GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
L2P-MIP: Learning to Presolve for Mixed Integer Programming
Authors: Chang Liu; Zhichen Dong; Haobo Ma; Weilin Luo; Xijun Li; Bowen Pang; Jia Zeng; Junchi Yan
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Modern solvers for solving mixed integer programming (MIP) often rely on the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm which could be of high time complexity, and presolving techniques are well designed to simplify the instance as pre-processing before B&B. However, such presolvers in existing literature or open-source solvers are mostly set by default agnostic to specific input instances, and few studies have been reported on tailoring presolving settings. In this paper, we aim to dive into this open question and show that the MIP solver can be indeed largely improved when switching the default instance-agnostic presolving into instance-specific presolving. Specifically, we propose a combination of supervised learning and classic heuristics to achieve efficient presolving adjusting, avoiding tedious reinforcement learning. Notably, our approach is orthogonal from many recent efforts in incorporating learning modules into the B&B framework after the presolving stage, and to our best knowledge, this is the first work for introducing learning to presolve in MIP solvers. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that well-trained neural networks can infer proper presolving for arbitrary incoming MIP instances in less than 0.5s, which is neglectable compared with the solving time often hours or days.
Exploring the cloud of feature interaction scores in a Rashomon set
Authors: Sichao Li; Rong Wang; Quanling Deng; Amanda S Barnard
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Interactions among features are central to understanding the behavior of machine learning models. Recent research has made significant strides in detecting and quantifying feature interactions in single predictive models. However, we argue that the feature interactions extracted from a single pre-specified model may not be trustworthy since: *a well-trained predictive model may not preserve the true feature interactions and there exist multiple well-performing predictive models that differ in feature interaction strengths*. Thus, we recommend exploring feature interaction strengths in a model class of approximately equally accurate predictive models. In this work, we introduce the feature interaction score (FIS) in the context of a Rashomon set, representing a collection of models that achieve similar accuracy on a given task. We propose a general and practical algorithm to calculate the FIS in the model class. We demonstrate the properties of the FIS via synthetic data and draw connections to other areas of statistics. Additionally, we introduce a Halo plot for visualizing the feature interaction variance in high-dimensional space and a swarm plot for analyzing FIS in a Rashomon set. Experiments with recidivism prediction and image classification illustrate how feature interactions can vary dramatically in importance for similarly accurate predictive models. Our results suggest that the proposed FIS can provide valuable insights into the nature of feature interactions in machine learning models.
Long-Short-Range Message-Passing: A Physics-Informed Framework to Capture Non-Local Interaction for Scalable Molecular Dynamics Simulation
Authors: Yunyang Li; Yusong Wang; Lin Huang; Han Yang; Xinran Wei; Jia Zhang; Tong Wang; Zun Wang; Bin Shao; Tie-Yan Liu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Computational simulation of chemical and biological systems using *ab initio* molecular dynamics has been a challenge over decades. Researchers have attempted to address the problem with machine learning and fragmentation-based methods. However, the two approaches fail to give a satisfactory description of long-range and many-body interactions, respectively. Inspired by fragmentation-based methods, we propose the Long-Short-Range Message-Passing (LSR-MP) framework as a generalization of the existing equivariant graph neural networks (EGNNs) with the intent to incorporate long-range interactions efficiently and effectively. We apply the LSR-MP framework to the recently proposed ViSNet and demonstrate the state-of-the-art results with up to 40% MAE reduction for molecules in MD22 and Chignolin datasets. Consistent improvements to various EGNNs will also be discussed to illustrate the general applicability and robustness of our LSR-MP framework. The code for our experiments and trained model weights could be found at https://github.com/liyy2/LSR-MP.
A Study of Bayesian Neural Network Surrogates for Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Yucen Lily Li; Tim G. J. Rudner; Andrew Gordon Wilson
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Bayesian optimization is a highly efficient approach to optimizing objective functions which are expensive to query. These objectives are typically represented by Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models which are easy to optimize and support exact inference. While standard GP surrogates have been well-established in Bayesian optimization, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have recently become practical function approximators, with many benefits over standard GPs such as the ability to naturally handle non-stationarity and learn representations for high-dimensional data. In this paper, we study BNNs as alternatives to standard GP surrogates for optimization. We consider a variety of approximate inference procedures for finite-width BNNs, including high-quality Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, low-cost stochastic MCMC, and heuristics such as deep ensembles. We also consider infinite-width BNNs, linearized Laplace approximations, and partially stochastic models such as deep kernel learning. We evaluate this collection of surrogate models on diverse problems with varying dimensionality, number of objectives, non-stationarity, and discrete and continuous inputs. We find: (i) the ranking of methods is highly problem dependent, suggesting the need for tailored inductive biases; (ii) HMC is the most successful approximate inference procedure for fully stochastic BNNs; (iii) full stochasticity may be unnecessary as deep kernel learning is relatively competitive; (iv) deep ensembles perform relatively poorly; (v) infinite-width BNNs are particularly promising, especially in high dimensions.
