GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Unlocking the Potential of Global Human Expertise
Authors: Elliot Meyerson; Olivier Francon; Darren Sargent; Babak Hodjat; Risto Miikkulainen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Solving societal problems on a global scale requires the collection and processing of ideas and methods from diverse sets of international experts. As the number and diversity of human experts increase, so does the likelihood that elements in this collective knowledge can be combined and refined to discover novel and better solutions. However, it is difficult to identify, combine, and refine complementary information in an increasingly large and diverse knowledge base. This paper argues that artificial intelligence (AI) can play a crucial role in this process. An evolutionary AI framework, termed RHEA, fills this role by distilling knowledge from diverse models created by human experts into equivalent neural networks, which are then recombined and refined in a population-based search. The framework was implemented in a formal synthetic domain, demonstrating that it is transparent and systematic. It was then applied to the results of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge, in which over 100 teams of experts across 23 countries submitted models based on diverse methodologies to predict COVID-19 cases and suggest non-pharmaceutical intervention policies for 235 nations, states, and regions across the globe. Building upon this expert knowledge, by recombining and refining the 169 resulting policy suggestion models, RHEA discovered a broader and more effective set of policies than either AI or human experts alone, as evaluated based on real-world data. The results thus suggest that AI can play a crucial role in realizing the potential of human expertise in global problem-solving.
Mixture of neural fields for heterogeneous reconstruction in cryo-EM
Authors: Axel Levy; Rishwanth Raghu; David Shustin; Adele Rui-Yang Peng; Huan Li; Oliver Biggs Clarke; Gordon Wetzstein; Ellen D Zhong
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an experimental technique for protein structure determination that images an ensemble of macromolecules in near-physiological contexts. While recent advances enable the reconstruction of dynamic conformations of a single biomolecular complex, current methods do not adequately model samples with mixed conformational and compositional heterogeneity. In particular, datasets containing mixtures of multiple proteins require the joint inference of structure, pose, compositional class, and conformational states for 3D reconstruction. Here, we present Hydra, an approach that models both conformational and compositional heterogeneity fully ab initio by parameterizing structures as arising from one of K neural fields. We employ a hybrid optimization strategy and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on synthetic datasets composed of mixtures of proteins with large degrees of conformational variability. We additionally demonstrate Hydra on an experimental dataset imaged of a cellular lysate containing a mixture of different protein complexes. Hydra expands the expressivity of heterogeneous reconstruction methods and thus broadens the scope of cryo-EM to increasingly complex samples.
Differentiable Modal Synthesis for Physical Modeling of Planar String Sound and Motion Simulation
Authors: Jin Woo Lee; Jaehyun Park; Min Jun Choi; Kyogu Lee
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: While significant advancements have been made in music generation and differentiable sound synthesis within machine learning and computer audition, the simulation of instrument vibration guided by physical laws has been underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel model for simulating the spatio-temporal motion of nonlinear strings, integrating modal synthesis and spectral modeling within a neural network framework. Our model leverages mechanical properties and fundamental frequencies as inputs, outputting string states across time and space that solve the partial differential equation characterizing the nonlinear string. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves superior accuracy in string motion simulation compared to existing baseline architectures. The code and demo are available online.
A Simple yet Scalable Granger Causal Structural Learning Approach for Topological Event Sequences
Authors: Mingjia Li; Shuo Liu; Hong Qian; Aimin Zhou
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: In modern telecommunication networks, faults manifest as alarms, generating thousands of events daily. Network operators need an efficient method to identify the root causes of these alarms to mitigate potential losses. This task is challenging due to the increasing scale of telecommunication networks and the interconnected nature of devices, where one fault can trigger a cascade of alarms across multiple devices within a topological network. Recent years have seen a growing focus on causal approaches to addressing this problem, emphasizing the importance of learning a Granger causal graph from topological event sequences. Such causal graphs delineate the relations among alarms and can significantly aid engineers in identifying and rectifying faults. However, existing methods either ignore the topological relationships among devices or suffer from relatively low scalability and efficiency, failing to deliver high-quality responses in a timely manner. To this end, this paper proposes $S^2GCSL$, a simple yet scalable Granger causal structural learning approach for topological event sequences. $S^2GCSL$ utilizes a linear kernel to model activation interactions among various event types within a topological network, and employs gradient descent to efficiently optimize the likelihood function. Notably, it can seamlessly incorporate expert knowledge as constraints within the optimization process, which enhances the interpretability of the outcomes. Extensive experimental results on both large-scale synthetic and real-world problems verify the scalability and efficacy of $S^2GCSL$.
