GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
SEABO: A Simple Search-Based Method for Offline Imitation Learning
Authors: Jiafei Lyu; Xiaoteng Ma; Le Wan; Runze Liu; Xiu Li; Zongqing Lu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted much attention due to its ability in learning from static offline datasets and eliminating the need of interacting with the environment. Nevertheless, the success of offline RL relies heavily on the offline transitions annotated with reward labels. In practice, we often need to hand-craft the reward function, which is sometimes difficult, labor-intensive, or inefficient. To tackle this challenge, we set our focus on the offline imitation learning (IL) setting, and aim at getting a reward function based on the expert data and unlabeled data. To that end, we propose a simple yet effective search-based offline IL method, tagged SEABO. SEABO allocates a larger reward to the transition that is close to its closest neighbor in the expert demonstration, and a smaller reward otherwise, all in an unsupervised learning manner. Experimental results on a variety of D4RL datasets indicate that SEABO can achieve competitive performance to offline RL algorithms with ground-truth rewards, given only a single expert trajectory, and can outperform prior reward learning and offline IL methods across many tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that SEABO also works well if the expert demonstrations contain only observations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dmksjfl/SEABO.
Dynamic Sparse No Training:  Training-Free Fine-tuning for Sparse LLMs
Authors: Yuxin Zhang; Lirui Zhao; Mingbao Lin; Sun Yunyun; Yiwu Yao; Xingjia Han; Jared Tanner; Shiwei Liu; Rongrong Ji
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: The ever-increasing large language models (LLMs), though opening a potential path for the upcoming artificial general intelligence, sadly drops a daunting obstacle on the way towards their on-device deployment. As one of the most well-established pre-LLMs approaches in reducing model complexity, network pruning appears to lag behind in the era of LLMs, due mostly to its costly fine-tuning (or re-training) necessity under the massive volumes of model parameter and training data. To close this industry-academia gap, we introduce Dynamic Sparse No Training ($\texttt{DSNT}$), a training-free fine-tuning approach that slightly updates sparse LLMs without the expensive backpropagation and any weight updates. Inspired by the Dynamic Sparse Training, $\texttt{DSNT}$ minimizes the reconstruction error between the dense and sparse LLMs, in the fashion of performing iterative weight pruning-and-growing on top of sparse LLMs. To accomplish this purpose, $\texttt{DSNT}$ particularly takes into account the anticipated reduction in reconstruction error for pruning and growing, as well as the variance w.r.t. different input data for growing each weight. This practice can be executed efficiently in linear time since its obviates the need of backpropagation for fine-tuning LLMs. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-V1/V2, Vicuna, and OPT across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of $\texttt{DSNT}$ in enhancing the performance of sparse LLMs, especially at high sparsity levels. For instance, $\texttt{DSNT}$ is able to outperform the state-of-the-art Wanda by 26.79 perplexity at 70% sparsity with LLaMA-7B. Our paper offers fresh insights into how to fine-tune sparse LLMs in an efficient training-free manner and open new venues to scale the great potential of sparsity to LLMs.  Codes are available at https://github.com/zyxxmu/DSnoT.
Simplifying Transformer Blocks
Authors: Bobby He; Thomas Hofmann
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: A simple design recipe for deep Transformers is to compose identical building blocks. But standard transformer blocks are far from simple, interweaving attention and MLP sub-blocks with skip connections \& normalisation layers in precise arrangements. This complexity leads to brittle architectures, where seemingly minor changes can significantly reduce training speed, or render models untrainable.

In this work, we ask to what extent the standard transformer block can be simplified? Combining signal propagation theory and empirical observations, we motivate modifications that allow many block components to be removed with no loss of training speed, including skip connections, projection or value parameters, sequential sub-blocks and normalisation layers. In experiments on both autoregressive decoder-only and BERT encoder-only models, our simplified transformers match the per-iteration training speed and performance of standard transformers, while enjoying 16\% faster training throughput, and using 15\% fewer parameters.
Compositional Generative Inverse Design
Authors: Tailin Wu; Takashi Maruyama; Long Wei; Tao Zhang; Yilun Du; Gianluca Iaccarino; Jure Leskovec
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: Inverse design, where we seek to design input variables in order to optimize an underlying objective function, is an important problem that arises across fields such as mechanical engineering to aerospace engineering. Inverse design is typically formulated as an optimization problem, with recent works leveraging optimization across learned dynamics models. However, as models are optimized they tend to fall into adversarial modes, preventing effective sampling. We illustrate that by instead optimizing over the learned energy function captured by the diffusion model, we can avoid such adversarial examples and significantly improve design performance. We further illustrate how such a design system is compositional, enabling us to combine multiple different diffusion models representing subcomponents of our desired system to design systems with every specified component. In an N-body interaction task and a challenging 2D multi-airfoil design task, we demonstrate that by composing the learned diffusion model at test time, our method allows us to design initial states and boundary shapes that are more complex than those in the training data. Our method generalizes to more objects for N-body dataset and discovers formation flying to minimize drag in the multi-airfoil design task. Project website and code can be found at https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/cindm.
