of components (i.e., encourage sparsity) for easier interpretability, and better computational and statistical properties. Earlier approaches, considering sparse pairwise interactions, have limited scalability, especially when imposing additional structural interpretability constraints. We propose a flexible GRAND-SLAMIN framework that can learn GAMs with interactions under sparsity and additional structural constraints in a differentiable end-to-end fashion. We customize first-order gradient-based optimization to perform sparse backpropagation to exploit sparsity in additive effects for any differentiable loss function in a GPU-compatible manner. Additionally, we establish novel non-asymptotic prediction bounds for our estimators with tree-based shape functions. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets show that our toolkit performs favorably in terms of performance, variable selection and scalability when compared with popular toolkits to fit GAMs with interactions. Our work expands the landscape of interpretable modeling while maintaining prediction accuracy competitive with non-interpretable black-box models. Our code is available at https://github.com/mazumder-lab/grandslamin.
tl;dr: We obtain high-accuracy solutions to the Schrödinger equation cheaply, by fine-tuning a wavefunction pre-trained on many molecules.
Obtaining accurate solutions to the Schrödinger equation is the key challenge in computational quantum chemistry.
Deep-learning-based Variational Monte Carlo (DL-VMC) has recently outperformed conventional approaches in terms of accuracy, but only at large computational cost.
Whereas in many domains models are trained once and subsequently applied for inference, accurate DL-VMC so far requires a full optimization for every new problem instance, consuming thousands of GPUhs even for small molecules.
We instead propose a DL-VMC model which has been pre-trained using self-supervised wavefunction optimization on a large and chemically diverse set of molecules.
Applying this model to new molecules without any optimization, yields wavefunctions and absolute energies that outperform established methods such as CCSD(T)-2Z.
To obtain accurate relative energies, only few fine-tuning steps of this base model are required.
We accomplish this with a fully end-to-end machine-learned model, consisting of an improved geometry embedding architecture and an existing SE(3)-equivariant model to represent molecular orbitals.
Combining this architecture with continuous sampling of geometries, we improve zero-shot accuracy by two orders of magnitude compared to the state of the art.
We extensively evaluate the accuracy, scalability and limitations of our base model on a wide variety of test systems.
tl;dr: A novel open-vocabulary detection framework learning region-word alignment by object co-occurrence across images.
Deriving reliable region-word alignment from image-text pairs is critical to learn
object-level vision-language representations for open-vocabulary object detection.
Existing methods typically rely on pre-trained or self-trained vision-language
models for alignment, which are prone to limitations in localization accuracy or
generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose CoDet, a novel approach
that overcomes the reliance on pre-aligned vision-language space by reformulating
region-word alignment as a co-occurring object discovery problem. Intuitively, by
grouping images that mention a shared concept in their captions, objects corresponding
to the shared concept shall exhibit high co-occurrence among the group.
CoDet then leverages visual similarities to discover the co-occurring objects and
align them with the shared concept. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoDet
has superior performances and compelling scalability in open-vocabulary detection,
e.g., by scaling up the visual backbone, CoDet achieves 37.0 $AP^m_{novel}$ and
44.7 $AP^m_{all}$ on OV-LVIS, surpassing the previous SoTA by 4.2 $AP^m_{novel}$
and 9.8 $AP^m_{all}$. Code is available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/CoDet.
tl;dr: An optimizer specially designed for few-shot-learning problems
We introduce Meta-AdaM, a meta-learned adaptive optimizer with momentum, designed for few-shot learning tasks that pose significant challenges to deep learning models due to the limited number of labeled examples. Meta-learning has been successfully employed to address these challenges by transferring meta-learned prior knowledge to new tasks. Most existing works focus on meta-learning an optimal model initialization or an adaptive learning rate learner for rapid convergence. However, these approaches either neglect to consider weight-update history for the adaptive learning rate learner or fail to effectively integrate momentum for fast convergence, as seen in many-shot learning settings. To tackle these limitations, we propose a meta-learned learning rate learner that utilizes weight-update history as input to predict more appropriate learning rates for rapid convergence. Furthermore, for the first time, our approach incorporates momentum into the optimization process of few-shot learning via a double look-ahead mechanism, enabling rapid convergence similar to many-shot settings. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Meta-AdaM.
