GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
AvaTaR: Optimizing LLM Agents for Tool Usage via Contrastive Reasoning
Authors: Shirley Wu; Shiyu Zhao; Qian Huang; Kexin Huang; Michihiro Yasunaga; Kaidi Cao; Vassilis N. Ioannidis; Karthik Subbian; Jure Leskovec; James Zou
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools and knowledge to boost accuracy and reduce hallucinations. However, developing prompting techniques that enable LLM agents to effectively use these tools and knowledge remains a heuristic and labor-intensive task. Here, we introduce AvaTaR, a novel and automated framework that optimizes an LLM agent to effectively leverage provided tools, improving performance on a given task. During optimization, we design a comparator module to iteratively deliver insightful and comprehensive prompts to the LLM agent by contrastively reasoning between positive and negative examples sampled from training data. We demon- strate AvaTaR on four complex multimodal retrieval datasets featuring textual, visual, and relational information, and three general question-answering (QA) datasets. We find AvaTaR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all seven tasks, exhibiting strong generalization ability when applied to novel cases and achieving an average relative improvement of 14% on the Hit@1 metric for the retrieval datasets and 13% for the QA datasets. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zou-group/avatar.
Exploring Token Pruning in Vision State Space Models
Authors: Zheng Zhan; Zhenglun Kong; Yifan Gong; Yushu Wu; Zichong Meng; Hangyu Zheng; Xuan Shen; Stratis Ioannidis; Wei Niu; Pu Zhao; Yanzhi Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have the advantage of keeping linear computational complexity compared to attention modules in transformers, and have been applied to vision tasks as a new type of powerful vision foundation model. Inspired by the observations that the final prediction in vision transformers (ViTs) is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, we take the novel step of enhancing the efficiency of SSM-based vision models through token-based pruning. However, direct applications of existing token pruning techniques designed for ViTs fail to deliver good performance, even with extensive fine-tuning. To address this issue, we revisit the unique computational characteristics of SSMs and discover that naive application disrupts the sequential token positions. This insight motivates us to design a novel and general token pruning method specifically for SSM-based vision models. We first introduce a pruning-aware hidden state alignment method to stabilize the neighborhood of remaining tokens for performance enhancement. Besides, based on our detailed analysis, we propose a token importance evaluation method adapted for SSM models, to guide the token pruning. With efficient implementation and practical acceleration methods, our method brings actual speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant computation reduction with minimal impact on performance across different tasks. Notably, we achieve 81.7\% accuracy on ImageNet with a 41.6\% reduction in the FLOPs for pruned PlainMamba-L3. Furthermore, our work provides deeper insights into understanding the behavior of SSM-based vision models for future research.
Mixture of Nested Experts: Adaptive Processing of Visual Tokens
Authors: Gagan Jain; Nidhi Hegde; Aditya Kusupati; Arsha Nagrani; Shyamal Buch; Prateek Jain; Anurag Arnab; Sujoy Paul
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The visual medium (images and videos) naturally contains a large amount of information redundancy, thereby providing a great opportunity for leveraging efficiency in processing. While Vision Transformer (ViT) based models scale effectively to large data regimes, they fail to capitalize on this inherent redundancy, leading to higher computational costs. Mixture of Experts (MoE) networks demonstrate scalability while maintaining same inference-time costs, but they come with a larger parameter footprint. We present Mixture of Nested Experts (MoNE), which utilizes a nested structure for experts, wherein individual experts fall on an increasing compute-accuracy curve. Given a compute budget, MoNE learns to dynamically choose tokens in a priority order, and thus redundant tokens are processed through cheaper nested experts. Using this framework, we achieve equivalent performance as the baseline models, while reducing inference time compute by over two-fold. We validate our approach on standard image and video datasets - ImageNet-21K, Kinetics400, and Something-Something-v2. We further highlight MoNE's adaptability by showcasing its ability to maintain strong performance across different inference-time compute budgets on videos, using only a single trained model.