What does automatic differentiation compute for neural networks?
Authors: Sejun Park; Sanghyuk Chun; Wonyeol Lee
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: Forward- or reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD) is a popular algorithm for computing the derivative of a function expressed by a program. AD always outputs the correct derivative if a program does not use any non-differentiable functions and control flows; however, it may return an arbitrary value otherwise. In this work, we investigate what AD computes for neural networks that may contain non-differentiable functions such as ReLU and maxpools. We first prove that AD always returns a generalized derivative called a Clarke subderivative for networks with pointwise activation functions, if the minibatch size is one and all non-differentiable neurons have distinct bias parameters. We show that the same conclusion does not hold otherwise, but does hold under some mild sufficient conditions. We also prove similar results for more general networks that can use maxpools and bias parameters shared across different neurons. We empirically check our sufficient conditions over popular network architectures and observe that AD almost always computes a Clarke subderivative in practical learning setups.
Aux-NAS: Exploiting Auxiliary Labels with Negligibly Extra Inference Cost
Authors: Yuan Gao; WEIZHONG ZHANG; Wenhan Luo; Lin Ma; Jin-Gang Yu; Gui-Song Xia; Jiayi Ma
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: We aim at exploiting additional auxiliary labels from an independent (auxiliary) task to boost the primary task performance which we focus on, while preserving a single task inference cost of the primary task. While most existing auxiliary learning methods are optimization-based relying on loss weights/gradients manipulation, our method is architecture-based with a flexible asymmetric structure for the primary and auxiliary tasks, which produces different networks for training and inference. Specifically, starting from two single task networks/branches (each representing a task), we propose a novel method with evolving networks where only primary-to-auxiliary links exist as the cross-task connections after convergence. These connections can be removed during the primary task inference, resulting in a single-task inference cost. We achieve this by formulating a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem, where we initialize bi-directional connections in the search space and guide the NAS optimization converging to an architecture with only the single-side primary-to-auxiliary connections. Moreover, our method can be incorporated with optimization-based auxiliary learning approaches. Extensive experiments with six tasks on NYU v2, CityScapes, and Taskonomy datasets using VGG, ResNet, and ViT backbones validate the promising performance. The codes are available at https://github.com/ethanygao/Aux-NAS.
EX-Graph: A Pioneering Dataset Bridging Ethereum and X
Authors: Qian Wang; Zhen Zhang; Zemin Liu; Shengliang Lu; Bingqiao Luo; Bingsheng He
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: While numerous public blockchain datasets are available, their utility is constrained by an exclusive focus on blockchain data. This constraint limits the incorporation of relevant social network data into blockchain analysis, thereby diminishing the breadth and depth of insight that can be derived. To address the above limitation, we introduce EX-Graph, a novel dataset that authentically links Ethereum and X, marking the first and largest dataset of its kind. EX-Graph combines Ethereum transaction records (2 million nodes and 30 million edges) and X following data (1 million nodes and 3 million edges), bonding 30,667 Ethereum addresses with verified X accounts sourced from OpenSea. Detailed statistical analysis on EX- Graph highlights the structural differences between X-matched and non-X-matched Ethereum addresses. Extensive experiments, including Ethereum link prediction, wash-trading Ethereum addresses detection, and X-Ethereum matching link pre- diction, emphasize the significant role of X data in enhancing Ethereum analysis. EX-Graph is available at https://exgraph.deno.dev/.
Enhancing One-Shot Federated Learning Through Data and Ensemble Co-Boosting
Authors: Rong Dai; Yonggang Zhang; Ang Li; Tongliang Liu; Xun Yang; Bo Han
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) has become a promising learning paradigm, enabling the training of a global server model via a single communication round. In OFL, the server model is aggregated by distilling knowledge from all client models (the ensemble), which are also responsible for synthesizing samples for distillation. In this regard, advanced works show that the performance of the server model is intrinsically related to the quality of the synthesized data and the ensemble model. To promote OFL, we introduce a novel framework, Co-Boosting, in which synthesized data and the ensemble model mutually enhance each other progressively. Specifically, Co-Boosting leverages the current ensemble model to synthesize higher-quality samples in an adversarial attack manner. These hard samples are then employed to promote the quality of the ensemble model by adjusting the ensembling weights for each client model. Consequently, Co-Boosting periodically achieves high-quality data and ensemble models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Co-Boosting can substantially outperform existing baselines under various settings. Moreover, Co-Boosting eliminates the need for adjustments to the client's local training, requires no additional data or model transmission, and allows client models to have heterogeneous architectures.
