GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Participatory Personalization in Classification
Authors: Hailey Joren; Chirag Nagpal; Katherine A Heller; Berk Ustun
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: Machine learning models are often personalized based on information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people, but do not facilitate nor inform their *consent*. Individuals cannot opt out of reporting information that a model needs to personalize their predictions nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a new family of prediction models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for supervised learning tasks where models are personalized with categorical group attributes. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of participatory systems in clinical prediction tasks, comparing them to common approaches for personalization and imputation. Our results show that participatory systems can facilitate and inform consent in a way that improves performance and privacy across all groups who report personal data.
Guarantees for Self-Play in Multiplayer Games via Polymatrix Decomposability
Authors: Revan MacQueen; James R. Wright
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Self-play is a technique for machine learning in multi-agent systems where a learning algorithm learns by interacting with copies of itself. Self-play is useful for generating large quantities of data for learning, but has the drawback that the agents the learner will face post-training may have dramatically different behavior than the learner came to expect by interacting with itself. For the special case of two-player constant-sum games, self-play that reaches Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to produce strategies that perform well against any post-training opponent; however, no such guarantee exists for multiplayer games. We show that in games that approximately decompose into a set of two-player constant-sum games (called constant-sum polymatrix games) where global $\epsilon$-Nash equilibria are boundedly far from Nash equilibria in each subgame (called subgame stability), any no-external-regret algorithm that learns by self-play will produce a strategy with bounded vulnerability. For the first time, our results identify a structural property of multiplayer games that enable performance guarantees for the strategies produced by a broad class of self-play algorithms. We demonstrate our findings through experiments on Leduc poker.
ChatGPT-Powered Hierarchical Comparisons for Image Classification
Authors: Zhiyuan Ren; Yiyang Su; Xiaoming Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The zero-shot open-vocabulary setting poses challenges for image classification.
Fortunately, utilizing a vision-language model like CLIP, pre-trained on image-text
pairs, allows for classifying images by comparing embeddings. Leveraging large
language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can further enhance CLIP’s accuracy
by incorporating class-specific knowledge in descriptions. However, CLIP still
exhibits a bias towards certain classes and generates similar descriptions for similar
classes, disregarding their differences. To address this problem, we present a
novel image classification framework via hierarchical comparisons. By recursively
comparing and grouping classes with LLMs, we construct a class hierarchy. With
such a hierarchy, we can classify an image by descending from the top to the bottom
of the hierarchy, comparing image and text embeddings at each level. Through
extensive experiments and analyses, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is
intuitive, effective, and explainable. Code will be released upon publication.
Slimmed Asymmetrical Contrastive Learning and Cross Distillation for Lightweight Model Training
Authors: Jian Meng; Li Yang; Kyungmin Lee; Jinwoo Shin; Deliang Fan; Jae-sun Seo
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Contrastive learning (CL) has been widely investigated with various learning mechanisms and achieves strong capability in learning representations of data in a self-supervised manner using unlabeled data. A common fashion of contrastive learning on this line is employing mega-sized encoders to achieve comparable performance as the supervised learning counterpart. Despite the success of the labelless training, current contrastive learning algorithms *failed* to achieve good performance with lightweight (compact) models, e.g., MobileNet, while the requirements of the heavy encoders impede the energy-efficient computation, especially for resource-constrained AI applications. Motivated by this, we propose a new self-supervised CL scheme, named SACL-XD, consisting of two technical components, **S**limmed **A**symmetrical **C**ontrastive **L**earning (SACL) and **Cross**-**D**istillation (XD), which collectively enable efficient CL with compact models. While relevant prior works employed a strong pre-trained model as the teacher of unsupervised knowledge distillation to a lightweight encoder, our proposed method trains CL models from scratch and outperforms them even without such an expensive requirement. Compared to the SoTA lightweight CL training (distillation) algorithms, SACL-XD achieves 1.79% ImageNet-1K accuracy improvement on MobileNet-V3 with 64$\times$ training FLOPs reduction.
