DeepNLP/ICML-2024-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
A Bayesian Approach to Online Planning
Authors: Nir Greshler, David Ben Eli, Carmel Rabinovitz, Gabi Guetta, Liran Gispan, Guy Zohar, Aviv Tamar

The combination of Monte Carlo tree search and neural networks has revolutionized online planning. As neural network approximations are often imperfect, we ask whether uncertainty estimates about the network outputs could be used to improve planning. We develop a Bayesian planning approach that facilitates such uncertainty quantification, inspired by classical ideas from the meta-reasoning literature. We propose a Thompson sampling based algorithm for searching the tree of possible actions, for which we prove the first (to our knowledge) finite time Bayesian regret bound, and propose an efficient implementation for a restricted family of posterior distributions. In addition we propose a variant of the Bayes-UCB method applied to trees. Empirically, we demonstrate that on the ProcGen Maze and Leaper environments, when the uncertainty estimates are accurate but the neural network output is inaccurate, our Bayesian approach searches the tree much more effectively. In addition, we investigate whether popular uncertainty estimation methods are accurate enough to yield significant gains in planning.
Scaling Down Deep Learning with MNIST-1D
Authors: Samuel James Greydanus, Dmitry Kobak

Although deep learning models have taken on commercial and political relevance, key aspects of their training and operation remain poorly understood. This has sparked interest in science of deep learning projects, many of which require large amounts of time, money, and electricity. But how much of this research really needs to occur at scale? In this paper, we introduce MNIST-1D: a minimalist, procedurally generated, low-memory, and low-compute alternative to classic deep learning benchmarks. Although the dimensionality of MNIST-1D is only 40 and its default training set size only 4000, MNIST-1D can be used to study inductive biases of different deep architectures, find lottery tickets, observe deep double descent, metalearn an activation function, and demonstrate guillotine regularization in self-supervised learning. All these experiments can be conducted on a GPU or often even on a CPU within minutes, allowing for fast prototyping, educational use cases, and cutting-edge research on a low budget.
Quality-Diversity Actor-Critic: Learning High-Performing and Diverse Behaviors via Value and Successor Features Critics
Authors: Luca Grillotti, Maxence Faldor, Borja G. León, Antoine Cully

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to solve complex continuous control tasks. However, most approaches return only one solution specialized for a specific problem. We introduce Quality-Diversity Actor-Critic (QDAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages a value function critic and a successor features critic to learn high-performing and diverse behaviors. In this framework, the actor optimizes an objective that seamlessly unifies both critics using constrained optimization to (1) maximize return, while (2) executing diverse skills. Compared with other Quality-Diversity methods, QDAC achieves significantly higher performance and more diverse behaviors on six challenging continuous control locomotion tasks. We also demonstrate that we can harness the learned skills to adapt better than other baselines to five perturbed environments. Finally, qualitative analyses showcase a range of remarkable behaviors: adaptive-intelligent-robotics.github.io/QDAC.
A Bias-Variance-Covariance Decomposition of Kernel Scores for Generative Models
Authors: Sebastian Gregor Gruber, Florian Buettner

Generative models, like large language models, are becoming increasingly relevant in our daily lives, yet a theoretical framework to assess their generalization behavior and uncertainty does not exist. Particularly, the problem of uncertainty estimation is commonly solved in an ad-hoc and task-dependent manner. For example, natural language approaches cannot be transferred to image generation. In this paper, we introduce the first bias-variance-covariance decomposition for kernel scores. This decomposition represents a theoretical framework from which we derive a kernel-based variance and entropy for uncertainty estimation. We propose unbiased and consistent estimators for each quantity which only require generated samples but not the underlying model itself. Based on the wide applicability of kernels, we demonstrate our framework via generalization and uncertainty experiments for image, audio, and language generation. Specifically, kernel entropy for uncertainty estimation is more predictive of performance on CoQA and TriviaQA question answering datasets than existing baselines and can also be applied to closed-source models.
Overcoming Saturation in Density Ratio Estimation by Iterated Regularization
Authors: Lukas Gruber, Markus Holzleitner, Johannes Lehner, Sepp Hochreiter, Werner Zellinger

Estimating the ratio of two probability densities from finitely many samples, is a central task in machine learning and statistics. In this work, we show that a large class of kernel methods for density ratio estimation suffers from error saturation, which prevents algorithms from achieving fast error convergence rates on highly regular learning problems. To resolve saturation, we introduce iterated regularization in density ratio estimation to achieve fast error rates. Our methods outperform its non-iteratively regularized versions on benchmarks for density ratio estimation as well as on large-scale evaluations for importance-weighted ensembling of deep unsupervised domain adaptation models.
On the Calibration of Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Kerui Gu, Rongyu Chen, Xuanlong Yu, Angela Yao