Symbol as Points: Panoptic Symbol Spotting via Point-based Representation
Authors: WENLONG LIU; Tianyu Yang; Yuhan Wang; Qizhi Yu; Lei Zhang
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: This work studies the problem of panoptic symbol spotting, which is to spot and parse both countable object instances (windows, doors, tables, etc.) and uncountable stuff (wall, railing, etc.) from computer-aided design (CAD) drawings. Existing methods typically involve either rasterizing the vector graphics into images and using image-based methods for symbol spotting, or directly building graphs and using graph neural networks for symbol recognition. In this paper, we take a different approach, which treats graphic primitives as a set of 2D points that are locally connected and use point cloud segmentation methods to tackle it. Specifically, we utilize a point transformer to extract the primitive features and append a mask2former-like spotting head to predict the final output. To better use the local connection information of primitives and enhance their discriminability, we further propose the attention with connection module (ACM) and contrastive connection learning scheme (CCL). Finally, we propose a KNN interpolation mechanism for the mask attention module of the spotting head to better handle primitive mask downsampling, which is primitive-level in contrast to pixel-level for the image. Our approach, named SymPoint, is simple yet effective, outperforming recent state-of-the-art method GAT-CADNet by an absolute increase of 9.6% PQ and 10.4% RQ on the FloorPlanCAD dataset. The source code and models will be available at \url{https://github.com/nicehuster/SymPoint}.
HypeBoy: Generative Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Hypergraphs
Authors: Sunwoo Kim; Shinhwan Kang; Fanchen Bu; Soo Yong Lee; Jaemin Yoo; Kijung Shin
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Hypergraphs are marked by complex topology, expressing higher-order interactions among multiple nodes with hyperedges, and better capturing the topology is essential for effective representation learning. Recent advances in generative self-supervised learning (SSL) suggest that hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) learned from generative self-supervision have the potential to effectively encode the complex hypergraph topology. Designing a generative SSL strategy for hypergraphs, however, is not straightforward. Questions remain with regard to its generative SSL task, connection to downstream tasks, and empirical properties of learned representations. In light of the promises and challenges, we propose a novel generative SSL strategy for hypergraphs. We first formulate a generative SSL task on hypergraphs, hyperedge filling, and highlight its theoretical connection to node classification. Based on the generative SSL task, we propose a hypergraph SSL method, HYPEBOY. HYPEBOY learns effective general-purpose hypergraph representations, outperforming 15 baseline methods across 11 benchmark datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first study on generative SSL on hypergraphs, and we demonstrate its theoretical and empirical strengths for hypergraph representation learning.
Zero-Shot Robustification of Zero-Shot Models
Authors: Dyah Adila; Changho Shin; Linrong Cai; Frederic Sala
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Zero-shot inference is a powerful paradigm that enables the use of large pretrained models for downstream classification tasks without further training. However, these models are vulnerable to inherited biases that can impact their performance. The traditional solution is fine-tuning, but this undermines the key advantage of pretrained models, which is their ability to be used out-of-the-box. We propose RoboShot, a method that improves the robustness of pretrained model embeddings in a fully zero-shot fashion. First, we use language models (LMs) to obtain useful insights from task descriptions. These insights are embedded and used to remove harmful and boost useful components in embeddings---without any supervision. Theoretically, we provide a simple and tractable model for biases in zero-shot embeddings and give a result characterizing under what conditions our approach can boost performance. Empirically, we evaluate RoboShot on nine image and NLP classification tasks and show an average improvement of 15.98% over several zero-shot baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate that RoboShot is compatible with a variety of pretrained and language models and propose a way to further boost performance with a zero-shot adaptation variant.
LongLoRA: Efficient Fine-tuning of Long-Context Large Language Models
Authors: Yukang Chen; Shengju Qian; Haotian Tang; Xin Lai; Zhijian Liu; Song Han; Jiaya Jia
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 oral)

Abstract: We present LongLoRA, an efficient fine-tuning approach that extends the context sizes of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), with limited computation cost.