tl;dr: We develop reconstruction bounds for DP-SGD and attacks that show these bounds are near tight
Differentially private training offers a protection which is usually interpreted as a guarantee against membership inference attacks. By proxy, this guarantee extends to other threats like reconstruction attacks attempting to extract complete training examples. Recent works provide evidence that if one does not need to protect against membership attacks but instead only wants to protect against a training data reconstruction, then utility of private models can be improved because less noise is required to protect against these more ambitious attacks. We investigate this question further in the context of DP-SGD, a standard algorithm for private deep learning, and provide an upper bound on the success of any reconstruction attack against DP-SGD together with an attack that empirically matches the predictions of our bound. Together, these two results open the door to fine-grained investigations on how to set the privacy parameters of DP-SGD in practice to protect against reconstruction attacks. Finally, we use our methods to demonstrate that different settings of the DP-SGD parameters leading to same DP guarantees can results in significantly different success rates for reconstruction, indicating that the DP guarantee alone might not be a good proxy for controlling the protection against reconstruction attacks.
2126. Learning Better with Less: Effective Augmentation for Sample-Efficient Visual Reinforcement Learning
tl;dr: This paper provides a comprehensive empirical study to investigate the crucial properties of effective DA and explore how to fully harness its potential to further enhance sample-efficient visual RL.
Data augmentation (DA) is a crucial technique for enhancing the sample efficiency of visual reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.
Notably, employing simple observation transformations alone can yield outstanding performance without extra auxiliary representation tasks or pre-trained encoders. However, it remains unclear which attributes of DA account for its effectiveness in achieving sample-efficient visual RL. To investigate this issue and further explore the potential of DA, this work conducts comprehensive experiments to assess the impact of DA's attributes on its efficacy and provides the following insights and improvements: (1) For individual DA operations, we reveal that both ample spatial diversity and slight hardness are indispensable. Building on this finding, we introduce Random PadResize (Rand PR), a new DA operation that offers abundant spatial diversity with minimal hardness. (2) For multi-type DA fusion schemes, the increased DA hardness and unstable data distribution result in the current fusion schemes being unable to achieve higher sample efficiency than their corresponding individual operations. Taking the non-stationary nature of RL into account, we propose a RL-tailored multi-type DA fusion scheme called Cycling Augmentation (CycAug), which performs periodic cycles of different DA operations to increase type diversity while maintaining data distribution consistency. Extensive evaluations on the DeepMind Control suite and CARLA driving simulator demonstrate that our methods achieve superior sample efficiency compared with the prior state-of-the-art methods.
tl;dr: An approximate Kalman filtering (and smoothing) algorithm is presented that deterministically tracks low-rank representations of the covariance matrices. This makes computations in high-dimensional state-space models tractable.
Inference and simulation in the context of high-dimensional dynamical systems remain computationally challenging problems.
Some form of dimensionality reduction is required to make the problem tractable in general.
In this paper, we propose a novel approximate Gaussian filtering and smoothing method
which propagates low-rank approximations of the covariance matrices.
This is accomplished by projecting the Lyapunov equations associated with the prediction step to a manifold of low-rank matrices,
which are then solved by a recently developed, numerically stable, dynamical low-rank integrator.
Meanwhile, the update steps are made tractable by noting that the covariance update only transforms the column space of the covariance matrix, which is low-rank by construction.
The algorithm differentiates itself from existing ensemble-based approaches in that
the low-rank approximations of the covariance matrices are deterministic, rather than stochastic.
Crucially, this enables the method to reproduce the exact Kalman filter as the low-rank dimension approaches the true dimensionality of the problem.