DiffLight: A Partial Rewards Conditioned Diffusion Model for Traffic Signal Control with Missing Data
Authors: Hanyang Chen; Yang Jiang; Shengnan Guo; Xiaowei Mao; Youfang Lin; Huaiyu Wan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: The application of reinforcement learning in traffic signal control (TSC) has been extensively researched and yielded notable achievements. However, most existing works for TSC assume that traffic data from all surrounding intersections is fully and continuously available through sensors. In real-world applications, this assumption often fails due to sensor malfunctions or data loss, making TSC with missing data a critical challenge. To meet the needs of practical applications, we introduce DiffLight, a novel conditional diffusion model for TSC under data-missing scenarios in the offline setting. Specifically, we integrate two essential sub-tasks, i.e., traffic data imputation and decision-making, by leveraging a Partial Rewards Conditioned Diffusion (PRCD) model to prevent missing rewards from interfering with the learning process. Meanwhile, to effectively capture the spatial-temporal dependencies among intersections, we design a Spatial-Temporal transFormer (STFormer) architecture. In addition, we propose a Diffusion Communication Mechanism (DCM) to promote better communication and control performance under data-missing scenarios. Extensive experiments on five datasets with various data-missing scenarios demonstrate that DiffLight is an effective controller to address TSC with missing data. The code of DiffLight is released at https://github.com/lokol5579/DiffLight-release.
Causal vs. Anticausal merging of predictors
Authors: Sergio Hernan Garrido Mejia; Patrick Blöbaum; Bernhard Schölkopf; Dominik Janzing
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We study the differences arising from merging predictors in the causal and anticausal directions using the same data.
In particular we study the asymmetries that arise in a simple model where we merge the predictors using one binary variable as target and two continuous variables as predictors.
We use Causal Maximum Entropy (CMAXENT) as inductive bias to merge the predictors, however, we expect similar differences to hold also when we use other merging methods that take into account asymmetries between cause and effect.
We show that if we observe all bivariate distributions, the CMAXENT solution reduces to a logistic regression in the causal direction and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) in the anticausal direction.
Furthermore, we study how the decision boundaries of these two solutions differ whenever we observe only some of the bivariate distributions implications for Out-Of-Variable (OOV) generalisation.
Exploring the Precise Dynamics of Single-Layer GAN Models: Leveraging Multi-Feature Discriminators for High-Dimensional Subspace Learning
Authors: Andrew Bond; Zafer Dogan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Subspace learning is a critical endeavor in contemporary machine learning, particularly given the vast dimensions of modern datasets. In this study, we delve into the training dynamics of a single-layer GAN model from the perspective of subspace learning, framing these GANs as a novel approach to this fundamental task. Through a rigorous scaling limit analysis, we offer insights into the behavior of this model. Extending beyond prior research that primarily focused on sequential feature learning, we investigate the non-sequential scenario, emphasizing the pivotal role of inter-feature interactions in expediting training and enhancing performance, particularly with an uninformed initialization strategy. Our investigation encompasses both synthetic and real-world datasets, such as MNIST and Olivetti Faces, demonstrating the robustness and applicability of our findings to practical scenarios. By bridging our analysis to the realm of subspace learning, we systematically compare the efficacy of GAN-based methods against conventional approaches, both theoretically and empirically. Notably, our results unveil that while all methodologies successfully capture the underlying subspace, GANs exhibit a remarkable capability to acquire a more informative basis, owing to their intrinsic ability to generate new data samples. This elucidates the unique advantage of GAN-based approaches in subspace learning tasks.