Kernel Metric Learning for In-Sample Off-Policy Evaluation of Deterministic RL Policies
Authors: Haanvid Lee; Tri Wahyu Guntara; Jongmin Lee; Yung-Kyun Noh; Kee-Eung Kim
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic target policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with continuous action spaces. While it is common to use importance sampling for OPE, it suffers from high variance when the behavior policy deviates significantly from the target policy. In order to address this issue, some recent works on OPE proposed in-sample learning with importance resampling. Yet, these approaches are not applicable to deterministic target policies for continuous action spaces. To address this limitation, we propose to relax the deterministic target policy using a kernel and learn the kernel metrics that minimize the overall mean squared error of the estimated temporal difference update vector of an action value function, where the action value function is used for policy evaluation. We derive the bias and variance of the estimation error due to this relaxation and provide analytic solutions for the optimal kernel metric. In empirical studies using various test domains, we show that the OPE with in-sample learning using the kernel with optimized metric achieves significantly improved accuracy than other baselines.
Large Language Models as Analogical Reasoners
Authors: Michihiro Yasunaga; Xinyun Chen; Yujia Li; Panupong Pasupat; Jure Leskovec; Percy Liang; Ed H. Chi; Denny Zhou
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting for language models demonstrates impressive performance across reasoning tasks, but typically needs labeled exemplars of the reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a new prompting approach, analogical prompting, designed to automatically guide the reasoning process of large language models. Inspired by analogical reasoning, a cognitive process in which humans draw from relevant past experiences to tackle new problems, our approach prompts language models to self-generate relevant exemplars or knowledge in the context, before proceeding to solve the given problem. This method presents several advantages: it obviates the need for labeling or retrieving exemplars, offering generality and convenience; it can also tailor the generated exemplars and knowledge to each problem, offering adaptability. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms 0-shot CoT and manual few-shot CoT in a variety of reasoning tasks, including math problem solving in GSM8K and MATH, code generation in Codeforces, and other reasoning tasks in BIG-Bench.
Multi-modal Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders for Neural and Behavioral Data
Authors: Rabia Gondur; Usama Bin Sikandar; Evan Schaffer; Mikio Christian Aoi; Stephen L Keeley
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Characterizing the relationship between neural population activity and behavioral data is a central goal of neuroscience. While latent variable models (LVMs) are successful in describing high-dimensional data, they are typically only designed for a single type of data, making it difficult to identify structure shared across different experimental data modalities. Here, we address this shortcoming by proposing an unsupervised LVM which extracts shared and independent latents for distinct, simultaneously recorded experimental modalities. We do this by combining Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (GPFA), an interpretable LVM for neural spiking data with temporally smooth latent space, with Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders (GP-VAEs), which similarly use a GP prior to characterize correlations in a latent space, but admit rich expressivity due to a deep neural network mapping to observations. We achieve interpretability in our model by partitioning latent variability into components that are either shared between or independent to each modality. We parameterize the latents of our model in the Fourier domain, and show improved latent identification using this approach over standard GP-VAE methods. We validate our model on simulated multi-modal data consisting of Poisson spike counts and MNIST images that scale and rotate smoothly over time. We show that the multi-modal GP-VAE (MM-GPVAE) is able to not only identify the shared and independent latent structure across modalities accurately, but provides good reconstructions of both images and neural rates on held-out trials. Finally, we demonstrate our framework on two real world multi-modal experimental settings: Drosophila whole-brain calcium imaging alongside tracked limb positions, and Manduca sexta spike train measurements from ten wing muscles as the animal tracks a visual stimulus.
