DeepNLP/ICML-2024-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
Preventing Model Collapse in Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models
Authors: Ying Li, Zhidi Lin, Feng Yin, Michael Minyi Zhang

Gaussian process latent variable models (GPLVMs) are a versatile family of unsupervised learning models commonly used for dimensionality reduction. However, common challenges in modeling data with GPLVMs include inadequate kernel flexibility and improper selection of the projection noise, leading to a type of model collapse characterized by vague latent representations that do not reflect the underlying data structure. This paper addresses these issues by, first, theoretically examining the impact of projection variance on model collapse through the lens of a linear GPLVM. Second, we tackle model collapse due to inadequate kernel flexibility by integrating the spectral mixture (SM) kernel and a differentiable random Fourier feature (RFF) kernel approximation, which ensures computational scalability and efficiency through off-the-shelf automatic differentiation tools for learning the kernel hyperparameters, projection variance, and latent representations within the variational inference framework. The proposed GPLVM, named advisedRFLVM, is evaluated across diverse datasets and consistently outperforms various salient competing models, including state-of-the-art variational autoencoders (VAEs) and other GPLVM variants, in terms of informative latent representations and missing data imputation.
A Theoretical Analysis of Backdoor Poisoning Attacks in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Boqi Li, Weiwei Liu

The rising threat of backdoor poisoning attacks (BPAs) on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has become a significant concern in recent years. In such attacks, the adversaries strategically target a specific class and generate a poisoned training set. The neural network (NN), well-trained on the poisoned training set, is able to predict any input with the trigger pattern as the targeted label, while maintaining accurate outputs for clean inputs. However, why the BPAs work remains less explored. To fill this gap, we employ a dirty-label attack and conduct a detailed analysis of BPAs in a two-layer convolutional neural network. We provide theoretical insights and results on the effectiveness of BPAs. Our experimental results on two real-world datasets validate our theoretical findings.
Concentration Inequalities for General Functions of Heavy-Tailed Random Variables
Authors: Shaojie Li, Yong Liu

Concentration inequalities play an essential role in the study of machine learning and high dimensional statistics. In this paper, we obtain unbounded analogues of the popular bounded difference inequality for functions of independent random variables with heavy-tailed distributions. The main results provide a general framework applicable to all heavy-tailed distributions with finite variance. To illustrate the strength of our results, we present applications to sub-exponential tails, sub-Weibull tails, and heavier polynomially decaying tails. Applied to some standard problems in statistical learning theory (vector valued concentration, Rademacher complexity, and algorithmic stability), we show that these inequalities allow an extension of existing results to heavy-tailed distributions up to finite variance.
Sparse Cocktail: Every Sparse Pattern Every Sparse Ratio All At Once
Authors: Zhangheng Li, Shiwei Liu, Tianlong Chen, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Zhenyu Zhang, Dilin Wang, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Shiyu Chang, Zhangyang Wang

Sparse Neural Networks (SNNs) have received voluminous attention for mitigating the explosion in computational costs and memory footprints of modern deep neural networks. Despite their popularity, most state-of-the-art training approaches seek to find a single high-quality sparse subnetwork with a preset sparsity pattern and ratio, making them inadequate to satiate platform and resource variability. Recently proposed approaches attempt to jointly train multiple subnetworks (we term as “sparse co-training") with a fixed sparsity pattern, to allow switching sparsity ratios subject to resource requirements. In this work, we take one more step forward and expand the scope of sparse co-training to cover diverse sparsity patterns and multiple sparsity ratios at once. We introduce Sparse Cocktail, the first sparse co-training framework that co-trains a suite of sparsity patterns simultaneously, loaded with multiple sparsity ratios which facilitate harmonious switch across various sparsity patterns and ratios at inference depending on the hardware availability. More specifically, Sparse Cocktail alternatively trains subnetworks generated from different sparsity patterns with a gradual increase in sparsity ratios across patterns and relies on an unified mask generation process and the Dense Pivot Co-training to ensure the subnetworks of different patterns orchestrate their shared parameters without canceling each other’s performance. Experiment results on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation illustrate the favorable effectiveness and flexibility of Sparse Cocktail, pointing to a promising direction for sparse co-training. Codes will be released.
Individual Contributions as Intrinsic Exploration Scaffolds for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xinran Li, Zifan Liu, Shibo Chen, Jun Zhang