Text-Aware Diffusion for Policy Learning
Authors: Calvin Luo; Mandy He; Zilai Zeng; Chen Sun
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Training an agent to achieve particular goals or perform desired behaviors is often accomplished through reinforcement learning, especially in the absence of expert demonstrations.  However, supporting novel goals or behaviors through reinforcement learning requires the ad-hoc design of appropriate reward functions, which quickly becomes intractable. To address this challenge, we propose Text-Aware Diffusion for Policy Learning (TADPoLe), which uses a pretrained, frozen text-conditioned diffusion model to compute dense zero-shot reward signals for text-aligned policy learning.  We hypothesize that large-scale pretrained generative models encode rich priors that can supervise a policy to behave not only in a text-aligned manner, but also in alignment with a notion of naturalness summarized from internet-scale training data.  In our experiments, we demonstrate that TADPoLe is able to learn policies for novel goal-achievement and continuous locomotion behaviors specified by natural language, in both Humanoid and Dog environments. The behaviors are learned zero-shot without ground-truth rewards or expert demonstrations, and are qualitatively more natural according to human evaluation. We further show that TADPoLe performs competitively when applied to robotic manipulation tasks in the Meta-World environment, without having access to any in-domain demonstrations.
Masked Hard-Attention Transformers Recognize Exactly the Star-Free Languages
Authors: Andy Yang; David Chiang; Dana Angluin
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The expressive power of transformers over inputs of unbounded size can be studied through their ability to recognize classes of formal languages. In this paper, we establish exact characterizations of transformers with hard attention (in which all attention is focused on exactly one position) and attention masking (in which each position only attends to positions on one side). With strict masking (each position cannot attend to itself) and without position embeddings, these transformers are expressively equivalent to linear temporal logic (LTL), which defines exactly the star-free languages. A key technique is the use of Boolean RASP as a convenient intermediate language between transformers and LTL. We then take numerous results known for LTL and apply them to transformers, showing how position embeddings, strict masking, and depth all increase expressive power.
Equivariant Neural Diffusion for Molecule Generation
Authors: François R J Cornet; Grigory Bartosh; Mikkel N. Schmidt; Christian A. Naesseth
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We introduce Equivariant Neural Diffusion (END), a novel diffusion model for molecule generation in 3D that is equivariant to Euclidean transformations. Compared to current state-of-the-art equivariant diffusion models, the key innovation in END lies in its learnable forward process for enhanced generative modelling. Rather than pre-specified, the forward process is parameterized through a time- and data-dependent transformation that is equivariant to rigid transformations.  Through a series of experiments on standard molecule generation benchmarks, we demonstrate the competitive performance of END compared to several strong baselines for both unconditional and conditional generation.
No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance
Authors: Vishaal Udandarao; Ameya Prabhu; Adhiraj Ghosh; Yash Sharma; Philip Torr; Adel Bibi; Samuel Albanie; Matthias Bethge
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of multimodal models on downstream concepts influenced by the frequency of these concepts in their pretraining datasets?

We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and 5 standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly. We contribute this long-tail test set as the Let it Wag! benchmark to further research in this direction. Taken together, our study reveals an exponential need for training data which implies that the key to "zero-shot" generalization capabilities under large-scale training data and compute paradigms remains to be found.
Federated Online Prediction from Experts with Differential Privacy: Separations and Regret Speed-ups
Authors: Fengyu Gao; Ruiquan Huang; Jing Yang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We study the problems of differentially private federated online prediction from experts against both *stochastic adversaries* and *oblivious adversaries*. We aim to minimize the average regret on $m$ clients working in parallel over time horizon $T$ with explicit differential privacy (DP) guarantees. With stochastic adversaries, we propose a **Fed-DP-OPE-Stoch** algorithm that achieves $\sqrt{m}$-fold speed-up of the per-client regret compared to the single-player counterparts under both pure DP and approximate DP constraints, while maintaining logarithmic communication costs. With oblivious adversaries, we establish non-trivial lower bounds indicating that *collaboration among clients does not lead to regret speed-up with general oblivious adversaries*. We then consider a special case of the oblivious adversaries setting, where there exists a low-loss expert. We design a new algorithm **Fed-SVT** and show that it achieves an $m$-fold regret speed-up under both pure DP and approximate DP constraints over the single-player counterparts. Our lower bound indicates that Fed-SVT is nearly optimal up to logarithmic factors. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work examining the differentially private online prediction from experts in the federated setting.
