GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Second-order forward-mode optimization of recurrent neural networks for neuroscience
Authors: Youjing Yu; Rui Xia; Qingxi Ma; Máté Lengyel; Guillaume Hennequin
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: A common source of anxiety for the computational neuroscience student is the question “will my recurrent neural network (RNN) model finally learn that task?”. Unlike in machine learning where any architectural modification of an RNN (e.g. GRU or LSTM) is acceptable if it speeds up training, the RNN models trained as _models of brain dynamics_ are subject to plausibility constraints that fundamentally exclude the usual machine learning hacks. The “vanilla” RNNs commonly used in computational neuroscience find themselves plagued by ill-conditioned loss surfaces that complicate training and significantly hinder our capacity to investigate the brain dynamics underlying complex tasks. Moreover, some tasks may require very long time horizons which backpropagation cannot handle given typical GPU memory limits. Here, we develop SOFO, a second-order optimizer that efficiently navigates loss surfaces whilst _not_ requiring backpropagation. By relying instead on easily parallelized batched forward-mode differentiation, SOFO enjoys constant memory cost in time. Morever, unlike most second-order optimizers which involve inherently sequential operations, SOFO's effective use of GPU parallelism yields a per-iteration wallclock time essentially on par with first-order gradient-based optimizers. We show vastly superior performance compared to Adam on a number of RNN tasks, including a difficult double-reaching motor task and the learning of an adaptive Kalman filter algorithm trained over a long horizon.
Safe and Efficient: A Primal-Dual Method for Offline Convex CMDPs under Partial Data Coverage
Authors: Haobo Zhang; Xiyue Peng; Honghao Wei; Xin Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy using a pre-collected dataset when data collection is impractical or risky. We propose a novel linear programming (LP) based primal-dual algorithm for convex MDPs that incorporates ``uncertainty'' parameters to improve data efficiency while requiring only partial data coverage assumption. Our theoretical results achieve a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(1/(1-\gamma)\sqrt{n})$ under general function approximation, improving the current state-of-the-art by a factor of $1/(1-\gamma)$, where $n$ is the number of data samples in an offline dataset, and $\gamma$ is the discount factor. The numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating the practical efficacy of our approach in achieving improved safety and learning efficiency in safe offline settings.
Alignment at Pre-training! Towards Native Alignment for Arabic LLMs
Authors: Juhao Liang; Zhenyang Cai; Jianqing Zhu; Huang Huang; Kewei Zong; Bang An; Mosen Alharthi; Juncai He; Lian Zhang; Haizhou Li; Benyou Wang; Jinchao Xu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing effective and safe language models. Traditional approaches focus on aligning models during the instruction tuning or reinforcement learning stages, referred to in this paper as `\textit{post alignment}'. We argue that alignment during the pre-training phase, which we term 'native alignment', warrants investigation. Native alignment aims to prevent unaligned content from the beginning, rather than relying on post-hoc processing. This approach leverages extensively aligned pre-training data to enhance the effectiveness and usability of pre-trained models. Our study specifically explores the application of native alignment in the context of Arabic LLMs. We conduct comprehensive experiments and ablation studies to evaluate the impact of native alignment on model performance and alignment stability. Additionally, we release open-source Arabic LLMs that demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks, providing significant benefits to the Arabic LLM community.
SpikedAttention: Training-Free and Fully Spike-Driven Transformer-to-SNN Conversion with Winner-Oriented Spike Shift for Softmax Operation
Authors: Sangwoo Hwang; Seunghyun Lee; Dahoon Park; Donghun Lee; Jaeha Kung
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Event-driven spiking neural networks(SNNs) are promising neural networks that reduce the energy consumption of continuously growing AI models. Recently, keeping pace with the development of transformers, transformer-based SNNs were presented. Due to the incompatibility of self-attention with spikes, however, existing transformer-based SNNs limit themselves by either restructuring self-attention architecture or conforming to non-spike computations. In this work, we propose a novel transformer-to-SNN conversion method that outputs an end-to-end spike-based transformer, named SpikedAttention. Our method directly converts the well-trained transformer without modifying its attention architecture. For the vision task, the proposed method converts Swin Transformer into an SNN without post-training or conversion-aware training, achieving state-of-the-art SNN accuracy on ImageNet dataset, i.e., 80.0\% with 28.7M parameters. Considering weight accumulation, neuron potential update, and on-chip data movement, SpikedAttention reduces energy consumption by 42\% compared to the baseline ANN, i.e., Swin-T. Furthermore, for the first time, we demonstrate that SpikedAttention successfully converts a BERT model to an SNN with only 0.3\% accuracy loss on average consuming 58\% less energy on GLUE benchmark. Our code is available at Github ( https://github.com/sangwoohwang/SpikedAttention ).