Superposed Decoding: Multiple Generations from a Single Autoregressive Inference Pass
Authors: Ethan Shen; Alan Fan; Sarah M Pratt; Jae Sung Park; Matthew Wallingford; Sham M. Kakade; Ari Holtzman; Ranjay Krishna; Ali Farhadi; Aditya Kusupati
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Many applications today provide users with multiple auto-complete drafts as they type, including GitHub's code completion, Gmail's smart compose, and Apple's messaging auto-suggestions. Under the hood, language models support this by running an autoregressive inference pass to provide a draft. Consequently, providing $k$ drafts to the user requires running an expensive language model $k$ times. To alleviate the computation cost of running $k$ inference passes, we propose Superposed Decoding, a new decoding algorithm that generates $k$ drafts at the computation cost of one autoregressive inference pass. We achieve this by feeding a superposition of the most recent token embeddings from the $k$ drafts as input to the next decoding step of the language model. At every inference step we combine the $k$ drafts with the top-$k$ tokens to get $k^2$ new drafts and cache the $k$ most likely options, using an n-gram interpolation with minimal compute overhead to filter out incoherent generations. Our experiments show that $k$ drafts from Superposed Decoding are at least as coherent and factual as Nucleus Sampling and Greedy Decoding respectively, while being at least $2.44\times$ faster for $k\ge3$. In a compute-normalized setting, user evaluations demonstrably favor text generated by Superposed Decoding over Nucleus Sampling. Superposed Decoding can also be combined with other decoding strategies, resulting in universal coverage gains when scaling inference time compute. Code and more examples open-sourced at https://github.com/RAIVNLab/SuperposedDecoding.
Adapting to Unknown Low-Dimensional Structures in Score-Based Diffusion Models
Authors: Gen Li; Yuling Yan
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: This paper investigates score-based diffusion models when the underlying target distribution is concentrated on or near low-dimensional manifolds within the higher-dimensional space in which they formally reside, a common characteristic of natural image distributions. Despite previous efforts to understand the data generation process of diffusion models, existing theoretical support remains highly suboptimal in the presence of low-dimensional structure, which we strengthen in this paper.  For the popular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), we find that the dependency of the error incurred within each denoising step on the ambient dimension $d$ is in general unavoidable. We further identify a unique design of coefficients that yields a converges rate at the order of $O(k^{2}/\sqrt{T})$ (up to log factors), where $k$ is the intrinsic dimension of the target distribution and $T$ is the number of steps. This represents the first theoretical demonstration that the DDPM sampler can adapt to unknown low-dimensional structures in the target distribution, highlighting the critical importance of coefficient design. All of this is achieved by a novel set of analysis tools that characterize the algorithmic dynamics in a more deterministic manner.
BitsFusion: 1.99 bits Weight Quantization of Diffusion Model
Authors: Yang Sui; Yanyu Li; Anil Kag; Yerlan Idelbayev; Junli Cao; Ju Hu; Dhritiman Sagar; Bo Yuan; Sergey Tulyakov; Jian Ren
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Diffusion-based image generation models have achieved great success in recent years by showing the capability of synthesizing high-quality content. However, these models contain a huge number of parameters, resulting in a significantly large model size. Saving and transferring them is a major bottleneck for various applications, especially those running on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we develop a novel weight quantization method that quantizes the UNet from Stable Diffusion v1.5 to $1.99$ bits, achieving a model with $7.9\times$ smaller size while exhibiting even better generation quality than the original one. Our approach includes several novel techniques, such as assigning optimal bits to each layer, initializing the quantized model for better performance, and improving the training strategy to dramatically reduce quantization error. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate our quantized model across various benchmark datasets and through human evaluation to demonstrate its superior generation quality.