Enhancing Knowledge Transfer for Task Incremental Learning with Data-free Subnetwork
Authors: Qiang Gao; Xiaojun Shan; Yuchen Zhang; Fan Zhou
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: As there exist competitive subnetworks within a dense network in concert with Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, we introduce a novel neuron-wise task incremental learning method, namely Data-free Subnetworks (DSN), which attempts to enhance the elastic knowledge transfer across the tasks that sequentially arrive. Specifically, DSN primarily seeks to transfer knowledge to the new coming task from the learned tasks by selecting the affiliated weights of a small set of neurons to be activated, including the reused neurons from prior tasks via neuron-wise masks. And it also transfers possibly valuable knowledge to the earlier tasks via data-free replay. Especially, DSN inherently relieves the catastrophic forgetting and the unavailability of past data or possible privacy concerns. The comprehensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DSN in the context of task-incremental learning by comparing it to several state-of-the-art baselines. In particular, DSN enables the knowledge transfer to the earlier tasks, which is often overlooked by prior efforts.
Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for Transformer in Knowledge Tracing
Authors: Shangshang Yang; Xiaoshan Yu; Ye Tian; Xueming Yan; Haiping Ma; Xingyi Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to trace students' knowledge states by predicting whether students answer correctly on exercises. Despite the excellent performance of existing Transformer-based KT approaches, they are criticized for the manually selected input features for fusion and the defect of single global context modelling to directly capture students' forgetting behavior in KT, when the related records are distant from the current record in terms of time. To address the issues, this paper first considers adding convolution operations to the Transformer to enhance its local context modelling ability used for students' forgetting behavior, then proposes an evolutionary neural architecture search approach to automate the input feature selection and automatically determine where to apply which operation for achieving the balancing of the local/global context modelling. In the search space, the original global path containing the attention module in Transformer is replaced with the sum of a global path and a local path that could contain different convolutions, and the selection of input features is also considered. To search the best architecture, we employ an effective evolutionary algorithm to explore the search space and also suggest a search space reduction strategy to accelerate the convergence of the algorithm. Experimental results on the two largest and most challenging education datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture found by the proposed approach.
Restless Bandits with Average Reward: Breaking the Uniform Global Attractor Assumption
Authors: Yige Hong; Qiaomin Xie; Yudong Chen; Weina Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: We study the infinite-horizon restless bandit problem with the average reward criterion, in both discrete-time and continuous-time settings.
A fundamental goal is to efficiently compute policies that achieve a diminishing optimality gap as the number of arms, $N$, grows large. 
Existing results on asymptotic optimality all rely on the uniform global attractor property (UGAP), a complex and challenging-to-verify assumption. 
In this paper, we propose a general, simulation-based framework, Follow-the-Virtual-Advice, that converts any single-armed policy into a policy for the original $N$-armed problem. 
This is done by simulating the single-armed policy on each arm and carefully steering the real state towards the simulated state. 
Our framework can be instantiated to produce a policy with an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. 
In the discrete-time setting, our result holds under a simpler synchronization assumption, which covers some problem instances that violate UGAP. 
More notably, in the continuous-time setting, we do not require \emph{any} additional assumptions beyond the standard unichain condition. 
In both settings, our work is the first asymptotic optimality result that does not require UGAP.
MIM4DD: Mutual Information Maximization for Dataset Distillation
Authors: Yuzhang Shang; Zhihang Yuan; Yan Yan
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Dataset distillation (DD) aims to synthesize a small dataset whose test performance is comparable to a full dataset using the same model. State-of-the-art (SoTA) methods optimize synthetic datasets primarily by matching heuristic indicators extracted from two networks: one from real data and one from synthetic data (see Fig.1, Left), such as gradients and training trajectories. DD is essentially a compression problem that emphasizes on maximizing the preservation of information contained in the data. We argue that well-defined metrics which measure the amount of shared information between variables in information theory are necessary for success measurement, but are never considered by previous works. Thus, we introduce mutual information (MI) as the metric to quantify the shared information between the synthetic and the real datasets, and devise MIM4DD numerically maximizing the MI via a newly designed optimizable objective within a contrastive learning framework to update the synthetic dataset. Specifically, we designate the samples in different datasets who share the same labels as positive pairs, and vice versa negative pairs. Then we respectively pull and push those samples in positive and negative pairs into contrastive space via minimizing NCE loss. As a result, the targeted MI can be transformed into a lower bound represented by feature maps of samples, which is numerically feasible. Experiment results show that MIM4DD can be implemented as an add-on module to existing SoTA DD methods.