In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), effective exploration is critical, especially in sparse reward environments. Although introducing global intrinsic rewards can foster exploration in such settings, it often complicates credit assignment among agents. To address this difficulty, we propose Individual Contributions as intrinsic Exploration Scaffolds (ICES), a novel approach to motivate exploration by assessing each agent’s contribution from a global view. In particular, ICES constructs exploration scaffolds with Bayesian surprise, leveraging global transition information during centralized training. These scaffolds, used only in training, help to guide individual agents towards actions that significantly impact the global latent state transitions. Additionally, ICES separates exploration policies from exploitation policies, enabling the former to utilize privileged global information during training. Extensive experiments on cooperative benchmark tasks with sparse rewards, including Google Research Football (GRF) and StarCraft Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC), demonstrate that ICES exhibits superior exploration capabilities compared with baselines. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ICES.
Learning Adaptive and View-Invariant Vision Transformer for Real-Time UAV Tracking
Authors: Yongxin Li, Mengyuan Liu, You Wu, Xucheng Wang, Xiangyang Yang, Shuiwang Li

Harnessing transformer-based models, visual tracking has made substantial strides. However, the sluggish performance of current trackers limits their practicality on devices with constrained computational capabilities, especially for real-time unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking. Addressing this challenge, we introduce AVTrack, an adaptive computation framework tailored to selectively activate transformer blocks for real-time UAV tracking in this work. Our novel Activation Module (AM) dynamically optimizes ViT architecture, selectively engaging relevant components and enhancing inference efficiency without compromising much tracking performance. Moreover, we bolster the effectiveness of ViTs, particularly in addressing challenges arising from extreme changes in viewing angles commonly encountered in UAV tracking, by learning view-invariant representations through mutual information maximization. Extensive experiments on five tracking benchmarks affirm the effectiveness and versatility of our approach, positioning it as a state-of-the-art solution in visual tracking. Code is released at: https://github.com/wuyou3474/AVTrack.
PID: Prompt-Independent Data Protection Against Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Ang Li, Yichuan Mo, Mingjie Li, Yisen Wang

The few-shot fine-tuning of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) has enabled them to grasp new concepts from a limited number of images. However, given the vast amount of personal images accessible online, this capability raises critical concerns about civil privacy. While several previous defense methods have been developed to prevent such misuse of LDMs, they typically assume that the textual prompts used by data protectors exactly match those employed by data exploiters. In this paper, we first empirically demonstrate that breaking this assumption, i.e., in cases where discrepancies exist between the textual conditions used by protectors and exploiters, could substantially reduces the effectiveness of these defenses. Furthermore, considering the visual encoder’s independence from textual prompts, we delve into the visual encoder and thoroughly investigate how manipulating the visual encoder affects the few-shot fine-tuning process of LDMs. Drawing on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective method called Prompt-Independent Defense (PID) to safeguard privacy against LDMs. We show that PID can act as a strong privacy shield on its own while requiring significantly less computational power. We believe our studies, along with the comprehensive understanding and new defense method, provide a notable advance toward reliable data protection against LDMs.
A Contextual Combinatorial Bandit Approach to Negotiation
Authors: Yexin Li, Zhancun Mu, Siyuan Qi

Learning effective negotiation strategies poses two key challenges: the exploration-exploitation dilemma and dealing with large action spaces. However, there is an absence of learning-based approaches that effectively address these challenges in negotiation. This paper introduces a comprehensive formulation to tackle various negotiation problems. Our approach leverages contextual combinatorial multi-armed bandits, with the bandits resolving the exploration-exploitation dilemma, and the combinatorial nature handles large action spaces. Building upon this formulation, we introduce NegUCB, a novel method that also handles common issues such as partial observations and complex reward functions in negotiation. NegUCB is contextual and tailored for full-bandit feedback without constraints on the reward functions. Under mild assumptions, it ensures a sub-linear regret upper bound. Experiments conducted on three negotiation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Improving Prototypical Visual Explanations with Reward Reweighing, Reselection, and Retraining
Authors: Aaron Jiaxun Li, Robin Netzorg, Zhihan Cheng, Zhuoqin Zhang, Bin Yu

In recent years, work has gone into developing deep interpretable methods for image classification that clearly attributes a model’s output to specific features of the data. One such of these methods is the Prototypical Part Network (ProtoPNet), which attempts to classify images based on meaningful parts of the input. While this architecture is able to produce visually interpretable classifications, it often learns to classify based on parts of the image that are not semantically meaningful. To address this problem, we propose the Reward Reweighing, Reselecting, and Retraining (R3) post-processing framework, which performs three additional corrective updates to a pretrained ProtoPNet in an offline and efficient manner. The first two steps involve learning a reward model based on collected human feedback and then aligning the prototypes with human preferences. The final step is retraining, which realigns the base features and the classifier layer of the original model with the updated prototypes. We find that our R3 framework consistently improves both the interpretability and the predictive accuracy of ProtoPNet and its variants.
Evaluating Quantized Large Language Models
Authors: Shiyao Li, Xuefei Ning, Luning Wang, Tengxuan Liu, Xiangsheng Shi, Shengen Yan, Guohao Dai, Huazhong Yang, Yu Wang