Optimal Top-Two Method for Best Arm Identification and Fluid Analysis
Authors: Agniv Bandyopadhyay; Sandeep Kumar Juneja; Shubhada Agrawal
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Top-2 methods have become popular in solving the best arm identification (BAI) problem. The best arm, or the arm with the largest mean amongst finitely many, is identified through an algorithm that at any sequential step independently pulls the empirical best arm, with a fixed probability $\beta$, and pulls the best challenger arm otherwise. The probability of incorrect selection is guaranteed to lie below a specified $\delta>0$. Information theoretic lower bounds on sample complexity are well known for BAI problem and are matched asymptotically as $\delta\to 0$ by computationally demanding plug-in methods. The above top 2 algorithm for any $\beta\in(0, 1)$ has sample complexity within a constant of the lower bound. However, determining the optimal β that matches the lower bound has proven difficult. In this paper, we address this and propose an optimal top-2 type algorithm. We consider a function of allocations anchored at a threshold. If it exceeds the threshold then the algorithm samples the empirical best arm. Otherwise, it samples the challenger arm. We show that the proposed algorithm is optimal as $\delta\to 0$. Our analysis relies on identifying a limiting fluid dynamics of allocations that satisfy a series of ordinary differential equations pasted together and that describe the asymptotic path followed by our algorithm. We rely on the implicit function theorem to show existence and uniqueness of these fluid ode’s and to show that the proposed algorithm remains close to the ode solution.
A Modular Conditional Diffusion Framework for Image Reconstruction
Authors: Magauiya Zhussip; Iaroslav Sergeevich Koshelev; Stamatios Lefkimmiatis
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have been recently utilized to deal with various blind image restoration (IR) tasks, where they have demonstrated outstanding performance in terms of perceptual quality. However, the task-specific nature of existing solutions and the excessive computational costs related to their training, make such models impractical and challenging to use for different IR tasks than those that were initially trained for. This hinders their wider adoption especially by those who lack access to powerful computational resources and vast amounts of training data. In this work we aim to address the above issues and enable the successful adoption of DPMs in practical IR-related applications. Towards this goal, we propose a modular diffusion probabilistic IR framework (DP-IR), which allows us to combine the performance benefits of existing pre-trained state-of-the-art IR networks and generative DPMs, while it requires only the additional training of a small module (0.7M params) related to the particular IR task of interest. Moreover, the architecture of our proposed framework allows us to employ a sampling strategy that leads to at least four times reduction of neural function evaluations without any performance loss, while it can also be combined with existing acceleration techniques (e.g. DDIM). We evaluate our model on four benchmarks for the tasks of burst JDD-SR, dynamic scene deblurring, and super-resolution. Our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of perceptual quality while retaining a competitive performance in relation to fidelity metrics.
Separate and Reconstruct: Asymmetric Encoder-Decoder for Speech Separation
Authors: Ui-Hyeop Shin; Sangyoun Lee; Taehan Kim; Hyung-Min Park
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: In speech separation, time-domain approaches have successfully replaced the time-frequency domain with latent sequence feature from a learnable encoder. Conventionally, the feature is separated into speaker-specific ones at the final stage of the network. Instead, we propose a more intuitive strategy that separates features earlier by expanding the feature sequence to the number of speakers as an extra dimension. To achieve this, an asymmetric strategy is presented in which the encoder and decoder are partitioned to perform distinct processing in separation tasks. The encoder analyzes features, and the output of the encoder is split into the number of speakers to be separated. The separated sequences are then reconstructed by the weight-shared decoder, which also performs cross-speaker processing. 
Without relying on speaker information, the weight-shared network in the decoder directly learns to discriminate features using a separation objective. In addition, to improve performance, traditional methods have extended the sequence length, leading to the adoption of dual-path models, which handle the much longer sequence effectively by segmenting it into chunks. To address this, we introduce global and local Transformer blocks that can directly handle long sequences more efficiently without chunking and dual-path processing. The experimental results demonstrated that this asymmetric structure is effective and that the combination of proposed global and local Transformer can sufficiently replace the role of inter- and intra-chunk processing in dual-path structure. Finally, the presented model combining both of these achieved state-of-the-art performance with much less computation in various benchmark datasets.