Multivariate Stochastic Dominance via Optimal Transport and Applications to Models Benchmarking
Authors: Gabriel Rioux; Apoorva Nitsure; Mattia Rigotti; Kristjan Greenewald; Youssef Mroueh
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Stochastic dominance is an important concept in probability theory, econometrics and social choice theory for robustly modeling agents' preferences between random outcomes.  While many works have been dedicated to the univariate case,
little has been done in the multivariate scenario, wherein an agent has to decide between different multivariate outcomes. By exploiting a  characterization  of  multivariate first stochastic dominance in terms of couplings, we  introduce  a statistic that assesses multivariate almost stochastic dominance under the framework of Optimal Transport  with a smooth cost. Further, we introduce an entropic regularization of this statistic, and establish a central limit theorem (CLT) and consistency of the bootstrap procedure for the empirical statistic. Armed with this CLT, we propose a hypothesis testing framework as well as an efficient implementation using the Sinkhorn algorithm. We showcase our  method in comparing and benchmarking Large Language Models that are evaluated on multiple metrics. Our multivariate stochastic dominance test allows us to capture the dependencies between the metrics in order to make an informed and statistically significant  decision on the relative performance of the models.
Optimal Private and Communication Constraint Distributed Goodness-of-Fit Testing for Discrete Distributions in the Large Sample Regime
Authors: Lasse Vuursteen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We study distributed goodness-of-fit testing for discrete distribution under bandwidth and differential privacy constraints. Information constraint distributed goodness-of-fit testing is a problem that has received considerable attention recently. The important case of discrete distributions is theoretically well understood in the classical case where all data is available in one "central" location. In a federated setting, however, data is distributed across multiple "locations" (e.g. servers) and cannot readily be shared due to e.g. bandwidth or privacy constraints that each server needs to satisfy. We show how recently derived results for goodness-of-fit testing for the mean of a multivariate Gaussian model extend to the discrete distributions, by leveraging Le Cam's theory of statistical equivalence. In doing so, we derive matching minimax upper- and lower-bounds for the goodness-of-fit testing for discrete distributions under bandwidth or privacy constraints in the regime where number of samples held locally are large.
Leveraging partial stragglers within gradient coding
Authors: Aditya Ramamoorthy; Ruoyu meng; Vrinda S Girimaji
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Within distributed learning, workers typically compute gradients on their assigned dataset chunks and send them to the parameter server (PS), which aggregates them to compute either an exact or approximate version of $\nabla L$ (gradient of the loss function $L$). However, in large-scale clusters, many workers are slower than their promised speed or even failure-prone. A gradient coding solution introduces redundancy within the assignment of chunks to the workers and uses coding theoretic ideas to allow the PS to recover $\nabla L$ (exactly or approximately), even in the presence of stragglers. Unfortunately, most existing gradient coding protocols are inefficient from a computation perspective as they coarsely classify workers as operational or failed; the potentially valuable work performed by slow workers (partial stragglers) is ignored. In this work, we present novel gradient coding protocols that judiciously leverage the work performed by partial stragglers. Our protocols are efficient from a computation and communication perspective and numerically stable. For an important class of chunk assignments, we present efficient algorithms for optimizing the relative ordering of chunks within the workers; this ordering affects the overall execution time. For exact gradient reconstruction, our protocol is around $2\times$ faster than the original class of protocols and for approximate gradient reconstruction, the mean-squared-error of our reconstructed gradient is several orders of magnitude better.
DarkSAM: Fooling Segment Anything Model to Segment Nothing
Authors: Ziqi Zhou; Yufei Song; Minghui Li; Shengshan Hu; Xianlong Wang; Leo Yu Zhang; Dezhong Yao; Hai Jin
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Segment Anything Model (SAM) has recently gained much attention for its outstanding generalization to unseen data and tasks. Despite its promising prospect, the vulnerabilities of SAM, especially to universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) have not been thoroughly investigated yet. In this paper, we propose DarkSAM, the first prompt-free universal attack framework against SAM, including a semantic decoupling-based spatial attack and a texture distortion-based frequency attack. We first divide the output of SAM into foreground and background. Then, we design a shadow target strategy to obtain the semantic blueprint of the image as the attack target. DarkSAM is dedicated to fooling SAM by extracting and destroying crucial object features from images in both spatial and frequency domains. In the spatial domain, we disrupt the semantics of both the foreground and background in the image to confuse SAM. In the frequency domain, we further enhance the attack effectiveness by distorting the high-frequency components (i.e., texture information) of the image. Consequently, with a single UAP, DarkSAM renders SAM incapable of segmenting objects across diverse images with varying prompts. Experimental results on four datasets for SAM and its two variant models demonstrate the powerful attack capability and transferability of DarkSAM. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/DarkSAM.