Uncertainty-aware Fine-tuning of Segmentation Foundation Models
Authors: Kangning Liu; Brian L. Price; Jason Kuen; Yifei Fan; Zijun Wei; Luis Figueroa; Krzysztof J. Geras; Carlos Fernandez-Granda
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a large-scale foundation model that has revolutionized segmentation methodology. Despite its impressive generalization ability, the segmentation accuracy of SAM on images with intricate structures is often unsatisfactory. Recent works have proposed lightweight fine-tuning using high-quality annotated data to improve accuracy on such images. However, here we provide extensive empirical evidence that this strategy leads to forgetting how to "segment anything": these models lose the original generalization abilities of SAM, in the sense that they perform worse for segmentation tasks not represented in the annotated fine-tuning set. To improve performance without forgetting, we introduce a novel framework that combines high-quality annotated data with a large unlabeled dataset. The framework relies on two methodological innovations. First, we quantify the uncertainty in the SAM pseudo labels associated with the unlabeled data and leverage it to perform uncertainty-aware fine-tuning. Second, we encode the type of segmentation task associated with each training example using a $\textit{task prompt}$ to reduce ambiguity. We evaluated the proposed Segmentation with Uncertainty Model (SUM) on a diverse test set consisting of 14 public benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, our method consistently surpasses SAM by 3-6 points in mean IoU and 4-7 in mean boundary IoU across point-prompt interactive segmentation rounds. Code is available at https://github.com/Kangningthu/SUM
DeformableTST: Transformer for Time Series Forecasting without Over-reliance on Patching
Authors: Donghao Luo; Xue Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: With the proposal of patching technique in time series forecasting, Transformerbased models have achieved compelling performance and gained great interest from
the time series community. But at the same time, we observe a new problem that
the recent Transformer-based models are overly reliant on patching to achieve ideal
performance, which limits their applicability to some forecasting tasks unsuitable
for patching. In this paper, we intent to handle this emerging issue. Through diving
into the relationship between patching and full attention (the core mechanism
in Transformer-based models), we further find out the reason behind this issue
is that full attention relies overly on the guidance of patching to focus on the
important time points and learn non-trivial temporal representation. Based on this
finding, we propose DeformableTST as an effective solution to this emerging
issue. Specifically, we propose deformable attention, a sparse attention mechanism
that can better focus on the important time points by itself, to get rid of the need of
patching. And we also adopt a hierarchical structure to alleviate the efficiency issue
caused by the removal of patching. Experimentally, our DeformableTST achieves
the consistent state-of-the-art performance in a broader range of time series tasks,
especially achieving promising performance in forecasting tasks unsuitable for
patching, therefore successfully reducing the reliance on patching and broadening
the applicability of Transformer-based models. Code is available at this repository:
https://github.com/luodhhh/DeformableTST.
MAmmoTH2: Scaling Instructions from the Web
Authors: Xiang Yue; Tianyu Zheng; Ge Zhang; Wenhu Chen
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Instruction tuning improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with data quality and scalability being the crucial factors. Most instruction tuning data come from human crowd-sourcing or GPT-4 distillation. We propose a paradigm to efficiently harvest 10 million naturally existing instruction data from the pre-training web corpus to enhance LLM reasoning. Our approach involves (1) recalling relevant documents, (2) extracting instruction-response pairs, and (3) refining the extracted pairs using open-source LLMs. Fine-tuning base LLMs on this dataset, we build MAmmoTH2 models, which significantly boost performance on reasoning benchmarks. Notably, MAmmoTH2-7B’s (Mistral) performance increases from 11% to 36.7% on MATH and from 36% to 68.4% on GSM8K without training on any in-domain data. Further training MAmmoTH2 on public instruction tuning datasets yields MAmmoTH2-Plus, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several reasoning and chatbot benchmarks. Our work demonstrates how to harvest large-scale, high-quality instruction data without costly human annotation or GPT-4 distillation, providing a new paradigm for building better instruction tuning data.