An Efficient Recipe for Long Context Extension via Middle-Focused Positional Encoding
Authors: Tong Wu; Yanpeng Zhao; Zilong Zheng
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Recently, many methods have been developed to extend the context length of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), but they often require fine-tuning at the target length ($\gg4K$) and struggle to effectively utilize information from the middle part of the context. To address these issues, we propose $\textbf{C}$ontinuity-$\textbf{R}$elativity ind$\textbf{E}$xing with g$\textbf{A}$ussian $\textbf{M}$iddle ($\texttt{CREAM}$), which interpolates positional encodings by manipulating position indices. Apart from being simple, $\texttt{CREAM}$ is training-efficient: it only requires fine-tuning at the pre-trained context window (e.g., Llama 2-4K) and can extend LLMs to a much longer target context length (e.g., 256K). To ensure that the model focuses more on the information in the middle, we introduce a truncated Gaussian to encourage sampling from the middle part of the context during fine-tuning, thus alleviating the ''Lost-in-the-Middle'' problem faced by long-context LLMs. Experimental results show that $\texttt{CREAM}$ successfully extends LLMs to the target length for both Base and Chat versions of $\texttt{Llama2-7B}$ with ``Never Miss A Beat''. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/bigai-nlco/cream.
Constant Acceleration Flow
Authors: Dogyun Park; Sojin Lee; Sihyeon Kim; Taehoon Lee; Youngjoon Hong; Hyunwoo J. Kim
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Rectified flow and reflow procedures have significantly advanced fast generation by progressively straightening ordinary differential equation (ODE) flows under the assumption that image and noise pairs, known as coupling, can be approximated by straight trajectories with constant velocity. However, we observe that the constant velocity modeling and reflow procedures have limitations in accurately learning to couple with flow crossing, leading to suboptimal few-step generation. To overcome the limitations, we introduce the Constant Acceleration Flow (CAF), a novel framework based on a simple constant acceleration equation. Additionally, we propose two techniques to improve estimation accuracy: initial velocity conditioning for the acceleration model and a reflow process for the initial velocity. Our comparative studies show that CAF not only outperforms rectified flow with reflow procedures in terms of speed and accuracy but also demonstrates substantial improvements in preserving coupling for fast generation.
Active Sequential Posterior Estimation for Sample-Efficient Simulation-Based Inference
Authors: Sam Griesemer; Defu Cao; Zijun Cui; Carolina Osorio; Yan Liu
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Computer simulations have long presented the exciting possibility of scientific insight into complex real-world processes. Despite the power of modern computing, however, it remains challenging to systematically perform inference under simulation models. This has led to the rise of simulation-based inference (SBI), a class of machine learning-enabled techniques for approaching inverse problems with stochastic simulators. Many such methods, however, require large numbers of simulation samples and face difficulty scaling to high-dimensional settings, often making inference prohibitive under resource-intensive simulators. To mitigate these drawbacks, we introduce active sequential neural posterior estimation (ASNPE). ASNPE brings an active learning scheme into the inference loop to estimate the utility of simulation parameter candidates to the underlying probabilistic model. The proposed acquisition scheme is easily integrated into existing posterior estimation pipelines, allowing for improved sample efficiency with low computational overhead. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the travel demand calibration setting, a high-dimensional inverse problem commonly requiring computationally expensive traffic simulators. Our method outperforms well-tuned benchmarks and state-of-the-art posterior estimation methods on a large-scale real-world traffic network, as well as demonstrates a performance advantage over non-active counterparts on a suite of SBI benchmark environments.
Self-Guiding Exploration for Combinatorial Problems
Authors: Zangir Iklassov; Yali Du; Farkhad Akimov; Martin Takáč
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in addressing reasoning tasks across diverse domains, including arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning. They utilize prompting techniques such as Exploration-of-Thought, Decomposition, and Refinement to effectively navigate and solve intricate tasks. Despite these advancements, the application of LLMs to Combinatorial Problems (CPs), known for their NP-hardness and critical roles in logistics and resource management remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel prompting strategy: Self-Guiding Exploration (SGE), designed to enhance the performance of solving CPs. SGE operates autonomously, generating multiple thought trajectories for each CP task. It then breaks these trajectories down into actionable subtasks, executes them sequentially, and refines the results to ensure optimal outcomes. We present our research as the first to apply LLMs to a broad range of CPs and demonstrate that SGE outperforms existing prompting strategies by over 27.84% in CP optimization performance. Additionally, SGE achieves a 2.46% higher accuracy over the best existing results in other reasoning tasks (arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic).
Your Diffusion Model is Secretly a Noise Classifier and Benefits from Contrastive Training
Authors: Yunshu Wu; Yingtao Luo; Xianghao Kong; Evangelos E. Papalexakis; Greg Ver Steeg
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Diffusion models learn to denoise data and the trained denoiser is then used to generate new samples from the data distribution. 
In this paper, we revisit the diffusion sampling process and identify a fundamental cause of sample quality degradation: the denoiser is poorly estimated in regions that are far Outside Of the training Distribution (OOD), and the sampling process inevitably evaluates in these OOD regions.