Fine-Grained Theoretical Analysis of Federated Zeroth-Order Optimization
Authors: Jun Chen; Hong Chen; Bin Gu; Hao Deng
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Federated zeroth-order optimization (FedZO) algorithm enjoys the advantages of both zeroth-order optimization and federated learning, and has shown exceptional performance on black-box attack and softmax regression tasks. However, there is no generalization analysis for FedZO, and its analysis on computing convergence rate is slower than the corresponding first-order optimization setting. This paper aims to establish systematic theoretical assessments of FedZO by developing the analysis technique of on-average model stability. We establish the first generalization error bound of FedZO under the Lipschitz continuity and smoothness conditions. Then, refined generalization and optimization bounds are provided by replacing bounded gradient with heavy-tailed gradient noise and utilizing the second-order Taylor expansion for gradient approximation. With the help of a new error decomposition strategy, our theoretical analysis is also extended to the asynchronous case. For FedZO, our fine-grained analysis fills the theoretical gap on the generalization guarantees and polishes the convergence characterization of the computing algorithm.
Searching for Optimal Per-Coordinate Step-sizes with Multidimensional Backtracking
Authors: Frederik Kunstner; Victor S. Portella; Mark Schmidt; Nick Harvey
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: The backtracking line-search is an effective technique to automatically tune the step-size in smooth optimization. It guarantees similar performance to using the theoretically optimal step-size. Many approaches have been developed to instead tune per-coordinate step-sizes, also known as diagonal preconditioners, but none of the existing methods are provably competitive with the optimal per-coordinate step-sizes. We propose multidimensional backtracking, an extension of the backtracking line-search to find good diagonal preconditioners for smooth convex problems. Our key insight is that the gradient with respect to the step-sizes, also known as hyper-gradients, yields separating hyperplanes that let us search for good preconditioners using cutting-plane methods. As black-box cutting-plane approaches like the ellipsoid method are computationally prohibitive, we develop an efficient algorithm tailored to our setting. Multidimensional backtracking is provably competitive with the best diagonal preconditioner and requires no manual tuning.
Maximization of Average Precision for Deep Learning with Adversarial Ranking Robustness
Authors: Gang Li; Wei Tong; Tianbao Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 spotlight)

Abstract: This paper seeks to address a gap in optimizing Average Precision (AP) while ensuring adversarial robustness, an area that has not been extensively explored to the best of our knowledge. AP maximization for deep learning has widespread applications, particularly when there is a significant imbalance between positive and negative examples. Although numerous studies have been conducted on adversarial training, they primarily focus on robustness concerning accuracy, ensuring that the average accuracy on adversarially perturbed examples is well maintained. However, this type of adversarial robustness is insufficient for many applications, as minor perturbations on a single example can significantly impact AP  while not greatly influencing the accuracy of the prediction system. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel formulation that combines an AP surrogate loss with a regularization term representing adversarial ranking robustness, which maintains the consistency between ranking of clean data and that of perturbed data. We then devise an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm to optimize the resulting objective. Our empirical studies, which compare our method to current leading adversarial training baselines and other robust AP maximization strategies, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Notably, our methods outperform a state-of-the-art method (TRADES) by more than 4\% in terms of robust AP against PGD attacks while achieving 7\% higher AP on clean data simultaneously on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100.The code is available at: <https://github.com/GangLii/Adversarial-AP>
A new perspective on building efficient and expressive 3D equivariant graph neural networks
Authors: weitao Du; Yuanqi Du; Limei Wang; Dieqiao Feng; Guifeng Wang; Shuiwang Ji; Carla P Gomes; Zhi-Ming Ma
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Geometric deep learning enables the encoding of physical symmetries in modeling 3D objects. Despite rapid progress in encoding 3D symmetries into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a comprehensive evaluation of the expressiveness of these network architectures through a local-to-global analysis lacks today. In this paper, we propose a local hierarchy of 3D isomorphism to evaluate the expressive power of equivariant GNNs and investigate the process of representing global geometric information from local patches. Our work leads to two crucial modules for designing expressive and efficient geometric GNNs; namely local substructure encoding (\textbf{LSE}) and frame transition encoding (\textbf{FTE}). To demonstrate the applicability of our theory, we propose LEFTNet which effectively implements these modules and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both scalar-valued and vector-valued molecular property prediction tasks. We further point out future design space for 3D equivariant graph neural networks. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/yuanqidu/LeftNet}.