CorDA: Context-Oriented Decomposition Adaptation of Large Language Models for Task-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning
Authors: Yibo Yang; Xiaojie Li; Zhongzhu Zhou; Shuaiwen Leon Song; Jianlong Wu; Liqiang Nie; Bernard Ghanem
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods build adapters widely agnostic of the context of downstream task to learn, or the context of important knowledge to maintain. As a result, there is often a performance gap compared to full-parameter fine-tuning, and meanwhile the fine-tuned model suffers from catastrophic forgetting of the pre-trained world knowledge. In this paper, we propose **CorDA**, a Context-oriented Decomposition Adaptation method that builds learnable **task-aware adapters** from weight decomposition oriented by the context of downstream task or the world knowledge to maintain. Concretely, we collect a few data samples, and perform singular value decomposition for each linear layer of a pre-trained LLM multiplied by the covariance matrix of the input activation using these samples. The inverse of the covariance matrix is multiplied with the decomposed components to reconstruct the original weights. By doing so, the context of the representative samples is captured through deciding the factorizing orientation. Our method enables two options, the **knowledge-preserved adaptation** and the **instruction-previewed adaptation**. For the former, we use question-answering samples to obtain the covariance matrices, and use the decomposed components with the smallest $r$ singular values to initialize a learnable adapter, with the others frozen such that the world knowledge is better preserved. For the latter, we use the instruction data from the fine-tuning task, such as math or coding, to orientate the decomposition and train the largest $r$ components that most correspond to the task to learn. We conduct extensive experiments on Math, Code, and Instruction Following tasks. Our knowledge-preserved adaptation not only achieves better performance than LoRA on fine-tuning tasks, but also mitigates the forgetting of world knowledge. Our instruction-previewed adaptation is able to further enhance the fine-tuning performance to be comparable with full fine-tuning, surpassing 
the state-of-the-art PEFT methods such as LoRA, DoRA, and PiSSA.
Nearly Optimal Approximation of Matrix Functions by the Lanczos Method
Authors: Noah Amsel; Tyler Chen; Anne Greenbaum; Cameron N Musco; Christopher Musco
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 spotlight)

Abstract: Approximating the action of a matrix function $f(\vec{A})$ on a vector $\vec{b}$ is an increasingly important primitive in machine learning, data science, and statistics, with applications such as sampling high dimensional Gaussians, Gaussian process regression and Bayesian inference, principle component analysis, and approximating Hessian spectral densities.
Over the past decade, a number of algorithms enjoying strong theoretical guarantees have been proposed for this task.
Many of the most successful belong to a family of algorithms called Krylov subspace methods.
Remarkably, a classic Krylov subspace method, called the Lanczos method for matrix functions (Lanczos-FA), frequently outperforms newer methods in practice. Our main result is a theoretical justification for this finding: we show that, for a natural class of rational functions, Lanczos-FA matches the error of the best possible Krylov subspace method up to a multiplicative approximation factor. 
The approximation factor depends on the degree of $f(x)$'s denominator and the condition number of $\vec{A}$, but not on the number of iterations $k$. Our result provides a strong justification for the excellent performance of Lanczos-FA, especially on functions that are well approximated by rationals, such as the matrix square root.
Cluster-Learngene: Inheriting Adaptive Clusters for Vision Transformers
Authors: Qiufeng Wang; Xu Yang; Fu Feng; Jing wang; Xin Geng
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: In recent years, the merging of vast datasets with powerful computational resources has led to the emergence of large pre-trained models in the field of deep learning. However, the common practices often overgeneralize the applicability of these models, overlooking the task-specific resource constraints. To mitigate this issue, we propose \textbf{Cluster-Learngene}, which effectively clusters critical internal modules from a large ancestry model and then inherits them to initialize descendant models of elastic scales. Specifically, based on the density characteristics of attention heads, our method adaptively clusters attention heads of each layer and position-wise feed-forward networks (FFNs) in the ancestry model as the learngene. Moreover, we introduce priority weight-sharing and learnable parameter transformations that expand the learngene to initialize descendant models of elastic scales. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Cluster-Learngene not only is more efficient compared to other initialization methods but also customizes models of elastic scales according to downstream task resources.