2D human pose estimation predicts keypoint locations and the corresponding confidence. Calibration-wise, the confidence should be aligned with the pose accuracy. Yet existing pose estimation methods tend to estimate confidence with heuristics such as the maximum value of heatmaps. This work shows, through theoretical analysis and empirical verification, a calibration gap in current pose estimation frameworks. Our derivations directly lead to closed-form adjustments in the confidence based on additionally inferred instance size and visibility. Given the black-box nature of deep neural networks, however, it is not possible to close the gap with only closed-form adjustments. We go one step further and propose a Calibrated ConfidenceNet (CCNet) to explicitly learn network-specific adjustments with a confidence prediction branch. The proposed CCNet, as a lightweight post-hoc addition, improves the calibration of standard off-the-shelf pose estimation frameworks.
EDISON: Enhanced Dictionary-Induced Tensorized Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Gaussian Error Rank Minimization
Authors: Zhibin Gu, Zhendong Li, Songhe Feng

This paper presents an efficient and scalable incomplete multi-view clustering method, referred to as Enhanced Dictionary-Induced tenSorized incomplete multi-view clustering with Gaussian errOr raNk minimization (EDISON). Specifically, EDISON employs an enhanced dictionary representation strategy as the foundation for inferring missing data and constructing anchor graphs, ensuring robustness to less-than-ideal data and maintaining high computational efficiency. Additionally, we introduce Gaussian error rank as a concise approximation of the true tensor rank, facilitating a comprehensive exploration of the diverse information encapsulated by various singular values in tensor data. Additionally, we integrate a hyper-anchor graph Laplacian manifold regularization into the tensor representation, allowing for the simultaneous utilization of inter-view high-order correlations and intra-view local correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the EDISON model in both effectiveness and efficiency compared to SOTA methods.
CRUXEval: A Benchmark for Code Reasoning, Understanding and Execution
Authors: Alex Gu, Baptiste Roziere, Hugh James Leather, Armando Solar-Lezama, Gabriel Synnaeve, Sida Wang

We present Code Reasoning, Understanding, and eXecution Evaluation, a benchmark consisting of 800 Python functions (3-13 lines). Each function comes with an input-output pair, leading to two natural tasks: input prediction and output prediction. First, we propose a general recipe for generating our execution benchmark by sampling from a model, which can be used for more challenging versions of the benchmark if needed. Second, we evaluate twenty code models on our benchmark and discover that many recent high-scoring models on HumanEval show no improvements on our benchmark. Third, we show that simple CoT and fine-tuning schemes can improve performance on our benchmark but remain far from solving it. The best setup, GPT-4 with chain of thought (CoT), achieves a pass@1 of 75% and 81% on input and output prediction, respectively. In contrast, Code Llama 34B achieves a pass@1 of 50% and 46% on input and output prediction. When it comes to reasoning about code, GPT-4 has a huge edge over other models but still fails consistently on some surprisingly simple Python programs.
Data-free Distillation of Diffusion Models with Bootstrapping
Authors: Jiatao Gu, Chen Wang, Shuangfei Zhai, Yizhe Zhang, Lingjie Liu, Joshua M. Susskind

Diffusion models have demonstrated great potential for generating diverse images. However, their performance often suffers from slow generation due to iterative denoising. Knowledge distillation has been recently proposed as a remedy which can reduce the number of inference steps to one or a few, without significant quality degradation. However, existing distillation methods either require significant amounts of offline computation for generating synthetic training data from the teacher model, or need to perform expensive online learning with the help of real data. In this work, we present a novel technique called BOOT, that overcomes these limitations with an efficient data-free distillation algorithm. The core idea is to learn a time-conditioned model that predicts the output of a pre-trained diffusion model teacher given any time-step. Such a model can be efficiently trained based on bootstrapping from two consecutive sampled steps. Furthermore, our method can be easily adapted to large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, which are challenging for previous methods given the fact that the training sets are often large and difficult to access. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several benchmark datasets in the DDIM setting, achieving comparable generation quality while being orders of magnitude faster than the diffusion teacher. The text-to-image results show that the proposed approach is able to handle highly complex distributions, shedding light on more efficient generative modeling.
Agent Smith: A Single Image Can Jailbreak One Million Multimodal LLM Agents Exponentially Fast
Authors: Xiangming Gu, Xiaosen Zheng, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Qian Liu, Ye Wang, Jing Jiang, Min Lin

A multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent can receive instructions, capture images, retrieve histories from memory, and decide which tools to use. Nonetheless, red-teaming efforts have revealed that adversarial images/prompts can jailbreak an MLLM and cause unaligned behaviors. In this work, we report an even more severe safety issue in multi-agent environments, referred to as infectious jailbreak. It entails the adversary simply jailbreaking a single agent, and without any further intervention from the adversary, (almost) all agents will become infected exponentially fast and exhibit harmful behaviors. To validate the feasibility of infectious jailbreak, we simulate multi-agent environments containing up to one million LLaVA-1.5 agents, and employ randomized pair-wise chat as a proof-of-concept instantiation for multi-agent interaction. Our results show that feeding an (infectious) adversarial image into the memory of any randomly chosen agent is sufficient to achieve infectious jailbreak. Finally, we derive a simple principle for determining whether a defense mechanism can provably restrain the spread of infectious jailbreak, but how to design a practical defense that meets this principle remains an open question to investigate.
Predictive Performance Comparison of Decision Policies Under Confounding
Authors: Luke Guerdan, Amanda Lee Coston, Ken Holstein, Steven Wu

Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing decision-making policy that is generally under-specified and dependent on unobservable factors. These sources of uncertainty are often addressed in practice by making strong assumptions about the data-generating mechanism. In this work, we propose a method to compare the predictive performance of decision policies under a variety of modern identification approaches from the causal inference and off-policy evaluation literatures (e.g., instrumental variable, marginal sensitivity model, proximal variable). Key to our method is the insight that there are regions of uncertainty that we can safely ignore in the policy comparison. We develop a practical approach for finite-sample estimation of regret intervals under no assumptions on the parametric form of the status quo policy. We verify our framework theoretically and via synthetic data experiments. We conclude with a real-world application using our framework to support a pre-deployment evaluation of a proposed modification to a healthcare enrollment policy.
On the Diminishing Returns of Width for Continual Learning
Authors: Etash Kumar Guha, Vihan Lakshman

While deep neural networks have demonstrated groundbreaking performance in various settings, these models often suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained on new tasks in sequence. Several works have empirically demonstrated that increasing the width of a neural network leads to a decrease in catastrophic forgetting but have yet to characterize the exact relationship between width and continual learning. We design one of the first frameworks to analyze Continual Learning Theory and prove that width is directly related to forgetting in Feed-Forward Networks (FFN), demonstrating that the diminishing returns of increasing widths to reduce forgetting. We empirically verify our claims at widths hitherto unexplored in prior studies where the diminishing returns are clearly observed as predicted by our theory.
Vector Quantization Pretraining for EEG Time Series with Random Projection and Phase Alignment
Authors: Haokun Gui, Xiucheng Li, Xinyang Chen

In this paper, we propose a BERT-style self-supervised learning model, VQ-MTM (Vector Quantization Masked Time-Series Modeling), for the EEG time series data analysis. At its core, VQ-MTM comprises a theoretically grounded random-projection quantization module and a phase-aligning module guided by the Time-Phase-Shift Equivariance of Fourier Transform, the two modules can generate well-defined semantic units (akin to words in natural language) for the corrupted and periodic time series, thus offering robust and consistent learning signals for the EEG self-supervised learning. VQ-MTM also owns low model complexity and can easily adapt to large-scale datasets. We conduct experiments on five real-world datasets including two large-scale datasets to verify the efficacy of our proposed model, the experiment results show that VQ-MTM is able to consistently surpass the existing methods by large margins on both seizure detection and classification tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HaokunGUI/VQ_MTM.
No Wrong Turns: The Simple Geometry Of Neural Networks Optimization Paths
Authors: Charles Guille-Escuret, Hiroki Naganuma, Kilian Fatras, Ioannis Mitliagkas

Understanding the optimization dynamics of neural networks is necessary for closing the gap between theory and practice. Stochastic first-order optimization algorithms are known to efficiently locate favorable minima in deep neural networks. This efficiency, however, contrasts with the non-convex and seemingly complex structure of neural loss landscapes. In this study, we delve into the fundamental geometric properties of sampled gradients along optimization paths. We focus on two key quantities, the restricted secant inequality and error bound, as well as their ratio γ, which hold high significance for first-order optimization. Our analysis reveals that these quantities exhibit predictable, consistent behavior throughout training, despite the stochasticity induced by sampling minibatches. Our findings suggest that not only do optimization trajectories never encounter significant obstacles, but they also maintain stable dynamics during the majority of training. These observed properties are sufficiently expressive to theoretically guarantee linear convergence and prescribe learning rate schedules mirroring empirical practices. We conduct our experiments on image classification, semantic segmentation and language modeling across different batch sizes, network architectures, datasets, optimizers, and initialization seeds. We discuss the impact of each factor. Our work provides novel insights into the properties of neural network loss functions, and opens the door to theoretical frameworks more relevant to prevalent practice.
Automated Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Task-Specific Exam Generation
Authors: Gauthier Guinet, Behrooz Omidvar-Tehrani, Anoop Deoras, Laurent Callot

