GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
BrainSCUBA: Fine-Grained Natural Language Captions of Visual Cortex Selectivity
Authors: Andrew Luo; Margaret Marie Henderson; Michael J. Tarr; Leila Wehbe
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Understanding the functional organization of higher visual cortex is a central focus in neuroscience. Past studies have primarily mapped the visual and semantic selectivity of neural populations using hand-selected stimuli, which may potentially bias results towards pre-existing hypotheses of visual cortex functionality. Moving beyond conventional approaches, we introduce a data-driven method that generates natural language descriptions for images predicted to maximally activate individual voxels of interest. Our method -- Semantic Captioning Using Brain Alignments ("BrainSCUBA") -- builds upon the rich embedding space learned by a contrastive vision-language model and utilizes a pre-trained large language model to generate interpretable captions. We validate our method through fine-grained voxel-level captioning across higher-order visual regions. We further perform text-conditioned image synthesis with the captions, and show that our images are semantically coherent and yield high predicted activations. Finally, to demonstrate how our method enables scientific discovery, we perform exploratory investigations on the distribution of "person" representations in the brain, and discover fine-grained semantic selectivity in body-selective areas. Unlike earlier studies that decode text, our method derives *voxel-wise captions of semantic selectivity*. Our results show that BrainSCUBA is a promising means for understanding functional preferences in the brain, and provides motivation for further hypothesis-driven investigation of visual cortex.
GeneOH Diffusion: Towards Generalizable Hand-Object Interaction Denoising via Denoising Diffusion
Authors: Xueyi Liu; Li Yi
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: In this work, we tackle the challenging problem of denoising hand-object interactions (HOI). Given an erroneous interaction sequence, the objective is to refine the incorrect hand trajectory to remove interaction artifacts for a perceptually realistic sequence.  This challenge involves intricate interaction noise, including unnatural hand poses and incorrect hand-object relations, alongside the necessity for robust generalization to new interactions and diverse noise patterns. We tackle those challenges through a novel approach, GeneOH Diffusion, incorporating two key designs: an innovative contact-centric HOI representation named GeneOH and a new domain-generalizable denoising scheme. The contact-centric representation GeneOH informatively parameterizes the HOI process, facilitating enhanced generalization across various HOI scenarios. The new denoising scheme consists of a canonical denoising model trained to project noisy data samples from a whitened noise space to a clean data manifold and a ``denoising via diffusion'' strategy which can handle input trajectories with various noise patterns by first diffusing them to align with the whitened noise space and cleaning via the canonical denoiser. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks with significant domain variations demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method. GeneOH Diffusion also shows promise for various downstream applications. We include [a website](https://meowuu7.github.io/GeneOH-Diffusion/) for introducing the work.
Get What You Want, Not What You Don't: Image Content Suppression for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Senmao Li; Joost van de Weijer; taihang Hu; Fahad Khan; Qibin Hou; Yaxing Wang; jian Yang
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: The success of recent text-to-image diffusion models is largely due to their capacity to be guided by a complex text prompt, which enables users to precisely describe the desired content. However, these models struggle to effectively suppress the generation of undesired content, which is explicitly requested to be omitted from the generated image in the prompt. In this paper, we analyze how to manipulate the text embeddings and remove unwanted content from them. We introduce two contributions, which we refer to as soft-weighted regularization and inference-time text embedding optimization. The first regularizes the text embedding matrix and effectively suppresses the undesired content. The second method aims to further suppress the unwanted content generation of the prompt, and encourages the generation of desired content. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on extensive experiments, validating its effectiveness. Furthermore, our method is generalizability to both the pixel-space diffusion models (i.e. DeepFloyd-IF) and the latent-space diffusion models (i.e. Stable Diffusion).
Unprocessing Seven Years of Algorithmic Fairness
Authors: André Cruz; Moritz Hardt
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 oral)

Abstract: Seven years ago, researchers proposed a postprocessing method to equalize the error rates of a model across different demographic groups. The work launched hundreds of papers purporting to improve over the postprocessing baseline. We empirically evaluate these claims through thousands of model evaluations on several tabular datasets. We find that the fairness-accuracy Pareto frontier achieved by postprocessing contains all other methods we were feasibly able to evaluate. In doing so, we address two common methodological errors that have confounded previous observations. One relates to the comparison of methods with different unconstrained base models. The other concerns methods achieving different levels of constraint relaxation. At the heart of our study is a simple idea we call unprocessing that roughly corresponds to the inverse of postprocessing. Unprocessing allows for a direct comparison of methods using different underlying models and levels of relaxation.
