GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Bridging Data Gaps in Diffusion Models with Adversarial Noise-Based Transfer Learning
Authors: Xiyu Wang; Baijiong Lin; Daochang Liu; Ying-Cong Chen; Chang Xu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Spotlight)

Abstract: Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) show significant potential in image generation, yet their performance hinges on having access to large datasets. Previous works, like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have tackled the limited data problem by transferring pre-trained models learned with sufficient data. However, those methods are hard to be utilized in DPMs since the distinct differences between DPM-based and GAN-based methods, showing in the unique iterative denoising process integral and the need for many timesteps with no-targeted noise in DPMs. In this paper, we propose a novel DPMs-based transfer learning method, ANT, to address the limited data problem. It includes two strategies: similarity-guided training, which boosts transfer with a classifier, and adversarial noise selection which adaptively chooses targeted noise based on the input image. Extensive experiments in the context of few-shot image generation tasks demonstrate that our method is not only efficient but also excels in terms of image quality and diversity when compared to existing GAN-based and DDPM-based methods.
Tripod: Three Complementary Inductive Biases for Disentangled Representation Learning
Authors: Kyle Hsu; Jubayer Ibn Hamid; Kaylee Burns; Chelsea Finn; Jiajun Wu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Inductive biases are crucial in disentangled representation learning for narrowing down an underspecified solution set. In this work, we consider endowing a neural network autoencoder with three select inductive biases from the literature: data compression into a grid-like latent space via quantization, collective independence amongst latents, and minimal functional influence of any latent on how other latents determine data generation. In principle, these inductive biases are deeply complementary: they most directly specify properties of the latent space, encoder, and decoder, respectively. In practice, however, naively combining existing techniques instantiating these inductive biases fails to yield significant benefits. To address this, we propose adaptations to the three techniques that simplify the learning problem, equip key regularization terms with stabilizing invariances, and quash degenerate incentives. The resulting model, Tripod, achieves state-of-the-art results on a suite of four image disentanglement benchmarks. We also verify that Tripod significantly improves upon its naive incarnation and that all three of its "legs" are necessary for best performance.
Conformal Prediction with Learned Features
Authors: Shayan Kiyani; George J. Pappas; Hamed Hassani
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the problem of conformal prediction with conditional guarantees. Prior work has shown that it is impossible to construct nontrivial prediction sets with full conditional coverage guarantees. A wealth of research has considered relaxations of full conditional guarantees, relying on some *predefined* uncertainty structures. Departing from this line of thinking, we propose Partition Learning Conformal Prediction (PLCP), a framework to improve conditional validity of prediction sets through *learning* uncertainty-guided features from the calibration data. We implement PLCP efficiently with alternating gradient descent, utilizing off-the-shelf machine learning models. We further analyze PLCP theoretically and provide conditional guarantees for infinite and finite sample sizes. Finally, our experimental results over four real-world and synthetic datasets show the superior performance of PLCP compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of coverage and length in both classification and regression scenarios.
Lightweight Image Super-Resolution via Flexible Meta Pruning
Authors: Yulun Zhang; Kai Zhang; Luc Van Gool; Martin Danelljan; Fisher Yu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Lightweight image super-resolution (SR) methods have obtained promising results with moderate model complexity. These approaches primarily focus on a lightweight architecture design, but neglect to further reduce network redundancy. While some model compression techniques try to achieve more lightweight SR models with neural architecture search, knowledge distillation, or channel pruning, they typically require considerable extra computational resources or neglect to prune weights. To address these issues, we propose a flexible meta pruning (FMP) for lightweight image SR, where the network channels and weights are pruned simultaneously. Specifically, we control the network sparsity via channel vectors and weight indicators. We feed them into a hypernetwork, whose parameters act as meta-data for the parameters of the SR backbone. Consequently, for each network layer, we conduct structured pruning with channel vectors, which control the output and input channels. Besides, we conduct unstructured pruning with weight indicators to influence the sparsity of kernel weights, resulting in flexible pruning. During pruning, the sparsity of both channel vectors and weight indicators are regularized. We optimize the channel vectors and weight indicators with proximal gradient and SGD. We conduct extensive experiments to investigate critical factors in the flexible channel and weight pruning for image SR, demonstrating the superiority of our FMP when applied to baseline image SR architectures.