We propose a new method to measure the task-specific accuracy of Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RAG). Evaluation is performed by scoring the RAG on an automatically-generated synthetic exam composed of multiple choice questions based on the corpus of documents associated with the task. Our method is an automated, cost-efficient, interpretable, and robust strategy to select the optimal components for a RAG system. We leverage Item Response Theory (IRT) to estimate the quality of an exam and its informativeness on task-specific accuracy. IRT also provides a natural way to iteratively improve the exam by eliminating the exam questions that are not sufficiently informative about a model’s ability. We demonstrate our approach on four new open-ended Question-Answering tasks based on Arxiv abstracts, StackExchange questions, AWS DevOps troubleshooting guides, and SEC filings. In addition, our experiments reveal more general insights into factors impacting RAG performance like size, retrieval mechanism, prompting and fine-tuning. Most notably, our findings show that choosing the right retrieval algorithms often leads to bigger performance gains than simply using a larger language model.
SLAB: Efficient Transformers with Simplified Linear Attention and Progressive Re-parameterized Batch Normalization
Authors: Jialong Guo, Xinghao Chen, Yehui Tang, Yunhe Wang

Transformers have become foundational architectures for both natural language and computer vision tasks. However, the high computational cost makes it quite challenging to deploy on resource-constraint devices. This paper investigates the computational bottleneck modules of efficient transformer, i.e., normalization layers and attention modules. LayerNorm is commonly used in transformer architectures but is not computational friendly due to statistic calculation during inference. However, replacing LayerNorm with more efficient BatchNorm in transformer often leads to inferior performance and collapse in training. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named PRepBN to progressively replace LayerNorm with re-parameterized BatchNorm in training. Moreover, we propose a simplified linear attention (SLA) module that is simple yet effective to achieve strong performance. Extensive experiments on image classification as well as object detection demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. For example, our SLAB-Swin obtains $83.6%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with $16.2$ms latency, which is $2.4$ms less than that of Flatten-Swin with $0.1%$ higher accuracy. We also evaluated our method for language modeling task and obtain comparable performance and lower latency. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/SLAB and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/SLAB.
DS-Agent: Automated Data Science by Empowering Large Language Models with Case-Based Reasoning
Authors: Siyuan Guo, Cheng Deng, Ying Wen, Hechang Chen, Yi Chang, Jun Wang

In this work, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) based agents to automate data science tasks, with the goal of comprehending task requirements, then building and training the best-fit machine learning models. Despite their widespread success, existing LLM agents are hindered by generating unreasonable experiment plans within this scenario. To this end, we present DS-Agent, a novel automatic framework that harnesses LLM agent and case-based reasoning (CBR). In the development stage, DS-Agent follows the CBR framework to structure an automatic iteration pipeline, which can flexibly capitalize on the expert knowledge from Kaggle, and facilitate consistent performance improvement through the feedback mechanism. Moreover, DS-Agent implements a low-resource deployment stage with a simplified CBR paradigm to adapt past successful solutions from the development stage for direct code generation, significantly reducing the demand on foundational capabilities of LLMs. Empirically, DS-Agent with GPT-4 achieves 100% success rate in the development stage, while attaining 36% improvement on average one pass rate across alternative LLMs in the deployment stage. In both stages, DS-Agent achieves the best rank in performance, costing $1.60 and \$0.13 per run with GPT-4, respectively. Our data and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/guosyjlu/DS-Agent.
Collaborative Heterogeneous Causal Inference Beyond Meta-analysis
Authors: Tianyu Guo, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Michael Jordan

Collaboration between different data centers is often challenged by heterogeneity across sites. To account for the heterogeneity, the state-of-the-art method is to re-weight the covariate distributions in each site to match the distribution of the target population. Nevertheless, this method still relies on the concept of traditional meta-analysis after adjusting for the distribution shift. This work proposes a collaborative inverse propensity score weighting estimator for causal inference with heterogeneous data. Instead of adjusting the distribution shift separately, we use weighted propensity score models to collaboratively adjust for the distribution shift. Our method shows significant improvements over the methods based on meta-analysis when heterogeneity increases. By incorporating outcome regression models, we prove the asymptotic normality when the covariates have dimension $d<8$. Our methods preserve privacy at individual sites by implementing federated learning protocols.