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising technique to reduce the cost of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, PTQ can effectively mitigate memory consumption and reduce computational overhead in LLMs. To meet the requirements of both high efficiency and performance across diverse scenarios, a comprehensive evaluation of quantized LLMs is essential to guide the selection of quantization methods. This paper presents a thorough evaluation of these factors by evaluating the effect of PTQ on Weight, Activation, and KV Cache on 11 model families, including OPT, LLaMA2, Falcon, Bloomz, Mistral, ChatGLM, Vicuna, LongChat, StableLM, Gemma, and Mamba, with parameters ranging from 125M to 180B. The evaluation encompasses five types of tasks: basic NLP, emergent ability, trustworthiness, dialogue, and long-context tasks. Moreover, we also evaluate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) quantization methods to demonstrate their applicability. Based on the extensive experiments, we systematically summarize the effect of quantization, provide recommendations to apply quantization techniques, and point out future directions. The code can be found in https://github.com/thu-nics/qllm-eval.
The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use with Unlearning
Authors: Nathaniel Li, Alexander Pan, Anjali Gopal, Summer Yue, Daniel Berrios, Alice Gatti, Justin D. Li, Ann-Kathrin Dombrowski, Shashwat Goel, Gabriel Mukobi, Nathan Helm-Burger, Rassin Lababidi, Lennart Justen, Andrew Bo Liu, Michael Chen, Isabelle Barrass, Oliver Zhang, Xiaoyuan Zhu, Rishub Tamirisa, Bhrugu Bharathi, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Cort B Breuer, Andy Zou, Mantas Mazeika, Zifan Wang, Palash Oswal, Weiran Lin, Adam Alfred Hunt, Justin Tienken-Harder, Kevin Y. Shih, Kemper Talley, John Guan, Ian Steneker, David Campbell, Brad Jokubaitis, Steven Basart, Stephen Fitz, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Kallol Krishna Karmakar, Uday Tupakula, Vijay Varadharajan, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Jimmy Ba, Kevin M. Esvelt, Alexandr Wang, Dan Hendrycks

The White House Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence highlights the risks of large language models (LLMs) empowering malicious actors in developing biological, cyber, and chemical weapons. To measure these risks, government institutions and major AI labs are developing evaluations for hazardous capabilities in LLMs. However, current evaluations are private and restricted to a narrow range of malicious use scenarios, which limits further research into reducing malicious use. To fill these gaps, we release the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy (WMDP) benchmark, a dataset of 3,668 multiple-choice questions that serve as a proxy measurement of hazardous knowledge in biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemical security. To guide progress on unlearning, we develop RMU, a state-of-the-art unlearning method based on controlling model representations. RMU reduces model performance on WMDP while maintaining general capabilities in areas such as biology and computer science, suggesting that unlearning may be a concrete path towards reducing malicious use from LLMs. We release our benchmark and code publicly at https://wmdp.ai.
Graph Neural Network Explanations are Fragile
Authors: Jiate Li, Meng Pang, Yun Dong, Jinyuan Jia, Binghui Wang

Explainable Graph Neural Network (GNN) has emerged recently to foster the trust of using GNNs. Existing GNN explainers are developed from various perspectives to enhance the explanation performance. We take the first step to study GNN explainers under adversarial attack—We found that an adversary slightly perturbing graph structure can ensure GNN model makes correct predictions, but the GNN explainer yields a drastically different explanation on the perturbed graph. Specifically, we first formulate the attack problem under a practical threat model (i.e., the adversary has limited knowledge about the GNN explainer and a restricted perturbation budget). We then design two methods (i.e., one is loss-based and the other is deduction-based) to realize the attack. We evaluate our attacks on various GNN explainers and the results show these explainers are fragile.
When Do Skills Help Reinforcement Learning? A Theoretical Analysis of Temporal Abstractions
Authors: Zhening Li, Gabriel Poesia, Armando Solar-Lezama

Skills are temporal abstractions that are intended to improve reinforcement learning (RL) performance through hierarchical RL. Despite our intuition about the properties of an environment that make skills useful, a precise characterization has been absent. We provide the first such characterization, focusing on the utility of deterministic skills in deterministic sparse-reward environments with finite action spaces. We show theoretically and empirically that RL performance gain from skills is worse in environments where solutions to states are less compressible. Additional theoretical results suggest that skills benefit exploration more than they benefit learning from existing experience, and that using unexpressive skills such as macroactions may worsen RL performance. We hope our findings can guide research on automatic skill discovery and help RL practitioners better decide when and how to use skills.
DiffStitch: Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion-based Trajectory Stitching
Authors: Guanghe Li, Yixiang Shan, Zhengbang Zhu, Ting Long, Weinan Zhang