MLI Formula: A Nearly Scale-Invariant Solution with Noise Perturbation
Authors: Bowen Tao; Xin-Chun Li; De-Chuan Zhan
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Monotonic Linear Interpolation (MLI) refers to the peculiar phenomenon that the error between the initial and converged model monotonically decreases along the linear interpolation, i.e., $(1-\alpha)\boldsymbol{\theta}_0 + \alpha \boldsymbol{\theta}_F$. Previous works focus on paired initial and converged points, relating MLI to the smoothness of the optimization trajectory. In this paper, we find a shocking fact that the error curves still exhibit a monotonic decrease when $\boldsymbol{\theta}_0$ is replaced with noise or even zero values, implying that the decreasing curve may be primarily related to the property of the converged model rather than the optimization trajectory. We further explore the relationship between $\alpha\boldsymbol{\theta}_F$ and $\boldsymbol{\theta}_F$ and propose scale invariance properties in various cases, including Generalized Scale Invariance (GSI), Rectified Scale Invariance (RSI), and Normalized Scale Invariance (NSI). From an inverse perspective, the MLI formula is essentially an equation that adds varying levels of noise (i.e., $(1-\alpha)\boldsymbol{\epsilon}$) to a nearly scale-invariant network (i.e., $\alpha \boldsymbol{\theta}_F$), resulting in a monotonically increasing error as the noise level rises. MLI is a special case where $\boldsymbol{\epsilon}$ is equal to $\boldsymbol{\theta}_0$.
PRISE: LLM-Style Sequence Compression for Learning Temporal Action Abstractions in Control
Authors: Ruijie Zheng; Ching-An Cheng; Hal Daumé III; Furong Huang; Andrey Kolobov
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Oral)

Abstract: Temporal action abstractions, along with belief state representations, are a powerful knowledge sharing mechanism for sequential decision making. In this work, we propose a novel view that treats inducing temporal action abstractions as a sequence compression problem. To do so, we bring a subtle but critical component of LLM training pipelines -- input tokenization via byte pair encoding (BPE) -- to bear on the seemingly distant task of learning skills of variable time span in continuous control domains. We introduce an approach called Primitive Sequence Encoding (PRISE) that combines continuous action quantization with BPE to learn powerful action abstractions. We empirically show that high-level skills discovered by PRISE from a multitask set of robotic manipulation demonstrations significantly boost the learning performance of behavior cloning on downstream tasks.
LCA-on-the-Line: Benchmarking Out of Distribution Generalization with Class Taxonomies
Authors: Jia Shi; Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare; Jinjin Tian; Siqi Chai; Zhiqiu Lin; Arun Balajee Vasudevan; Di Feng; Francesco Ferroni; Shu Kong
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Oral)

Abstract: We tackle the challenge of predicting models' Out-of-Distribution (OOD) performance using in-distribution (ID) measurements without requiring OOD data. Existing evaluations with ``Effective robustness'', which use ID accuracy as an indicator of OOD accuracy, encounter limitations when models are trained with diverse supervision and distributions, such as class labels (*Vision Models, VMs, on ImageNet*) and textual descriptions (*Visual-Language Models, VLMs, on LAION*). VLMs often generalize better to OOD data than VMs despite having similar or lower ID performance. To improve the prediction of models' OOD performance from ID measurements, we introduce the *Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA)-on-the-Line* framework. This approach revisits the established concept of LCA distance, which measures the hierarchical distance between labels and predictions within a predefined class hierarchy, such as WordNet. We assess 75 models using ImageNet as the ID dataset and five significantly shifted OOD variants, uncovering a strong linear correlation between ID LCA distance and OOD top-1 accuracy. Our method provides a compelling alternative for understanding why VLMs tend to generalize better. Additionally, we propose a technique to construct a taxonomic hierarchy on any dataset using $K$-means clustering, demonstrating that LCA distance is robust to the constructed taxonomic hierarchy. Moreover, we demonstrate that aligning model predictions with class taxonomies, through soft labels or prompt engineering, can enhance model generalization. Open source code in our [Project Page](https://elvishelvis.github.io/papers/lca/).
On the Duality Between Sharpness-Aware Minimization and Adversarial Training
Authors: Yihao Zhang; Hangzhou He; Jingyu Zhu; Huanran Chen; Yifei Wang; Zeming Wei
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Adversarial Training (AT), which adversarially perturb the input samples during training, has been acknowledged as one of the most effective defenses against adversarial attacks, yet suffers from inevitably decreased clean accuracy. Instead of perturbing the samples, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) perturbs the model weights during training to find a more flat loss landscape and improve generalization. However, as SAM is designed for better clean accuracy, its effectiveness in enhancing adversarial robustness remains unexplored. In this work, considering the duality between SAM and AT, we investigate the adversarial robustness derived from SAM. Intriguingly, we find that using SAM alone can improve adversarial robustness. To understand this unexpected property of SAM, we first provide empirical and theoretical insights into how SAM can implicitly learn more robust features, and conduct comprehensive experiments to show that SAM can improve adversarial robustness notably without sacrificing any clean accuracy, shedding light on the potential of SAM to be a substitute for AT when accuracy comes at a higher priority. Code is available at https://github.com/weizeming/SAM_AT.