This can become problematic for all sampling methods, especially when we move to parallel sampling which requires us to initialize and update the entire sample trajectory of dynamics in parallel, leading to many OOD evaluations. 
To address this problem, we introduce a new self-supervised training objective that differentiates the levels of noise added to a sample, leading to improved OOD denoising performance. The approach is based on our observation that diffusion models implicitly define a log-likelihood ratio that distinguishes distributions with different amounts of noise, and this expression depends on denoiser performance outside the standard training distribution.
We show by diverse experiments that the proposed contrastive diffusion training is effective for both sequential and parallel settings, and it improves the performance and speed of parallel samplers significantly. Code for our paper can be found at https://github.com/yunshuwu/ContrastiveDiffusionLoss
Generalizable Person Re-identification via Balancing Alignment and Uniformity
Authors: Yoonki Cho; Jaeyoon Kim; Woo Jae Kim; Junsik Jung; Sung-eui Yoon
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Domain generalizable person re-identification (DG re-ID) aims to learn discriminative representations that are robust to distributional shifts. While data augmentation is a straightforward solution to improve generalization, certain augmentations exhibit a polarized effect in this task, enhancing in-distribution performance while deteriorating out-of-distribution performance. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon and reveal that it leads to sparse representation spaces with reduced uniformity. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Balancing Alignment and Uniformity (BAU), which effectively mitigates this effect by maintaining a balance between alignment and uniformity. Specifically, BAU incorporates alignment and uniformity losses applied to both original and augmented images and integrates a weighting strategy to assess the reliability of augmented samples, further improving the alignment loss. Additionally, we introduce a domain-specific uniformity loss that promotes uniformity within each source domain, thereby enhancing the learning of domain-invariant features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BAU effectively exploits the advantages of data augmentation, which previous studies could not fully utilize, and achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring complex training procedures. The code is available at https://github.com/yoonkicho/BAU.
Generating Origin-Destination Matrices in Neural Spatial Interaction Models
Authors: Ioannis Zachos; Mark Girolami; Theodoros Damoulas
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Agent-based models (ABMs) are proliferating as decision-making tools across policy areas in transportation, economics, and epidemiology. In these models, a central object of interest is the discrete origin-destination matrix which captures spatial interactions and agent trip counts between locations. Existing approaches resort to continuous approximations of this matrix and subsequent ad-hoc discretisations in order to perform ABM simulation and calibration. This impedes conditioning on partially observed summary statistics, fails to explore the multimodal matrix distribution over a discrete combinatorial support, and incurs discretisation errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a computationally efficient framework that scales linearly with the number of origin-destination pairs, operates directly on the discrete combinatorial space, and learns the agents' trip intensity through a neural differential equation that embeds spatial interactions. Our approach outperforms the prior art in terms of reconstruction error and ground truth matrix coverage, at a fraction of the computational cost. We demonstrate these benefits in two large-scale spatial mobility ABMs in Washington, DC and Cambridge, UK.
PeRFlow: Piecewise Rectified Flow as Universal Plug-and-Play Accelerator
Authors: Hanshu Yan; Xingchao Liu; Jiachun Pan; Jun Hao Liew; qiang liu; Jiashi Feng
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We present Piecewise Rectified Flow (PeRFlow), a flow-based method for accelerating diffusion models. PeRFlow divides the sampling process of generative flows into several time windows and straightens the trajectories in each interval via the reflow operation, thereby approaching piecewise linear flows. PeRFlow achieves superior performance in a few-step generation. Moreover, through dedicated parameterizations, the PeRFlow models inherit knowledge from the pretrained diffusion models. Thus, the training converges fast and the obtained models show advantageous transfer ability, serving as universal plug-and-play accelerators that are compatible with various workflows based on the pre-trained diffusion models.
UGC: Universal Graph Coarsening
Authors: Mohit Kataria; Sandeep Kumar; Jayadeva Jayadeva
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: In the era of big data, graphs have emerged as a natural representation of intricate relationships. However, graph sizes often become unwieldy, leading to storage, computation, and analysis challenges. A crucial demand arises for methods that can effectively downsize large graphs while retaining vital insights. Graph coarsening seeks to simplify large graphs while maintaining the basic statistics of the graphs, such as spectral properties and $\epsilon$-similarity in the coarsened graph. This ensures that downstream processes are more efficient and effective. Most published methods are suitable for homophilic datasets, limiting their universal use. We propose **U**niversal **G**raph **C**oarsening (UGC), a framework equally suitable for homophilic and heterophilic datasets. UGC integrates node attributes and adjacency information, leveraging the dataset's heterophily factor. Results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that UGC preserves spectral similarity while coarsening. In comparison to existing methods, UGC is 4x to 15x faster, has lower eigen-error, and yields superior performance on downstream processing tasks even at 70% coarsening ratios.