CosNet: A Generalized Spectral Kernel Network
Authors: Yanfang Xue; Pengfei Fang; Jinyue Tian; Shipeng Zhu; hui xue
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Complex-valued representation exists inherently in the time-sequential data that can be derived from the integration of harmonic waves. The non-stationary spectral kernel, realizing a complex-valued feature mapping, has shown its potential to analyze the time-varying statistical characteristics of the time-sequential data, as a result of the modeling frequency parameters. However, most existing spectral kernel-based methods eliminate the imaginary part, thereby limiting the representation power of the spectral kernel. To tackle this issue, we propose a generalized spectral kernel network, namely, \underline{Co}mplex-valued \underline{s}pectral kernel \underline{Net}work (CosNet), which includes spectral kernel mapping generalization (SKMG) module and complex-valued spectral kernel embedding (CSKE) module. Concretely, the SKMG module is devised to generalize the spectral kernel mapping in the real number domain to the complex number domain, recovering the inherent complex-valued representation for the real-valued data. Then a following CSKE module is further developed to combine the complex-valued spectral kernels and neural networks to effectively capture long-range or periodic relations of the data. Along with the CosNet, we study the effect of the complex-valued spectral kernel mapping via theoretically analyzing the bound of covering number and generalization error. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CosNet performs better than the mainstream kernel methods and complex-valued neural networks.
Concept Algebra for (Score-Based) Text-Controlled Generative Models
Authors: Zihao Wang; Lin Gui; Jeffrey Negrea; Victor Veitch
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: This paper concerns the structure of learned representations in text-guided generative models, focusing on score-based models. A key property of such models is that they can compose disparate concepts in a 'disentangled' manner.This suggests these models have internal representations that encode concepts in a 'disentangled' manner. Here, we focus on the idea that concepts are encoded as subspaces of some representation space.  We formalize what this means, show there's a natural choice for the representation, and develop a simple method for identifying the part of the representation corresponding to a given concept. In particular, this allows us to manipulate the concepts expressed by the model through algebraic manipulation of the representation. We demonstrate the idea with examples using Stable Diffusion.
State-Action Similarity-Based Representations for Off-Policy Evaluation
Authors: Brahma S Pavse; Josiah P. Hanna
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: In reinforcement learning, off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the expected return of an evaluation policy given a fixed dataset that was collected by running one or more different policies. One of the more empirically successful algorithms for OPE has been the fitted q-evaluation (FQE) algorithm that uses temporal difference updates to learn an action-value function, which is then used to estimate the expected return of the evaluation policy. Typically, the original fixed dataset is fed directly into FQE to learn the action-value function of the evaluation policy. Instead, in this paper, we seek to enhance the data-efficiency of FQE by first transforming the fixed dataset using a learned encoder, and then feeding the transformed dataset into FQE. To learn such an encoder, we introduce an OPE-tailored state-action behavioral similarity metric, and use this metric and the fixed dataset to  learn an encoder that models this metric. Theoretically, we show that this metric allows us to bound the error in the resulting OPE estimate. Empirically, we show that other state-action similarity metrics lead to representations that cannot represent the action-value function of the evaluation policy, and that our state-action representation method boosts the data-efficiency of FQE and lowers OPE error relative to other OPE-based representation learning methods on challenging OPE tasks. We also empirically show that the learned representations significantly mitigate divergence of FQE under varying distribution shifts. Our code is available here: https://github.com/Badger-RL/ROPE.
Adaptive Linear Estimating Equations
Authors: Mufang Ying; Koulik Khamaru; Cun-Hui Zhang
Venue: NeurIPS 2023 (NeurIPS 2023 poster)

Abstract: Sequential data collection has emerged as a widely adopted technique for enhancing the efficiency of data gathering processes. Despite its advantages, such data collection mechanism often introduces complexities to the statistical inference procedure. For instance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator in an adaptive linear regression model can exhibit non-normal asymptotic behavior, posing challenges for accurate inference and interpretation. In this paper, we propose a general method for constructing debiased estimator which remedies this issue. It makes use of the idea of adaptive linear estimating equations, and we establish theoretical guarantees of asymptotic normality, supplemented by discussions on achieving near-optimal asymptotic variance. A salient feature of our estimator is that in the context of multi-armed bandits,  our estimator retains the non-asymptotic performance of the least squares estimator while obtaining asymptotic normality property. Consequently, this work helps connect two fruitful paradigms of adaptive inference: a) non-asymptotic inference using concentration inequalities  and b) asymptotic inference via asymptotic normality.