Large Language Models are Efficient Learners of Noise-Robust Speech Recognition
Authors: Yuchen Hu; CHEN CHEN; Chao-Han Huck Yang; Ruizhe Li; Chao Zhang; Pin-Yu Chen; EngSiong Chng
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have promoted generative error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), which leverages the rich linguistic knowledge and powerful reasoning ability of LLMs to improve recognition results. The latest work proposes a GER benchmark with "HyPoradise" dataset to learn the mapping from ASR N-best hypotheses to ground-truth transcription by efficient LLM finetuning, which shows great effectiveness but lacks specificity on noise-robust ASR. In this work, we extend the benchmark to noisy conditions and investigate if we can teach LLMs to perform denoising for GER just like what robust ASR do, where one solution is introducing noise information as a conditioner into LLM. However, directly incorporating noise embeddings from audio encoder could harm the LLM tuning due to cross-modality gap. To this end, we propose to extract a language-space noise embedding from the N-best list to represent the noise conditions of source speech, which can promote the denoising process in GER. Furthermore, in order to enhance its representation ability of audio noise, we design a knowledge distillation (KD) approach via mutual information estimation to distill the real noise information in audio embeddings to our language embedding. Experiments on various latest LLMs demonstrate our approach achieves a new breakthrough with up to 53.9% correction improvement in terms of word error rate while with limited training data. Analysis shows that our language-space noise embedding can well represent the noise conditions of source speech, under which off-the-shelf LLMs show strong ability of language-space denoising.
UniAdapter: Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Cross-modal Modeling
Authors: Haoyu Lu; Yuqi Huo; Guoxing Yang; Zhiwu Lu; Wei Zhan; Masayoshi Tomizuka; Mingyu Ding
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large-scale vision-language pre-trained models have shown promising transferability to various downstream tasks. As the size of these foundation models and the number of downstream tasks grow, the standard full fine-tuning paradigm becomes unsustainable due to heavy computational and storage costs. This paper proposes UniAdapter, which unifies unimodal and multimodal adapters for parameter-efficient cross-modal adaptation on pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, adapters are distributed to different modalities and their interactions, with the total number of tunable parameters reduced by partial weight sharing. The unified and knowledge-sharing design enables powerful cross-modal representations that can benefit various downstream tasks, requiring only 1.0%-2.0% tunable parameters of the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments on 7 cross-modal downstream benchmarks (including video-text retrieval, image-text retrieval, VideoQA, VQA and Caption) show that in most cases, UniAdapter not only outperforms the state-of-the-arts, but even beats the full fine-tuning strategy. Particularly, on the MSRVTT retrieval task, UniAdapter achieves 49.7% recall@1 with 2.2% model parameters, outperforming the latest competitors by 2.0%. The code and models are available at https://github.com/RERV/UniAdapter.
Annealing Self-Distillation Rectification Improves Adversarial Training
Authors: Yu-Yu Wu; Hung-Jui Wang; Shang-Tse Chen
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: In standard adversarial training, models are optimized to fit invariant one-hot labels for adversarial data when the perturbations are within allowable budgets. However, the overconfident target harms generalization and causes the problem of robust overfitting. To address this issue and enhance adversarial robustness, we analyze the characteristics of robust models and identify that robust models tend to produce smoother and well-calibrated outputs. Based on the observation, we propose a simple yet effective method, Annealing Self-Distillation Rectification (ADR), which generates soft labels as a better guidance mechanism that reflects the underlying distribution of data. By utilizing ADR, we can obtain rectified labels that improve model robustness without the need for pre-trained models or extensive extra computation. Moreover, our method facilitates seamless plug-and-play integration with other adversarial training techniques by replacing the hard labels in their objectives. We demonstrate the efficacy of ADR through extensive experiments and strong performances across datasets.
Don't Judge by the Look: Towards Motion Coherent Video Representation
Authors: Yitian Zhang; Yue Bai; Huan Wang; Yizhou Wang; Yun Fu
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Current training pipelines in object recognition neglect Hue Jittering when doing data augmentation as it not only brings appearance changes that are detrimental to classification, but also the implementation is inefficient in practice. In this study, we investigate the effect of hue variance in the context of video understanding and find this variance to be beneficial since static appearances are less important in videos that contain motion information. Based on this observation, we propose a data augmentation method for video understanding, named Motion Coherent Augmentation (MCA), that introduces appearance variation in videos and implicitly encourages the model to prioritize motion patterns, rather than static appearances. Concretely, we propose an operation SwapMix to efficiently modify the appearance of video samples, and introduce Variation Alignment (VA) to resolve the distribution shift caused by SwapMix, enforcing the model to learn appearance invariant representations. Comprehensive empirical evaluation across various architectures and different datasets solidly validates the effectiveness and generalization ability of MCA, and the application of VA in other augmentation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/BeSpontaneous/MCA-pytorch.
Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models
Authors: Ming Jin; Shiyu Wang; Lintao Ma; Zhixuan Chu; James Y. Zhang; Xiaoming Shi; Pin-Yu Chen; Yuxuan Liang; Yuan-Fang Li; Shirui Pan; Qingsong Wen
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks, models for time series forecasting are often specialized, necessitating distinct designs for different tasks and applications. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in NLP and CV, their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. Recent studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the challenge remains in effectively aligning the modalities of time series data and natural language to leverage these capabilities. In this work, we present Time-LLM, a reprogramming framework to repurpose LLMs for general time series forecasting with the backbone language models kept intact. We begin by reprogramming the input time series with text prototypes before feeding it into the frozen LLM to align the two modalities. To augment the LLM's ability to reason with time series data, we propose Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP), which enriches the input context and directs the transformation of reprogrammed input patches. The transformed time series patches from the LLM are finally projected to obtain the forecasts. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that \method is a powerful time series learner that outperforms state-of-the-art, specialized forecasting models. Moreover, Time-LLM excels in both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios. The code is made available at https://github.com/KimMeen/Time-LLM.
BayesPrompt: Prompting Large-Scale Pre-Trained Language Models on Few-shot Inference via Debiased Domain Abstraction
Authors: Jiangmeng Li; Fei Song; Yifan Jin; Wenwen Qiang; Changwen Zheng; Fuchun Sun; Hui Xiong
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: As a novel and effective fine-tuning paradigm based on large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), prompt-tuning aims to reduce the gap between downstream tasks and pre-training objectives. While prompt-tuning has yielded continuous advancements in various tasks, such an approach still remains a persistent defect: prompt-tuning methods fail to generalize to specific few-shot patterns. From the perspective of distribution analyses, we disclose that the intrinsic issues behind the phenomenon are the over-multitudinous conceptual knowledge contained in PLMs and the abridged knowledge for target downstream domains, which jointly result in that PLMs mis-locate the knowledge distributions corresponding to the target domains in the universal knowledge embedding space. To this end, we intuitively explore to approximate the unabridged target domains of downstream tasks in a debiased manner, and then abstract such domains to generate discriminative prompts, thereby providing the de-ambiguous guidance for PLMs. Guided by such an intuition, we propose a simple yet effective approach, namely BayesPrompt, to learn prompts that contain the domain discriminative information against the interference from domain-irrelevant knowledge. BayesPrompt primitively leverages known distributions to approximate the debiased factual distributions of target domains and further uniformly samples certain representative features from the approximated distributions to generate the ultimate prompts for PLMs. We provide theoretical insights with the connection to domain adaptation. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.
Offline Data Enhanced On-Policy Policy Gradient with Provable Guarantees
Authors: Yifei Zhou; Ayush Sekhari; Yuda Song; Wen Sun
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Hybrid RL is the setting where an RL agent has access to both offline data and online data by interacting with the real-world environment. In this work, we propose a new hybrid RL algorithm that combines an on-policy actor-critic method with offline data. On-policy methods such as policy gradient and natural policy gradient (NPG) have shown to be more robust to model misspecification, though sometimes it may not be as sample efficient as methods that rely on off-policy learning. On the other hand, offline methods that depend on off-policy training often require strong assumptions in theory and are less stable to train in practice. Our new approach integrates a procedure of off-policy training on the offline data into an on-policy NPG framework. We show that our approach, in theory, can obtain a *best-of-both-worlds* type of result --- it achieves the state-of-art theoretical guarantees of offline RL when offline RL-specific assumptions hold, while at the same time maintaining the theoretical guarantees of on-policy NPG regardless of the offline RL assumptions' validity. Experimentally, in challenging rich-observation environments, we show that our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art hybrid RL baseline which only relies on off-policy policy optimization, demonstrating the empirical benefit of combining on-policy and off-policy learning.
Embarrassingly Simple Dataset Distillation
Authors: Yunzhen Feng; Shanmukha Ramakrishna Vedantam; Julia Kempe
Venue: ICLR 2024 (ICLR 2024 poster)

Abstract: Dataset distillation extracts a small set of synthetic training samples from a large dataset with the goal of achieving competitive performance on test data when trained on this sample. In this work, we tackle dataset distillation at its core by treating it directly as a bilevel optimization problem. Re-examining the foundational back-propagation through time method, we study the pronounced variance in the gradients, computational burden, and long-term dependencies. We introduce an improved method: Random Truncated Backpropagation Through Time (RaT-BPTT) to address them. RaT-BPTT incorporates a truncation coupled with a random window, effectively stabilizing the gradients and speeding up the optimization while covering long dependencies. This allows us to establish new state-of-the-art for a variety of standard dataset benchmarks. A deeper dive into the nature of distilled data unveils pronounced intercorrelation. In particular, subsets of distilled datasets tend to exhibit much worse performance than directly distilled smaller datasets of the same size. Leveraging RaT-BPTT, we devise a boosting mechanism that generates distilled datasets that contain subsets with near optimal performance across different data budgets.