Transforming Vision Transformer: Towards Efficient Multi-Task Asynchronous Learner
Authors: Hanwen Zhong; Jiaxin Chen; Yutong Zhang; Di Huang; Yunhong Wang
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Multi-Task Learning (MTL) for Vision Transformer aims at enhancing the model capability by tackling multiple tasks simultaneously. Most recent works have predominantly focused on designing Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structures and integrating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to efficiently perform multi-task learning. However, their rigid combination hampers both the optimization of MoE and the effectiveness of reparameterization of LoRA, leading to sub-optimal performance and low inference speed. In this work, we propose a novel approach dubbed Efficient Multi-Task Learning (EMTAL) by transforming a pre-trained Vision Transformer into an efficient multi-task learner during training, and reparameterizing the learned structure for efficient inference. Specifically, we firstly develop the MoEfied LoRA structure, which decomposes the pre-trained Transformer into a low-rank MoE structure and employ LoRA to fine-tune the parameters. Subsequently, we take into account the intrinsic asynchronous nature of multi-task learning and devise a learning Quality Retaining (QR) optimization mechanism, by leveraging the historical high-quality class logits to prevent a well-trained task from performance degradation. Finally, we design a router fading strategy to integrate the learned parameters into the original Transformer, archiving efficient inference. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method, compared to the state-of-the-art multi-task learning approaches.
Hierarchical Programmatic Option Framework
Authors: Yu-An Lin; Chen-Tao Lee; Chih-Han Yang; Guan-Ting Liu; Shao-Hua Sun
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning aims to learn deep neural network policies to solve large-scale decision-making problems. However, approximating policies using deep neural networks makes it difficult to interpret the learned decision-making process. To address this issue, prior works (Trivedi et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2023; Carvalho et al., 2024) proposed to use human-readable programs as policies to increase the interpretability of the decision-making pipeline. Nevertheless, programmatic policies generated by these methods struggle to effectively solve long and repetitive RL tasks and cannot generalize to even longer horizons during testing. To solve these problems, we propose the Hierarchical Programmatic Option framework (HIPO), which aims to solve long and repetitive RL problems with human-readable programs as options (low-level policies). Specifically, we propose a method that retrieves a set of effective, diverse, and compatible programs as options. Then, we learn a high-level policy to effectively reuse these programmatic options to solve reoccurring subtasks. Our proposed framework outperforms programmatic RL and deep RL baselines on various tasks. Ablation studies justify the effectiveness of our proposed search algorithm for retrieving a set of programmatic options.
Efficiently Learning Significant Fourier Feature Pairs for Statistical Independence Testing
Authors: Yixin Ren; Yewei Xia; Hao Zhang; Jihong Guan; Shuigeng Zhou
Venue: NeurIPS 2024 (NeurIPS 2024 poster)

Abstract: We propose a novel method to efficiently learn significant Fourier feature pairs for maximizing the power of Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion~(HSIC) based independence tests. We first reinterpret HSIC in the frequency domain, which reveals its limited discriminative power due to the inability to adapt to specific frequency-domain features under the current inflexible configuration. To remedy this shortcoming, we introduce a module of learnable Fourier features, thereby developing a new criterion. We then derive a finite sample estimate of the test power by modeling the behavior of the criterion, thus formulating an optimization objective for significant Fourier feature pairs learning. We show that this optimization objective can be computed in linear time (with respect to the sample size $n$), which ensures fast independence tests. We also prove the convergence property of the optimization objective and establish the consistency of the independence tests. Extensive empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real datasets validates our method's superiority in effectiveness and efficiency, particularly in handling high-dimensional data and dealing with large-scale scenarios.