Our method reduces computational complexity from cubic (for the Kalman filter) to quadratic in the state-space size in the worst-case, and can achieve linear complexity if the state-space model satisfies certain criteria.
Through a set of experiments in classical data-assimilation and spatio-temporal regression, we show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the ensemble-based methods in terms of error in the mean and covariance with respect to the exact Kalman filter. This comes at no additional cost in terms of asymptotic computational complexity.
tl;dr: We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, a generalization of heavy-tailed noise. We present an efficient list-decodable learner that recovers a small list of candidates one of which is close to the true solution.
We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, broadly generalizing the standard heavy-tailed noise setup.
In our setting, in addition to random observation noise, the stochastic gradient
may be subject to independent \emph{oblivious noise},
which may not have bounded moments and is not necessarily centered.
Specifically, we assume access to a noisy oracle for the stochastic gradient of $f$
at $x$, which returns a vector $\nabla f(\gamma, x) + \xi$, where $\gamma$ is
the bounded variance observation noise
and $\xi$ is the oblivious noise that is independent of $\gamma$ and $x$.
The only assumption we make on the oblivious noise $\xi$
is that $\Pr[\xi = 0] \ge \alpha$, for some $\alpha \in (0, 1)$.
In this setting, it is not information-theoretically possible to recover a single solution
close to the target when the fraction of inliers $\alpha$ is less than $1/2$.
Our main result is an efficient {\em list-decodable} learner that recovers
a small list of candidates at least one of which is close to the true solution.
On the other hand, if $\alpha = 1-\epsilon$, where $0< \epsilon < 1/2$ is sufficiently small
constant, the algorithm recovers a single solution.
Along the way, we develop a rejection-sampling-based algorithm to perform noisy location estimation,
which may be of independent interest.
Given the recent impressive accomplishments of language models (LMs) for code generation, we explore the use of LMs as general adaptive mutation and crossover operators for an evolutionary neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm.
While NAS still proves too difficult a task for LMs to succeed at solely through prompting, we find that the combination of evolutionary prompt engineering with soft prompt-tuning, a method we term EvoPrompting, consistently finds diverse and high performing models. We first demonstrate that EvoPrompting is effective on the computationally efficient MNIST-1D dataset, where EvoPrompting produces convolutional architecture variants that outperform both those designed by human experts and naive few-shot prompting in terms of accuracy and model size. We then apply our method to searching for graph neural networks on the CLRS Algorithmic Reasoning Benchmark, where EvoPrompting is able to design *novel* architectures that outperform current state-of-the-art models on 21 out of 30 algorithmic reasoning tasks while maintaining similar model size. EvoPrompting is successful at designing accurate and efficient neural network architectures across a variety of machine learning tasks, while also being general enough for easy adaptation to other tasks beyond neural network design.
Transformers are central in modern natural language processing and computer vision applications. Despite recent works devoted to reducing the quadratic cost of such models with respect to sequence length, dealing with ultra long sequences (e.g., $>$16K tokens) remains challenging. Applications such as answering questions based on a book or summarizing a scientific article are inefficient or infeasible. Here, we propose to significantly improve the efficiency of Transformers for ultra long sequences, by compressing the sequence into a much smaller representation at each layer. Specifically, by exploiting the fact that in many tasks, only a small subset of special tokens, which we call VIP-tokens, are most relevant to the final prediction, we propose a VIP-token centric compression (VCC) scheme which selectively compresses the sequence based on their impact on approximating the representation of the VIP-tokens. Compared with competitive baselines, our algorithm is not only efficient (achieving more than $3\times$ compute efficiency gain compared to baselines on 4K and 16K lengths), but also offers competitive/better performance on a large number of tasks. Further, we show that our algorithm scales to 128K tokens (or more) while consistently offering accuracy improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/mlpen/VCC.
2131. Stochastic Distributed Optimization under Average Second-order Similarity: Algorithms and Analysis
tl;dr: We propose two new algorithms (SVRS and AccSVRS) that achieve better communication complexity in distributed optimization under similarity condition.