Less or More From Teacher: Exploiting Trilateral Geometry For Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Chengming Hu; Haolun Wu; Xuan Li; Chen Ma; Xi Chen; Boyu Wang; Jun Yan; Xue Liu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Knowledge distillation aims to train a compact student network using soft supervision from a larger teacher network and hard supervision from ground truths. However, determining an optimal knowledge fusion ratio that balances these supervisory signals remains challenging. Prior methods generally resort to a constant or heuristic-based fusion ratio, which often falls short of a proper balance. In this study, we introduce a novel adaptive method for learning a sample-wise knowledge fusion ratio, exploiting both the correctness of teacher and student, as well as how well the student mimics the teacher on each sample. Our method naturally leads to the \textit{intra-sample} trilateral geometric relations among the student prediction ($\mathcal{S}$), teacher prediction ($\mathcal{T}$), and ground truth ($\mathcal{G}$). To counterbalance the impact of outliers, we further extend to the \textit{inter-sample} relations, incorporating the teacher's global average prediction ($\mathcal{\bar{T}})$ for samples within the same class.  A simple neural network then learns the implicit mapping from the intra- and inter-sample relations to an adaptive, sample-wise knowledge fusion ratio in a bilevel-optimization manner. Our approach provides a simple, practical, and adaptable solution for knowledge distillation that can be employed across various architectures and model sizes. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over other loss re-weighting methods on image classification, attack detection, and click-through rate prediction.
Unraveling the Enigma of Double Descent: An In-depth Analysis through the Lens of Learned Feature Space
Authors: Yufei Gu; Xiaoqing Zheng; Tomaso Aste
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Double descent presents a counter-intuitive aspect within the machine learning domain, and researchers have observed its manifestation in various models and tasks. While some theoretical explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon in specific contexts, an accepted theory for its occurring mechanism in deep learning remains yet to be established. In this study, we revisit the phenomenon of double descent and demonstrate that the presence of noisy data strongly influences its occurrence. By comprehensively analysing the feature space of learned representations, we unveil that double descent arises in imperfect models trained with noisy data. We argue that while small and intermediate models before the interpolation threshold follow the traditional bias-variance trade-off, over-parameterized models interpolate noisy samples among robust data thus acquiring the capability to separate the information from the noise. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Yufei-Gu-451/double_descent_inference.git}.
Meta-Evolve: Continuous Robot Evolution for One-to-many Policy Transfer
Authors: Xingyu Liu; Deepak Pathak; Ding Zhao
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: We investigate the problem of transferring an expert policy from a source robot to multiple different robots. To solve this problem, we propose a method named *Meta-Evolve* that uses continuous robot evolution to efficiently transfer the policy to each target robot through a set of tree-structured evolutionary robot sequences. The robot evolution tree allows the robot evolution paths to be shared, so our approach can significantly outperform naive one-to-one policy transfer. We present a heuristic approach to determine an optimized robot evolution tree. Experiments have shown that our method is able to improve the efficiency of one-to-three transfer of manipulation policy by up to 3.2$\times$ and one-to-six transfer of agile locomotion policy by 2.4$\times$ in terms of simulation cost over the baseline of launching multiple independent one-to-one policy transfers. Supplementary videos available at the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/meta-evolve.
DFormer: Rethinking RGBD Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Bowen Yin; Xuying Zhang; Zhong-Yu Li; Li Liu; Ming-Ming Cheng; Qibin Hou
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: We present DFormer, a novel RGB-D pretraining framework to learn transferable representations for RGB-D segmentation tasks. DFormer has two new key innovations: 1) Unlike previous works that encode RGB-D information with RGB pretrained backbone, we pretrain the backbone using image-depth pairs from ImageNet-1K, and thus the DFormer is endowed with the capacity to encode RGB-D representations; 2) DFormer comprises a sequence of RGB-D blocks, which are tailored for encoding both RGB and depth information through a novel building block design. DFormer avoids the mismatched encoding of the 3D geometry relationships in depth maps by RGB pretrained backbones, which widely lies in existing methods but has not been resolved. We finetune the pretrained DFormer on two popular RGB-D tasks, i.e., RGB-D semantic segmentation and RGB-D salient object detection, with a lightweight decoder head. Experimental results show that our DFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performance on these two tasks with less than half of the computational cost of the current best methods on two RGB-D semantic segmentation datasets and five RGB-D salient object detection datasets. Code will be made publicly available.