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the performance of the learned policy highly depends on the quality of offline datasets. However, the offline dataset contains very limited optimal trajectories in many cases. This poses a challenge for offline RL algorithms, as agents must acquire the ability to transit to high-reward regions. To address this issue, we introduce Diffusionbased Trajectory Stitching (DiffStitch), a novel diffusion-based data augmentation pipeline that systematically generates stitching transitions between trajectories. DiffStitch effectively connects low-reward trajectories with high-reward trajectories, forming globally optimal trajectories and thereby mitigating the challenges faced by offline RL algorithms in learning trajectory stitching. Empirical experiments conducted on D4RL datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across RL methodologies. Notably, DiffStitch demonstrates substantial enhancements in the performance of one-step methods(IQL), imitation learning methods(TD3+BC) and trajectory optimization methods(DT). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/guangheli12/DiffStitch
Privacy Preserving Adaptive Experiment Design
Authors: Jiachun Li, Kaining Shi, David Simchi-Levi

Adaptive experiment is widely adopted to estimate conditional average treatment effect (CATE) in clinical trials and many other scenarios. While the primary goal in experiment is to maximize estimation accuracy, due to the imperative of social welfare, it’s also crucial to provide treatment with superior outcomes to patients, which is measured by regret in contextual bandit framework. Furthermore, privacy concerns arise in clinical scenarios containing sensitive data like patients health records. Therefore, it’s essential for the treatment allocation mechanism to incorporate robust privacy protection measures. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between loss of social welfare and statistical power of CATE estimation in contextual bandit experiment. We propose a matched upper and lower bound for the multi-objective optimization problem, and then adopt the concept of Pareto optimality to mathematically characterize the optimality condition. Furthermore, we propose differentially private algorithms which still matches the lower bound, showing that privacy is "almost free". Additionally, we derive the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which is essential in statistical inference and hypothesis testing.
Combining Experimental and Historical Data for Policy Evaluation
Authors: Ting Li, Chengchun Shi, Qianglin Wen, Yang Sui, Yongli Qin, Chunbo Lai, Hongtu Zhu

This paper studies policy evaluation with multiple data sources, especially in scenarios that involve one experimental dataset with two arms, complemented by a historical dataset generated under a single control arm. We propose novel data integration methods that linearly integrate base policy value estimators constructed based on the experimental and historical data, with weights optimized to minimize the mean square error (MSE) of the resulting combined estimator. We further apply the pessimistic principle to obtain more robust estimators, and extend these developments to sequential decision making. Theoretically, we establish non-asymptotic error bounds for the MSEs of our proposed estimators, and derive their oracle, efficiency and robustness properties across a broad spectrum of reward shift scenarios. Numerical experiments and real-data-based analyses from a ridesharing company demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed estimators.
LoRAP: Transformer Sub-Layers Deserve Differentiated Structured Compression for Large Language Models
Authors: Guangyan Li, Yongqiang Tang, Wensheng Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) show excellent performance in difficult tasks, but they often require massive memories and computational resources. How to reduce the parameter scale of LLMs has become research hotspots. In this study, we get an important observation that the multi-head self-attention (MHA) sub-layer of Transformer exhibits noticeable low-rank structure, while the feed-forward network (FFN) sub-layer does not. With this regard, we design a novel structured compression method LoRAP, which organically combines Low-Rank matrix approximation And structured Pruning. For the MHA sub-layer, we proposal an input activation weighted singular value decomposition method and allocate different parameter amounts for each weight matrix based on the differences in low-rank properties of matrices.For the FFN sub-layer, we propose a gradient-free structured channel pruning method and save the least important 1% of parameters which actually play a vital role in model performance. Extensive evaluations on zero-shot perplexity and zero-shot task classification indicate that our proposal is superior to previous structured compression rivals under multiple compression ratios. Our code will be released soon.
DiffFPR: Diffusion Prior for Oversampled Fourier Phase Retrieval
Authors: Ji Li, Chao Wang

This paper tackled the challenging Fourier phase retrieval problem, the absolute uniqueness of which does not hold. The existence of equivalent solution (a.k.a. trivial solution ambiguity) hinders the successful recovery, especially for multi-channel color image. The traditional iterative engine, such as the Relaxed Averaged Alternating Reflections (RAAR), can be applied to reconstruct the image channel-wisely. However, due to the relative uniqueness of the solution, the restoration is not automatically aligned with the accurate orientation for each channel, resulting in a reconstructed image that deviates significantly from the true solution manifold. To address this issue, by penalizing the mismatch of the image channels, a diffusion model as the strong prior of the color image is integrated into the iterative engine. The combination of the traditional iterative engine and the diffusion model provides an effective solution to the oversampled Fourier phase retrieval. The formed algorithm, DiffFPR, is validated by experiments. The code is available at https://github.com/Chilie/DiffFPR.