Fast Decision Boundary based Out-of-Distribution Detector
Authors: Litian Liu; Yao Qin
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Efficient and effective Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is essential for the safe deployment of AI systems. Existing feature space methods, while effective, often incur significant computational overhead due to their reliance on auxiliary models built from training features. In this paper, we propose a computationally-efficient OOD detector without using auxiliary models while still leveraging the rich information embedded in the feature space. Specifically, we detect OOD samples based on their feature distances to decision boundaries. To minimize computational cost, we introduce an efficient closed-form estimation, analytically proven to tightly lower bound the distance. Based on our estimation, we discover that In-Distribution (ID) features tend to be further from decision boundaries than OOD features. Additionally, ID and OOD samples are better separated when compared at equal deviation levels from the mean of training features. By regularizing the distances to decision boundaries based on feature deviation from the mean, we develop a hyperparameter-free, auxiliary model-free OOD detector. Our method matches or surpasses the effectiveness of state-of-the-art methods in extensive experiments while incurring negligible overhead in inference latency. Overall, our approach significantly improves the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off in OOD detection. Code is available at: https://github.com/litianliu/fDBD-OOD.
EvGGS: A Collaborative Learning Framework for Event-based Generalizable Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Jiaxu Wang; Junhao He; Ziyi Zhang; Mingyuan Sun; Jingkai SUN; Renjing Xu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Event cameras offer promising advantages such as high dynamic range and low latency, making them well-suited for challenging lighting conditions and fast-moving scenarios. However, reconstructing 3D scenes from raw event streams is difficult because event data is sparse and does not carry absolute color information. To release its potential in 3D reconstruction, we propose the first event-based generalizable 3D reconstruction framework, which reconstructs scenes as 3D Gaussians from only event input in a feedforward manner and can generalize to unseen cases without any retraining. This framework includes a depth estimation module, an intensity reconstruction module, and a Gaussian regression module. These submodules connect in a cascading manner, and we collaboratively train them with a designed joint loss to make them mutually promote. To facilitate related studies, we build a novel event-based 3D dataset with various material objects and calibrated labels of greyscale images, depth maps, camera poses, and silhouettes. Experiments show models that have jointly trained significantly outperform those trained individually. Our approach performs better than all baselines in reconstruction quality, and depth/intensity predictions with satisfactory rendering speed.
SurfPro: Functional Protein Design Based on Continuous Surface
Authors: Zhenqiao Song; Tinglin Huang; Lei Li; Wengong Jin
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: How can we design proteins with desired functions? We are motivated by a chemical intuition that both geometric structure and biochemical properties are critical to a protein's function. In this paper, we propose SurfPro, a new method to generate functional proteins given a desired surface and its associated biochemical properties. SurfPro comprises a hierarchical encoder that progressively models the geometric shape and biochemical features of a protein surface, and an autoregressive decoder to produce an amino acid sequence. We evaluate SurfPro on a standard inverse folding benchmark CATH 4.2 and two functional protein design tasks: protein binder design and enzyme design. Our SurfPro consistently surpasses previous state-of-the-art inverse folding methods, achieving a recovery rate of 57.78% on CATH 4.2 and higher success rates in terms of protein-protein binding and enzyme-substrate interaction scores
Correlation-Induced Label Prior for Semi-Supervised Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Biao Liu; Ning Xu; Xiangyu Fang; Xin Geng
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Semi-supervised multi-label learning (SSMLL) aims to address the challenge of limited labeled data availability in multi-label learning (MLL) by leveraging unlabeled data to improve the model's performance. Due to the difficulty of estimating the reliable label correlation on minimal multi-labeled data, previous SSMLL methods fail to unlash the power of the correlation among multiple labels to improve the performance of the predictive model in SSMLL. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel SSMLL method named PCLP where the correlation-induced label prior is inferred to enhance the pseudo-labeling instead of dirtily estimating the correlation among labels. Specifically, we construct the correlated label prior probability distribution using structural causal model (SCM), constraining the correlations of generated pseudo-labels to conform to the prior, which can be integrated into a variational label enhancement framework optimized by both labeled and unlabeled instances in a unified manner. Theoretically, we demonstrate the accuracy of the generated pseudo-labels and guarantee the learning consistency of the proposed method. Comprehensive experiments on several benchmark datasets have validated the superiority of the proposed method.