ToRA: A Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent for Mathematical Problem Solving
Authors: Zhibin Gou; Zhihong Shao; Yeyun Gong; yelong shen; Yujiu Yang; Minlie Huang; Nan Duan; Weizhu Chen
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large language models have made significant progress in various language tasks, yet they still struggle with complex mathematics. In this paper, we propose ToRA a series of Tool-integrated Reasoning Agents designed to solve challenging mathematical problems by seamlessly integrating natural language reasoning with the utilization of external tools (e.g., computation libraries and symbolic solvers), thereby amalgamating the analytical prowess of language and the computational efficiency of tools. To train ToRA, we curate interactive tool-use trajectories on mathematical datasets, apply imitation learning on the annotations, and propose output space shaping to further refine models' reasoning behavior. As a result, ToRA models significantly outperform open-source models on 10 mathematical reasoning datasets across all scales with 13%-19% absolute improvements on average. Notably, ToRA-7B reaches 44.6% on the competition-level dataset MATH, surpassing the best open-source model WizardMath-70B by 22% absolute. ToRA-34B is also the first open-source model that achieves an accuracy exceeding 50% on MATH, which significantly outperforms GPT-4's CoT result, and is competitive with GPT-4 solving problems with programs. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and remaining challenges of tool interaction for mathematical reasoning, providing valuable insights for future research.
Bayesian Bi-clustering of Neural Spiking Activity with Latent Structures
Authors: Ganchao Wei
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Modern neural recording techniques allow neuroscientists to obtain spiking activity of multiple neurons from different brain regions over long time periods, which requires new statistical methods to be developed for understanding structure of the large-scale data. In this paper, we develop a bi-clustering method to cluster the neural spiking activity spatially and temporally, according to their low-dimensional latent structures. The spatial (neuron) clusters are defined by the latent trajectories within each neural population, while the temporal (state) clusters are defined by (populationally) synchronous local linear dynamics shared with different periods. To flexibly extract the bi-clustering structure, we build the model non-parametrically, and develop an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample the posterior distributions of model parameters. Validating our proposed MCMC algorithm through simulations, we find the method can recover unknown parameters and true bi-clustering structures successfully. We then apply the proposed bi-clustering method to multi-regional neural recordings under different experiment settings, where we find that simultaneously considering latent trajectories and spatial-temporal clustering structures can provide us with a more accurate and interpretable result. Overall, the proposed method provides scientific insights for large-scale (counting) time series with elongated recording periods, and it can potentially have application beyond neuroscience.
GRANDE: Gradient-Based Decision Tree Ensembles for Tabular Data
Authors: Sascha Marton; Stefan Lüdtke; Christian Bartelt; Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Despite the success of deep learning for text and image data, tree-based ensemble models are still state-of-the-art for machine learning with heterogeneous tabular data. However, there is a significant need for tabular-specific gradient-based methods due to their high flexibility. In this paper, we propose $\text{GRANDE}$, $\text{GRA}$die$\text{N}$t-Based $\text{D}$ecision Tree $\text{E}$nsembles, a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned decision tree ensembles using end-to-end gradient descent. GRANDE is based on a dense representation of tree ensembles, which affords to use backpropagation with a straight-through operator to jointly optimize all model parameters. Our method combines axis-aligned splits, which is a useful inductive bias for tabular data, with the flexibility of gradient-based optimization. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced instance-wise weighting that facilitates learning representations for both, simple and complex relations, within a single model. We conducted an extensive evaluation on a predefined benchmark with 19 classification datasets and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing gradient-boosting and deep learning frameworks on most datasets. The method is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GRANDE
GTA: A Geometry-Aware Attention Mechanism for Multi-View Transformers
Authors: Takeru Miyato; Bernhard Jaeger; Max Welling; Andreas Geiger
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: As transformers are equivariant to the permutation of input tokens, encoding the positional information of tokens is necessary for many tasks. However, since existing positional encoding schemes have been initially designed for NLP tasks, their suitability for vision tasks, which typically exhibit different structural properties in their data, is questionable. We argue that existing positional encoding schemes are suboptimal for 3D vision tasks, as they do not respect their underlying 3D geometric structure. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a geometry-aware attention mechanism that encodes the geometric structure of tokens as relative transformation determined by the geometric relationship between queries and key-value pairs. By evaluating on multiple novel view synthesis (NVS) datasets in the sparse wide-baseline multi-view setting, we show that our attention, called Geometric Transform Attention (GTA), improves learning efficiency and performance of state-of-the-art transformer-based NVS models without any additional learned parameters and only minor computational overhead.
VDC: Versatile Data Cleanser based on Visual-Linguistic Inconsistency by Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Zihao Zhu; Mingda Zhang; Shaokui Wei; Bingzhe Wu; Baoyuan Wu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: The role of data in building AI systems has recently been emphasized by the emerging concept of data-centric AI. Unfortunately, in the real-world, datasets may contain dirty samples, such as poisoned samples from backdoor attack, noisy labels in crowdsourcing, and even hybrids of them. The presence of such dirty samples makes the DNNs vunerable and unreliable.
Hence, it is critical to detect dirty samples to improve the quality and realiability of dataset. 
Existing detectors only focus on detecting poisoned samples or noisy labels, that are often prone to weak generalization when dealing with dirty samples from other fields.
In this paper, we find a commonality of various dirty samples is visual-linguistic inconsistency between images and associated labels. 