We study finite-sum distributed optimization problems involving a master node and $n-1$ local nodes under the popular $\delta$-similarity and $\mu$-strong convexity conditions. We propose two new algorithms, SVRS and AccSVRS, motivated by previous works. The non-accelerated SVRS method combines the techniques of gradient sliding and variance reduction and achieves a better communication complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n {+} \sqrt{n}\delta/\mu)$ compared to existing non-accelerated algorithms. Applying the framework proposed in Katyusha X, we also develop a directly accelerated version named AccSVRS with the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n {+} n^{3/4}\sqrt{\delta/\mu})$ communication complexity. In contrast to existing results, our complexity bounds are entirely smoothness-free and exhibit superiority in ill-conditioned cases. Furthermore, we establish a nearly matched lower bound to verify the tightness of our AccSVRS method.
tl;dr: This study reveals how stochasticity from mini-batch gradients biases overparameterized neural networks towards "invariant sets" corresponding to simpler subnetworks with improved generalization.
In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving generalization. To reveal this bias, we identify _invariant sets_, or subsets of parameter space that remain unmodified by SGD. We focus on two classes of invariant sets that correspond to simpler (sparse or low-rank) subnetworks and commonly appear in modern architectures. Our analysis uncovers that SGD exhibits a property of _stochastic attractivity_ towards these simpler invariant sets. We establish a sufficient condition for stochastic attractivity based on a competition between the loss landscape's curvature around the invariant set and the noise introduced by stochastic gradients. Remarkably, we find that an increased level of noise strengthens attractivity, leading to the emergence of attractive invariant sets associated with saddle-points or local maxima of the train loss. We observe empirically the existence of attractive invariant sets in trained deep neural networks, implying that SGD dynamics often collapses to simple subnetworks with either vanishing or redundant neurons. We further demonstrate how this simplifying process of _stochastic collapse_ benefits generalization in a linear teacher-student framework. Finally, through this analysis, we mechanistically explain why early training with large learning rates for extended periods benefits subsequent generalization.
tl;dr: We call for membership testing tools as a best practice for documenting large language model datasets, providing a lightweight and fast demonstration system on several corpora: the Pile and the Stack.
Foundation models are trained on increasingly immense and opaque datasets. Even while these models are now key in AI system building, it can be difficult to answer the straightforward question: has the model already encountered a given example during training? We therefore propose a widespread adoption of Data Portraits: artifacts that record training data and allow for downstream inspection. First we outline the properties of such an artifact and discuss how existing solutions can be used to increase transparency. We then propose and implement a solution based on data sketching, stressing fast and space efficient querying. Using our tools, we document a popular language modeling corpus (The Pile) and a recently released code modeling dataset (The Stack). We show that our solution enables answering questions about test set leakage and model plagiarism. Our tool is lightweight and fast, costing only 3% of the dataset size in overhead. We release a live interface of our tools at https://dataportraits.org/ and call on dataset and model creators to release Data Portraits as a complement to current documentation practices.
Chaotic systems make long-horizon forecasts difficult because small perturbations in initial conditions cause trajectories to diverge at an exponential rate. In this setting, neural operators trained to minimize squared error losses, while capable of accurate short-term forecasts, often fail to reproduce statistical or structural properties of the dynamics over longer time horizons and can yield degenerate results. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework designed to preserve invariant measures of chaotic attractors that characterize the time-invariant statistical properties of the dynamics. Specifically, in the multi-environment setting (where each sample trajectory is governed by slightly different dynamics), we consider two novel approaches to training with noisy data. First, we propose a loss based on the optimal transport distance between the observed dynamics and the neural operator outputs. This approach requires expert knowledge of the underlying physics to determine what statistical features should be included in the optimal transport loss. Second, we show that a contrastive learning framework, which does not require any specialized prior knowledge, can preserve statistical properties of the dynamics nearly as well as the optimal transport approach. On a variety of chaotic systems, our method is shown empirically to preserve invariant measures of chaotic attractors.