Binning as a Pretext Task: Improving Self-Supervised Learning in Tabular Domains
Authors: Kyungeun Lee; Ye Seul Sim; Hyeseung Cho; Moonjung Eo; Suhee Yoon; Sanghyu Yoon; Woohyung Lim
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: The ability of deep networks to learn superior representations hinges on leveraging the proper inductive biases, considering the inherent properties of datasets. In tabular domains, it is critical to effectively handle heterogeneous features (both categorical and numerical) in a unified manner and to grasp irregular functions like piecewise constant functions. To address the challenges in the self-supervised learning framework, we propose a novel pretext task based on the classical binning method. The idea is straightforward: reconstructing the bin indices (either orders or classes) rather than the original values. This pretext task provides the encoder with an inductive bias to capture the irregular dependencies, mapping from continuous inputs to discretized bins, and mitigates the feature heterogeneity by setting all features to have category-type targets. Our empirical investigations ascertain several advantages of binning: capturing the irregular function, compatibility with encoder architecture and additional modifications, standardizing all features into equal sets, grouping similar values within a feature, and providing ordering information. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse tabular datasets corroborate that our method consistently improves tabular representation learning performance for a wide range of downstream tasks. The codes are available in https://github.com/kyungeun-lee/tabularbinning.
Subsampling is not Magic: Why Large Batch Sizes Work for Differentially Private Stochastic Optimisation
Authors: Ossi Räisä; Joonas Jälkö; Antti Honkela
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: We study how the batch size affects the total gradient variance in differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), seeking a theoretical explanation for the usefulness of large batch sizes. As DP-SGD is the basis of modern DP deep learning, its properties have been widely studied, and recent works have empirically found large batch sizes to be beneficial. However, theoretical explanations of this benefit are currently heuristic at best. We first observe that the total gradient variance in DP-SGD can be decomposed into subsampling-induced and noise-induced variances. We then prove that in the limit of an infinite number of iterations, the effective noise-induced variance is invariant to the batch size. The remaining subsampling-induced variance decreases with larger batch sizes, so large batches reduce the effective total gradient variance. We confirm numerically that the asymptotic regime is relevant in practical settings when the batch size is not small, and find that outside the asymptotic regime, the total gradient variance decreases even more with large batch sizes. We also find a sufficient condition that implies that large batch sizes similarly reduce effective DP noise variance for one iteration of DP-SGD.
MFTN: A Multi-scale Feature Transfer Network Based on IMatchFormer for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Shuying Huang; Mingyang Ren; Yong Yang; Xiaozheng Wang; Yingzhi Wei
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Hyperspectral image super-resolution (HISR) aims to fuse a low-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI) with a high-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI) to obtain a high-resolution hyperspectral image (HR-HSI). Due to some existing HISR methods ignoring the significant feature difference between LR-HSI and HR-MSI, the reconstructed HR-HSI typically exhibits spectral distortion and blurring of spatial texture. To solve this issue, we propose a multi-scale feature transfer network (MFTN) for HISR. Firstly, three multi-scale feature extractors are constructed to extract features of different scales from the input images. Then, a multi-scale feature transfer module (MFTM) consisting of three improved feature matching Transformers (IMatchFormers) is designed to learn the detail features of different scales from HR-MSI by establishing the cross-model feature correlation between LR-HSI and degraded HR-MSI. Finally, a multiscale dynamic aggregation module (MDAM) containing three spectral aware aggregation modules (SAAMs) is constructed to reconstruct the final HR-HSI by gradually aggregating features of different scales. Extensive experimental results on three commonly used datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance compared to state- of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
Flexible Residual Binarization for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Yulun Zhang; Haotong Qin; Zixiang Zhao; Xianglong Liu; Martin Danelljan; Fisher Yu
Venue: ICML 2024 (ICML 2024 Poster)

Abstract: Binarized image super-resolution (SR) has attracted much research attention due to its potential to drastically reduce parameters and operations. However, most binary SR works binarize network weights directly, which hinders high-frequency information extraction. Furthermore, as a pixel-wise reconstruction task, binarization often results in heavy representation content distortion. To address these issues, we propose a flexible residual binarization (FRB) method for image SR. We first propose a second-order residual binarization (SRB), to counter the information loss caused by binarization. In addition to the primary weight binarization, we also binarize the reconstruction error, which is added as a residual term in the prediction. Furthermore, to narrow the representation content gap between the binarized and full-precision networks, we propose Distillation-guided Binarization Training (DBT). We uniformly align the contents of different bit widths by constructing a normalized attention form. Finally, we generalize our method by applying our FRB to binarize convolution and Transformer-based SR networks, resulting in two binary baselines: FRBC and FRBT. We conduct extensive experiments and comparisons with recent leading binarization methods. Our proposed baselines, FRBC and FRBT, achieve superior performance both quantitatively and visually. The code and model will be released.