To capture the semantic inconsistency between modalities, we propose versatile data cleanser (VDC) leveraging the surpassing capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLM) in cross-modal alignment and reasoning.
It consists of three consecutive modules: the visual question generation module to generate insightful questions about the image; the visual question answering module to acquire the semantics of the visual content by answering the questions with MLLM; followed by the visual answer evaluation module to evaluate the inconsistency.
Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and generalization to various categories and types of dirty samples.
The code is available at [https://github.com/zihao-ai/vdc](https://github.com/zihao-ai/vdc).
InfoBatch: Lossless Training Speed Up by Unbiased Dynamic Data Pruning
Authors: Ziheng Qin; Kai Wang; Zangwei Zheng; Jianyang Gu; Xiangyu Peng; xu Zhao Pan; Daquan Zhou; Lei Shang; Baigui Sun; Xuansong Xie; Yang You
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 oral)

Abstract: Data pruning aims to obtain lossless performances with less overall cost. A common approach is to filter out samples that make less contribution to the training. This could lead to gradient expectation bias compared to the original data. To solve this problem, we propose InfoBatch, a novel framework aiming to achieve lossless training acceleration by unbiased dynamic data pruning. Specifically, InfoBatch
randomly prunes a portion of less informative samples based on the loss distribution and rescales the gradients of the remaining samples to approximate the original gradient. As a plug-and-play and architecture-agnostic framework, InfoBatch consistently obtains lossless training results on classification, semantic segmentation, vision pertaining, and instruction fine-tuning tasks. On CIFAR10/100, ImageNet-
1K, and ADE20K, InfoBatch losslessly saves 40% overall cost. For pertaining MAE and diffusion model, InfoBatch can respectively save 24.8% and 27% cost. For LLaMA instruction fine-tuning, combining InfoBatch and the recent coreset selection method (DQ) can achieve 10 times acceleration. Our results encourage more exploration on the data efficiency aspect of large model training. Code is publicly available at NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/InfoBatch.
Towards Lossless Dataset Distillation via Difficulty-Aligned Trajectory Matching
Authors: Ziyao Guo; Kai Wang; George Cazenavette; HUI LI; Kaipeng Zhang; Yang You
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: The ultimate goal of Dataset Distillation is to synthesize a small synthetic dataset such that a model trained on this synthetic set will perform equally well as a model trained on the full, real dataset. Until now, no method of Dataset Distillation has reached this completely lossless goal, in part due to the fact that previous methods only remain effective when the total number of synthetic samples is extremely small. Since only so much information can be contained in such a small number of samples, it seems that to achieve truly loss dataset distillation, we must develop a distillation method that remains effective as the size of the synthetic dataset grows. In this work, we present such an algorithm and elucidate why existing methods fail to generate larger, high-quality synthetic sets. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on trajectory-matching, or optimizing the synthetic data to induce similar long-term training dynamics as the real data. We empirically find that the training stage of the trajectories we choose to match (i.e., early or late) greatly affects the effectiveness of the distilled dataset. Specifically, early trajectories (where the teacher network learns easy patterns) work well for a low-cardinality synthetic set since there are fewer examples wherein to distribute the necessary information. Conversely, late trajectories (where the teacher network learns hard patterns) provide better signals for larger synthetic sets since there are now enough samples to represent the necessary complex patterns. Based on our findings, we propose to align the difficulty of the generated patterns with the size of the synthetic dataset. In doing so, we successfully scale trajectory matching-based methods to larger synthetic datasets, achieving lossless dataset distillation for the very first time. Code and distilled datasets will be released.
SYMBOL: Generating Flexible Black-Box Optimizers through Symbolic Equation Learning
Authors: Jiacheng Chen; Zeyuan Ma; Hongshu Guo; Yining Ma; Jie Zhang; Yue-Jiao Gong
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recent Meta-learning for Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) methods harness neural networks to meta-learn configurations of traditional black-box optimizers. Despite their success, they are inevitably restricted by the limitations of predefined hand-crafted optimizers. In this paper, we present SYMBOL, a novel framework that promotes the automated discovery of black-box optimizers through symbolic equation learning. Specifically, we propose a Symbolic Equation Generator (SEG) that allows closed-form optimization rules to be dynamically generated for specific tasks and optimization steps. Within SYMBOL, we then develop three distinct strategies based on reinforcement learning, so as to meta-learn the SEG efficiently. Extensive experiments reveal that the optimizers generated by SYMBOL not only surpass the state-of-the-art BBO and MetaBBO baselines, but also exhibit exceptional zero-shot generalization abilities across entirely unseen tasks with different problem dimensions, population sizes, and optimization horizons. Furthermore, we conduct in-depth analyses of our SYMBOL framework and the optimization rules that it generates, underscoring its desirable flexibility and interpretability.