Typically, training LLMs with long context sizes is computationally expensive, requiring extensive training hours and GPU resources. For example, training on the context length of 8192 needs 16x computational costs in self-attention layers as that of 2048. In this paper, we speed up the context extension of LLMs in two aspects. On the one hand, although dense global attention is needed during inference, fine-tuning the model can be effectively and efficiently done by sparse local attention. The proposed shifted sparse attention effectively enables context extension, leading to non-trivial computation saving with similar performance to fine-tuning with vanilla attention. Particularly, it can be implemented with only two lines of code in training, while being optional in inference. On the other hand, we revisit the parameter-efficient fine-tuning regime for context expansion. Notably, we find that LoRA for context extension works well under the premise of trainable embedding and normalization. LongLoRA combines this improved LoRA with S^2-Attn. LongLoRA demonstrates strong empirical results on various tasks on Llama2 models from 7B/13B to 70B. LongLoRA extends Llama2 7B from 4k context to 100k, or Llama2 70B to 32k on a single 8x A100 machine. LongLoRA extends models' context while retaining their original architectures, and is compatible with most existing techniques, like Flash-Attention2. In addition, we further conduct supervised fine-tuning with LongLoRA and our long instruction-following LongAlpaca dataset. All our code, models, dataset, and demo are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/LongLoRA.
THOUGHT PROPAGATION: AN ANALOGICAL APPROACH TO COMPLEX REASONING WITH LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS
Authors: Junchi Yu; Ran He; Zhitao Ying
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in reasoning tasks with the development of prompting methods. 
However, existing prompting approaches cannot reuse insights of solving similar problems and suffer from accumulated errors in multi-step reasoning, since they prompt LLMs to reason \textit{from scratch}.
To address these issues, we propose \textbf{\textit{Thought Propagation} (TP)}, which explores the analogous problems and leverages their solutions to enhance the complex reasoning ability of LLMs.
These analogous problems are related to the input one, with reusable solutions and problem-solving strategies.
Thus, it is promising to propagate insights of solving previous analogous problems to inspire new problem-solving. 
To achieve this, TP first prompts LLMs to propose and solve a set of analogous problems that are related to the input one. 
Then, TP reuses the results of analogous problems to directly yield a new solution or derive a knowledge-intensive plan for execution to amend the initial solution obtained from scratch.
TP is compatible with existing prompting approaches, allowing plug-and-play generalization and enhancement in a wide range of tasks without much labor in task-specific prompt engineering. 
Experiments across three challenging tasks demonstrate TP enjoys a substantial improvement over the baselines by an average of 12\% absolute increase in finding the optimal solutions in Shortest-path Reasoning, 13\% improvement of human preference in Creative Writing, and 15\% enhancement in the task completion rate of LLM-Agent Planning.
FreeDyG: Frequency Enhanced Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph Model for Link Prediction
Authors: Yuxing Tian; Yiyan Qi; Fan Guo
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Link prediction is a crucial task in dynamic graph learning. Recent advancements in continuous-time dynamic graph models, primarily by leveraging richer temporal details, have significantly improved link prediction performance. However, due to their complex modules, they still face several challenges, such as overfitting and optimization difficulties. More importantly, it is challenging for these methods to capture the 'shift' phenomenon, where node interaction patterns change over time. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet novel method called \textbf{Fre}quency \textbf{E}nhanced Continuous-Time \textbf{Dy}namic \textbf{G}raph ({\bf FreeDyG}) model for link prediction. Specifically, we propose a node interaction frequency encoding module that both explicitly captures the proportion of common neighbors and the frequency of the interaction of the node pair. Unlike previous works that primarily focus on the time domain, we delve into the frequency domain, allowing a deeper and more nuanced extraction of interaction patterns, revealing periodic and "shift" behaviors. Extensive experiments conducted on seven real-world continuous-time dynamic graph datasets validate the effectiveness of FreeDyG. The results consistently demonstrate that FreeDyG outperforms existing methods in both transductive and inductive settings. Our code is available at this repository: \href{https://github.com/Tianxzzz/FreeDyG}{https://github.com/Tianxzzz/FreeDyG}
DreamSmooth: Improving Model-based Reinforcement Learning via Reward Smoothing
Authors: Vint Lee; Pieter Abbeel; Youngwoon Lee
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we found that surprisingly, reward prediction is often a bottleneck of MBRL, especially for sparse rewards that are challenging (or even ambiguous) to predict. Motivated by the intuition that humans can learn from rough reward estimates, we propose a simple yet effective reward smoothing approach, DreamSmooth, which learns to predict a temporally-smoothed reward, instead of the exact reward at the given timestep. We empirically show that DreamSmooth achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon sparse-reward tasks both in sample efficiency and final performance without losing performance on common benchmarks, such as Deepmind Control Suite and Atari benchmarks.